"The last time I looked, if you got a paycheck, you were a worker," said delegate Dave Toland, a teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin.

AFT members are expressing anger over a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruling released July 15 that effectively withdraws the right, under the National Labor Relations Act, of graduate employees at a private university to bargain collectively. The ruling was issued as 3,000 delegates were gathered in Washington, D.C. this week for the union's biennial convention. Within a day, delegates approved a special order of business opposing the decision.

"The ruling is outrageous," said executive vice president Nat LaCour, announcing the development during a celebration of the union's organizing victories. A short time later, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.) concurred, telling delegates: "This is a shameful disregard for the rights of these employees." The graduate employees "should have the same rights as all workers. They are not second-class citizens."

The Republican-controlled board's decision overturns an earlier ruling in a case involving New York University teaching assistants, research assistants and proctors. In November 2000, a NLRB regional director ruled they were employees within the statutory definition of the National Labor Relations Act and therefore had the right to unionize. The following year, graduate employees at Brown University filed a petition to hold a bargaining election and the university asked the NLRB to review the NYU decision.

In the next two years, the political makeup of the board changed to its current Republican majority. The five-member board voted 3-2 to overrule the regional director's decision. The majority wrote, "it is clear to us that graduate student assistants, including those at Brown, are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university."

The AFT has represented graduate employees in the public sector for more than three decades.  The union represents teaching and research assistants at 14 major public universities, including the University of Wisconsin, the University of Michigan, the University of Florida and the City University of New York.

In public universities, unlike private institutions, graduate employees who teach or conduct research fall under state labor laws and not the National Labor Relations Act.  State labor boards or state supreme courts in 13 states have ruled previously that graduate employees are workers and have the right to form unions.

"Graduate employees are obviously workers who deserve the same rights as their counterparts in public universities," said AFT secretary-treasurer Edward J. McElroy. Any member of the NLRB who can't recognize a worker when they see one, he said, "shouldn't be on a national labor board." Board members are appointed by the president to five-year terms. The current appointments are majority Republican.

In a strongly worded dissent, board members Wilma B. Liebman and Dennis P. Walsh charge that the decision "is woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality" and…"shows a troubling lack of interest in empirical evidence."

The majority's approach, the dissenters write, "rests on fundamental misunderstandings of contemporary higher education, which reflect our colleagues' unwillingness to take a close looks at the academic world. Today, the academy is also a workplace for many graduate students, and disputes over work-related issues are common."

Such disputes in the industrial workplace were the impetus for Congress passing the National Labor Relations Act in the 1930s.

In the special order of business, delegates unanimously approved a resolution offered by the Teaching Assistants' Association/AFT Local 3220 representing graduate employees at the University of Wisconsin. Dave Toland, a delegate from the Teaching Assistants' Association/AFT at the University of Wisconsin, introduced the resolution. "The last time I looked, if you got a paycheck, you were a worker," he observed. Over the past 10 years, he added, thousands of full-time tenured faculty have been eliminated nationwide, replaced by part-time/adjunct faculty and graduate employees. "The University of Wisconsin could not function without its 4,000 teaching assistants."

The resolution also directs the AFT to continue organizing graduate employees at public and private universities. The union is in the midst of a three-year campaign to assist the Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania in its bid for recognition. The private university refuses to count ballots cast in an NLRB-sponsored election held last year. [Barbara McKenna]

July 16, 2004

photo by Ray Crowell