Senator quizzes NLRB on grad employee rulings

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) aimed some tough questions at National Labor Relations Board members who appeared before his U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education on Sept. 23. 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.

Specter, as 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.

The 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. A few weeks later, an NLRB regional director applied that decision in University of Pennsylvania.

Battista, a newcomer to the board appointed by President Bush, testified 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 is based as much on economic as academic considerations. The implications of the board’s Brown decision, she noted, will not be to reduce labor problems for these workers. “The issues that drive graduate students to organize unions will not go away. For many decades, the National Labor Relations Act has been an effective tool for channeling labor disputes into peaceful collective bargaining.” With Brown, she added, “fewer workers now enjoy fewer rights” and the act “cannot serve the purpose that Congress intended.”

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 compensation teaching assistants receive for their labor is inadequate to cover living expenses and health benefits for one person, much less the families that many graduate employees support. The union, they believe, 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 said.

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 GET-UP vote and the board’s final decision and whether the board was being adequately funded. He admonished NLRB chair Battista “to find a way, as [U.S. Supreme Court] Justice Warren did during the segregation cases,” to arrive at decisions not tinged by partisanship. He indicated that a legislative solution to the question of graduate employee bargaining would be difficult to achieve, given the many major bills on the plate of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Tax cuts leave middle-income Americans behind

In name only. That’s the only way to describe the current economic recovery once its effects on middle-income Americans are factored in, a new report from the Economic Policy Institute suggests. EPI’s comprehensive report on the state of working America, released on Labor Day, paints a dismal portrait of current conditions for millions of families. And it raises the prospect that current policies designed to promote growth through tax cuts may leave middle-income Americans out in the cold for months, if not years, to come.

“The contrast between this recession/recovery cycle and the nine others since World War II tells the story,” EPI notes. In the seven postwar recoveries of this length, all the jobs lost due to recession had been recouped within an average of 20 months. “In the current recovery, 39 months after [the recession began] we were still 1.2 million jobs short.”

For some groups, the situation is particularly dire. For example, the unemployment rate among African-Americans hit 10.1 percent in June 2004—up from 9.8 percent when the so-called recovery began. And wage erosion was most severe for men at the 50th percentile of earnings, a group whose wages fell nearly a full percentage point last year.

Underneath the broad gauge of joblessness, the picture isn’t any prettier. Despite higher productivity, the average real wages for nonsupervisory workers fell 1.2 percent in the year ending July 2004, the latest data available at the time of the report. From 2000 to 2002, real income of the average U.S. household fell 2.4 percent. “Comparable figures for 2003, when they become available, are expected to show a further drop, since wages were stagnant for all but the highest 5 percent of earners,” EPI reports.

“So far, the recovery has not generated either the quantity or quality of jobs families need to lift their living standards,” says report co-author Sylvia Allegretto. “The costs of basic necessities like healthcare, housing and college keep rising, and many working families’ incomes are not keeping pace.”

Visit the EPI Web site at www.epinet.org to view fact sheets, read an excerpt or to order the report, The State of Working America 2004/2005.

Calif. lecturers prevail on hiring dispute

Lecturers at the University of California-Davis (UC-Davis) won an enormous victory in August when a labor board representative affirmed their union’s right to negotiate lecturer reappointment policies. The ruling, a proposal that goes to the entire California Public Employment Relations Board, resulted from an unfair labor practice claim the University Council-AFT (UC-AFT) filed more than three years ago.

Administrative law judge Fred D’Orazio determined that the university “breached its duty to negotiate” by deciding in November 2000 to unilaterally change the criteria for reviewing and reappointing lecturers after they completed six years of teaching. Under a memorandum of understanding, University of California lecturers whose performance was rated excellent after six years could be reappointed for three-year periods if there was a continuing need. In 2000, university officials at Davis decided to stop making these reappointments, claiming they wanted to shift teaching done by temporary faculty to full-time tenured faculty.

After repeatedly asking management to discuss the policy change and being rebuffed, UC-AFT, which represents about 300 lecturers at UC-Davis, and 2,700 throughout the UC system, filed its first unfair practice charge in April 2001. It amended the claim after a year of inactivity on the case.

In his proposed decision, D’Orazio found that the university breached its duty to negotiate under the state’s Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. Also, UC-Davis interfered with the right of lecturers to be represented by UC-AFT and denied UC-AFT the right to represent its members. Somewhat outrageously, the university claimed that the union waived its right to negotiate by not questioning the policy change. The judge stated that the facts clearly showed otherwise.

As a remedy, UC-Davis would have to allow the seven lecturers affected by the policy to have a performance evaluation and be considered for post-six-year appointments. Upon successfully completing that process, they would be entitled to back pay and benefits.

“The university wanted to get rid of many courses and hire cheaper, newer lecturers and post-docs,” says UC-AFT president Bob Samuels. “The dean at Davis wanted to bring in more star tenured faculty, and replace long-term full-time lecturers with research faculty, but she must have known that the money would not be there to do it. They simply got rid of long-term lecturers, and then did not replace them with enough tenure-track faculty.”

“This is a huge victory for us,” says Samuels. “Nontenured faculty have been a key element to universities, and these institutions need to accept the reality of the situation they created. They should honor our faculty and honor our contracts, and if they do not do this, we will use all of our resources to make them treat us in the proper manner.”

Oregon grad employees get contract

The Graduate Teaching Fellows Federation/AFT (GTFF), representing more than 1,300 employees at the University of Oregon, has reached a contract agreement providing pay raises, reductions in student fees and strong contract language on grievance procedures and work assignments.

The agreement, negotiated during a state-imposed hiring freeze, was reached Aug. 5, one day after GTFF showed its muscle by holding a highly successful “Empty Campus Day.” A state mediator assisted in the negotiations.

The tentative agreement runs retroactively from April 1, 2004, to March 31, 2006. Under the terms, GTFs will receive a $45 reduction in fees each term, or $135 per year. They also will receive a 2 percent pay increase during the 2005-06 academic year, assuming the governor lifts a wage freeze on state employees. If the governor does not, GTFs will receive a further reduction of student fees.

Initially, the university had agreed only to lower the student fees until the wage freeze ended, at which time the higher fees would be reinstated. “I know of no other situation where an employee would be given a raise but told that she was going to have to give it back at a predetermined date,” says GTFF negotiator Jey Strangfeld.

A fundamental sticking point in the negotiations involved bargaining-unit protections. The university has been hiring graduate students outside the unit to do unit work, and has even been hiring undergraduates to do teaching and grading. This has resulted in numerous grievances. The new contract clarifies GTF work as research, teaching, grading, administrative work or laboratory assistance, notes David Cecil, GTFF organizer.

Cecil attributes the final settlement to the growing strength of the union. “Over the period of the last two years, the members of the GTFF have stepped up their activism and militancy,” he says. On Empty Campus Day, one-third of teaching fellows moved classes off campus. Supportive faculty and undergraduates generally observed the day by doing the same and staying away from the university, reports Cecil. The university settled the next day.