In
another attack on workers’ rights, the Republican majority on the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on July 13 denied graduate employees at
private universities important federal protections affecting their rights
to form unions and bargain collectively.
The
Bush NLRB—the federal agency that oversees union elections and guides the
way labor laws are applied—sided with administrators at Brown University
in Providence, R.I., who fought efforts by graduate employees to form a
union with the UAW. In a 3–2 party-line decision, the NLRB said graduate
employees are students, not workers, and therefore are not entitled to the
protections of federal labor law. The ruling overturns a 2000 decision
giving graduate employees at New York University the right to a union
voice on the job.
Dissenters on the board and union leaders say the new ruling does
not acknowledge the work graduate employees do teaching undergraduates,
grading tests and assisting professors—often for low wages and nearly
nonexistent benefits. “The Bush board overturned precedent and ignored
overwhelming evidence of the transformation of colleges and universities
into large-scale employers of low-wage academic workers,” said
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney.
“We
are...performing work which is critical to the educational mission of this
institution,” said Sheyda Jahanbani, a teaching assistant at Brown's
history department, “and we're entitled to the same rights as any other
group of workers.”
Only days after making its decision about Brown University, the
NLRB sent six pending cases on graduate employees back to regional
directors. Those cases involve graduate employees trying to form unions at
Columbia, Tufts, the University of Pennsylvania and the Research
Foundation of the State University of New York.
Last month, the NLRB said it would review
the legality of rules regarding majority verification procedures to
form unions. Often called card-check
recognition, the process enables workers to more fairly and quickly
indicate whether they want a union. It’s an alternative to the lengthy
NLRB election process, which actually encourages
employers to block workers’ free choice.
With the NLRB’s latest decision, graduate employees at private
universities join the 32 million other workers in the United States who
are not entitled to protections of either federal or state labor
law, such as independent contractors and more than 300,000 agricultural
workers, according to a September 2002 analysis by
the federal General Accounting Office. The international watchdog
group Human Rights Watch, in a 2000 report on U.S. labor
rights, found “freedom of association is a right under severe, often
buckling pressure when workers in the United States try to exercise it,”
partly because so many workers aren’t protected by federal labor law.
“The labor board should be protecting and expanding the rights of
workers, not restricting them,” said UAW President Ron
Gettelfinger.
“However, no flawed labor board decision,” said Sweeney, “can erase
the fact that the freedom to form unions is a fundamental human right.”
More
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Download the NLRB’s
decision denying graduate employees at private universities
their rights as workers.
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Download information on Bush’s record on workers’ freedom to form
unions (PDF format) from the special BushWatch
report from America@work.
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Find out more about graduate
employees at private and public universities coming together into
unions and sign up for the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions 13th annual
conference in New York City July 22–25.
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