Sen. Arlen Specter (R.-Penn.) had some tough questions for National Labor Relations Board members who appeared before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education this month. He probed whether the board's recent decision to deny graduate employees at private universities the right to a union was based on legal reasoning or political considerations.

To explore this question, Specter, who is subcommittee chair, invited testimony from NLRB chair Robert Battista, board member Wilma Liebman, Christina Collins from the Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania/AFT (GET-UP) and from an attorney representing the university.

Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania/AFT spokesperson, Christina Collins, testifies before the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education. Photo by Michael Campbell.

The Sept. 23 hearing was called to examine the board's overturning of its 2000 New York University ruling that graduate and teaching assistants were employees under the National Labor Relations Act and had the right to collective bargaining. In August, the five-member board, with a different political makeup, reversed itself and ruled  in Brown University that the graduate assistants were primarily students and not covered under the act. Then a few weeks later, an NLRB regional director applied that decision in the University of Pennsylvania case.

Battista, a newcomer to the board appointed by President Bush, held that the NYU decision was erroneous, short-lived and had to be overturned. He referred to precedents set 30 years earlier in the Adelphi University and Stanford University cases and maintained that the graduate assistants relationship to their universities was primarily academic.

Liebman, a Clinton appointee, explained that the NYU decision in 2000 was based on evidence that universities have changed since the early 1970s, and their reliance on graduate assistants to provide instruction that has a basis is as economic as it is academic.  The implications of the board's Brown decision, she noted, will not be to reduce labor problems for these workers. It will mean that fewer workers will enjoy the right to resolve them under the NLRA.

Collins testified about the nature of the work she and the other 900 to 1,000 graduate and research assistants provide to Penn. She noted that a recent survey shows that the exchange for the assistants' labor is inadequate compensation to provide living expenses and health benefits. The union, they believed, would provide a voice for them to improve working and learning conditions at Penn. GET-UP finds the argument that graduate employees have "no right to or need for a union to be absolutely unfounded" in a democratic society, she added.

Specter asked both board members what had changed in the four years between NYU and Brown. Liebman noted that conditions in the universities had not, but the board's composition had. Specter asked why there had been a year-and-a-half delay between the time of the GET-UP vote and the board's final decision and whether the board was being adequately funded. He admonished NLRB chair Robert Battista "to find a way, as [U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Warren did during the segregation cases" to get decisions that are not tinged by partisanship. He indicated that a legislative solution to the question of graduate employee bargaining would be difficult to achieve when the Senate Appropriations Committee has so many major bills on its plate. [Barbara McKenna]