Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press
Striking teaching assistants protest on the campus of Columbia University in 2018. Representatives of the university and the graduate students union have since held bargaining sessions.
Last Friday, in one of its least unexpected diktats, the National Labor Relations Board, now controlled by Trump appointees, indicated that it’s going to revoke the right of graduate students who work as teaching or research assistants at private universities to bargain collectively. (Whether grad students can unionize at public universities is up to the individual states, since the National Labor Relations Act doesn’t cover public-sector workers.)
Grad students are the Ping-Pong balls of American labor law. The NLRB first granted them the right to unionize when it was controlled by Bill Clinton’s appointees. That right was taken away four years later when the board was controlled by George W. Bush appointees, only to be restored in 2016, when Barack Obama’s appointees were in the majority. Since then, grad students have voted to unionize at 15 colleges, five of which, including NYU, American, and Tufts, have signed contracts with their students. Now, Trump’s board members have voted to inaugurate a comment period on the idea of revoking that right yet again, certain to be followed by their revoking it.
University administrators can agree to let students unionize outside the NLRA, of course—having, say, a private mediation service run the election or just granting recognition to the students when a majority has signed union affiliation cards. But most administrations have greeted student unionization efforts with unyielding hostility, refusing to bargain even once their students have voted to unionize.
Which does leave the students with one other option. If the NLRB rules that students aren’t covered under the NLRA, that means that, like farmworkers and other NLRA-excluded workers, they can be granted collective-bargaining rights by the states—as California did with Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers during Jerry Brown’s first go-round as governor. The students’ next stop, accordingly, should be the legislatures of such blue states as California, New York, Massachusetts, and Illinois. To be sure, governors and legislators like to be on good terms with university presidents and wealthy alums, but if California’s lawmakers could stand up to Uber, which they just did by ruling its drivers to be employees, they should be able to stand up to the pooh-bahs of Stanford and USC. Well, they should if grad students and their union allies raise enough of a ruckus to make them do the right thing.
