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News :: Labor |
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NLRB strikes down grad student unions at private universities |
Current rating: 0 |
by ap via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
16 Jul 2004
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A 3-2 ruling along party lines regarding private universities. |
Teaching Assistants Are Told: No Union
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sheyda Jahanbani may be a student, but her life at Brown University in Providence, R.I. feels more like a job. There are long hours of teaching, a boss who gives orders, and she depends on her income to pay the bills. But in a 3-2 vote Thursday, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Jahanbani and other graduate students at America's private universities are students, not workers.
That means they can't form unions to negotiate wages, health care and workplace grievance procedures.
``Clearly, anybody who starts grad school understands there are going to be sacrifices,'' said Jahanbani, 27, who is pursuing a doctorate in American history. ``At the same time, there are basic rights any employee has the right to expect. Health care. A decent wage. Some respect in the workplace.''
The decision, in a case involving Brown, is a victory for private universities, which depend on relatively inexpensive graduate student labor to teach classes. Nearly a quarter of college instructors are graduate students, according to evidence cited in the ruling.
The universities also maintain that what they pay students is simply financial aid, not income, and graduate student unionizing could upset an academic apprenticeship system that has existed for decades.
``It's an important decision for private research universities in that it restores the traditional relationship between graduate research and teaching assistants and the university,'' said Sheldon Steinbach, general counsel for the American Council on Education, which represents universities.
But pro-union graduate students decried the decision as politically motivated and anti-labor. Three Republican appointees of President Bush voted in the majority -- overturning a 2000 decision involving New York University -- while two Democrats dissented.
The students also said the board failed to appreciate how drastically graduate student life has changed over the last 30 years. Students must teach more now, which means their degrees take longer, and they are more likely to have families to support.
``It is work, and it's an essential part of the university,'' said John Harwood, an art history graduate student at Columbia University in New York.
The NLRB, a government agency, deals with private employers and has no jurisdiction over public universities and colleges, which are governed by state laws. Those laws vary but unions are recognized by many public universities, including the University of California system, the University of Wisconsin, Michigan State and the University of Michigan.
There are more than 2 million graduate and professional students, according to the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students. About 44 percent of graduate students attend private universities, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Education statistics.
NYU is the only private university that's recognized a graduate student union. In 2002, graduate students there negotiated stipend increases of up to 40 percent, as well as improved health care benefits.
But that contract comes up for renewal next year, and NYU issued a statement saying it was still considering how it would proceed in light of the ruling.
``The impact of the contract was huge,'' said Elena Gorfinkel, a graduate student in cinema studies, who will have an $18,000 stipend next year, considerably higher than in the past. ``It made the university accountable to us in a way.''
Groups at several other private universities, including Brown, Columbia, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts, are pushing for union recognition, but their efforts suffered a major setback with the decision.
Support for unionizing is by no means universal among graduate students, however. Last year, union backers at Yale called an unofficial vote, hoping for an overwhelming show of support for union recognition. To their embarrassment, the measure failed.
Several graduate students said they weren't surprised that a Republican-controlled NLRB would reverse the NYU decision.
``I'm more disappointed in Brown University, in these leaders of prestigious universities that are beacons of progressive politics,'' Jahanbani said. ``I'm surprised that (Brown), this bastion of progressive thought, would hand such a juicy morsel over to the anti-labor movement.''
@%< |
This work is in the public domain |
Comments
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Re: NLRB strikes down grad student unions at private universities |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
17 Jul 2004
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Jack
In response to your screed, that they are students does not, by definition, preclude the fact that they are employees, regardless of the NLRB decision. As a graduate student, I and other graduate students know that working as a teaching assistant, research assistant, or grader (here at the U of I) is an essential part of the requirement of being a graduate student. I would go so far as to say that, except for the rare naive or obtuse graduate student (particularly Ph. D. candidates), those who enter graduate school with the intent to earn a Ph. D. understand that teaching, researching for a professor or both, are work requirements essential for remuneration during graduate school. If one is a graduate student, one must expect to do work throughout most if not all of one's college career. It begins with, not after, graduate school. Plainly and not surprisingly, your post is inaccurate at best, insipid at its flatulent worst, for one cannot uncouple being a student and a worker (teacher) at the graduate level.
Second, if your post had been more informed--or informed at all--it may have advised that students should try their luck in the public sector, since the ruling applied to private universities. The private sector, according to the NLRB ruling, is the one in which graduate student teachers have no rights to unionize. How would their luck improve?
Third, having watched your often tasteless posts from a distance in order to avoid their noxious pungence wafting ashore from afar, I must note your frequent failure to uphold or even acknowledge the rights that workers have as citizens in this nation. Perhaps if more right-wingers like yourself paid a little more attention to the important role that the rights of workers of all classes and ilks to organize has played in lifting this nation to the level of greatness and the fulfillment of citizens' rights that it has long enjoyed, then perhaps left-wingers like myself might occasionally cut you some slack in your teary-eyed, sniveling rants in which you whine about your rights to free speech on this website. And before you respond with some absured notion that my perspective is somehow informed by a parochial definition of either "workers" or "class" or "rights," think again. Only somewhat tangentially, one of my best friends is the manager of a store in a large pharmacy-driven chain, and he cpnstantly rails against his company--how they under-allot funds for even part-time staff, how he must do the work of "stock-people," how he must handle many more rote tasks in addition to his many financial, administrative, human-resource, and organizational duties, and how these new tasks were never a part of his or any other manager's job. All this from someone with two college degrees, twenty-two years of experience in the profession, and a store manager's salary, yet with a workload easily worthy of three people in a store, and gradually reduced from white-collar managerial class to fairly well-paid, yet over-worked and under-respected. It sounds like much of "blue collar" America, only the law prohibits his right to organize too. Despite his good salary, he would unionize, but he legally cannot, illustrating that people unionize over rights and equitable treatment on the job, not simply over money. His being in the private sector has no bearing on his status or treatment as an important and responsible member of a very large firm.
Go back to bed Jack. |
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Moving Forward |
by JK
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
21 Jul 2004
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As I ponder posting a review of Robert Greenwald's "OutFoxed," I feel impelled to draw upon some of the inspiration that Greenwald's latest gem has provided to follow up on my previous post, to touch briefly on Jack Ryan's silly screed, and to move forward. Setting aside the various inaccuracies in Jack's post that not surprisingly suggest shoddy attention to details, I think that his central message--that workers have the right to work and the right to quit--merits close scrutiny. I say this not because I believe that there is merit to his position, for according to the law there is not, but rather I suggest that explicating and refuting this point is crucial to understanding the current state of labor the the U.S., in part the rise of the radical right wing in politics, and the resurgence of a nineteenth-century style of discourse that has fueled that rise. In the process, moving forward from Jack Ryan and his meretricious shilling for the radical right wing is the impetus for this post, and hopefully for engaging in a wider discussion with a wider audience about what we progressives want to say and do about the condition of labor.
I must preface my remarks by acknowledging how funny I find it that people who wrap themselves in the flag while holding high the Constitution and its protective amendments never fail to cry foul about perceived failures of others to uphold such rights as free speech. Yet these same people often remain blatantly ignorant of other rights that the same Constitution, buttressed by Congressional laws, provides. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935 guarantees the freedom of association for workers "by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid and protection." The NLRA also provides and protects the right of workers to act as well as to bargain collectively--to strike, to picket, and to protest.
That is, this law rejects the archaic, even backwards thinking that workers merely have the right to work for an employer, or to quit in order to hopefully find better terms and conditions of employment elsewhere. It affirms that there is at the very least a third option--the right of workers to think, organize, and act collectively in order to attain better terms and conditions of employment in jobs that they hold. The NLRA, passed amid the Depression and widespread violent industrial strife that employers most often fomented and exacerbated, steadfastly rejected the inadequacies of nineteenth century legal decisions that were often based on English Common Law doctrine, that held that workers organizing and acting collectively represented an illegal conspiracy. Indeed, as the industrial pluralists who helped to inform, write, implement and expand upon the NLRA believed, the official granting and protection of workers' rights were preferred to the previous system dominated by employers' obstinate, obstreperous, and often overtly violent opposition to such workers rights. The idea that workers must be self-employed in order to be able to determine their own destiny is not only retrograde, it is also in direct opposition to the philosophy that guided the NLRA to passage nearly seventy years ago. The NLRA also decreed certain antiunion employer practices, no doubt steered by beliefs similar to the antiquated foolishness occasionally posted here by right-wingers, to be illegal.
Setting aside various and serious problems in the current system of industrial jurisprudence for another post, the right wing today consistently and officially expresses its antipathy toward workers' rights. Ticking off the checklist of affronts to workers' rights under Bush alone is all too easy--tossing OSHA standards in the trash almost immediately after entering office, threatening to invoke Taft-Hartley's "cooling-off" provisions against flight attendants for American Airlines in June 2001, then actually doing so with IAM at Northwest in December of that year, while carrying the antiunion ball further in the fall of 2002 with its blatant interference in the ILWU-PMA dispute and intimidation of the ILWU, revoking through legislation the rights to union membership for hundreds of thousands of federal employees with the Department of Homeland Security and the threats to privatize many federal government jobs, threatening to cut overtime protections for millions of workers previously provided by the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, and so many more egregious acts.
I posit that more than pro-business sentiment guides Bush and rest of the GOP who has supported these heinous transgressions. I posit that the sentiment that workers have the right to work for what employers--many of the very powerful of whom fervently support the GOP--offer, or the right to go elsewhere, has never left either the business community at large or the right-wing politicians whom they hold in their collective pocket. The GOP does not yet have the power to to fully roll back the gains that labor has made over the last seven decades--mainly the last five--yet that time is fast approaching. For those who might think that such talk is vapid fear-mongering, I strongly disagree. For the past thirty years, the GOP has hammered away at workers' rights and collective action and agitation with several staple messages, not the least of which is the primacy of commerce and "free markets" which, if left to their own devices and the experts who run the companies operating in it, will provide everyone with profitable companies, steady jobs, and ample consumer goods. While capitalism has officially reigned supreme in the pantheon of world ideologies since 1989, have workers both here and abroad progressed or regressed in terms of wages vis-a-vis inflation, job security, and the affordability of necessary goods? This is and ought to be the subject of debate, yet I would argue that workers in general and citizens as a whole have suffered crucial setbacks in wages, benefits, most notably the erosion of the pension, and even with widely available consumer goods (although making this argument is a tricky point, for I am not against choices in consumer goods, but against exploitation in their production, distribution, and consumption as well as against the notion that workers can and should accept stagnant or reduced wages so long as staple goods are reasonably affordable; one--stagnant wages--is no salve for the other--the affordability of goods--when we lack financial stability and discretionary income for political actions and leverage, personal well-being, health insurance, social spending, education, and other vital items...) during the last twenty-fours especially, and the last forty generally (more to come on that another time).
I argue that this stems in part from our trust that certain laws, such as the NLRA and FLSA, are immutable and indelibly etched in the lexicon of federal legislation. They are not, as recent history has shown, because radicals on the right have consistently and innacurately trumpeted the notion that workers, especially unionized workers with good remunerations, have been responsible for limiting the business community at large from successfully competing, therefore holding the US as a nation back from its rightful place atop the economic and political world. Intractable unions as "special interests"--unlike businesses that I suppose would qualify as "normal interests"--have been responsible for inhibiting individuals from creatively utilizing their capital and ideas, so this thinking goes. If only unions and their selfish members--as collectives--would act for the common good, coincidentally the common good of wealthy individuals with their own mutual benefit societies such as the National Association of Manufacturers, as well as right-wing pro-business "think-tanks"--I'm laughing as I type that oxymoron--then we as individual citizens could not help but profit from their munificent socio-economic planning. With such rhetorical rubric operating, Bush's overtime provisions are not only no stretch of the imagination, but indeed are proposed as preferred policy to stimulate the economy AND expand overtime to some people previously ineligible. George Orwell meets Elmer Fudd.
That, in sum, has been the consistent refrain of the right wing for the last thirty years, at least. It harks back to the calls from Carnegie, Gary, Ford, Rockefeller, Sloan and others for "free hands" of businesses, with the best interests of the nation in mind and in practice, to run their affairs as they see fit, and to provide jobs and economic improvement, especially in our current times of stagnation and indeed privation. Wealthy paternalistic individuals supposedly promote and provide the general welfare necessary for the downtrodden to succeed, as long as they can pick themselves up by their lazy bootstraps to grab the opportunity. It's just that simplistic.
Has this occurred? Hardly. The fastest-growing jobs in the nation--the service industry, espeically food--are among the least unionized. While there are many reasons for this, one has been, I dare say for I have personally seen it, the guiding belief among business managers and owners that people have the right to work for what they offer, or the right to go elsewhere--not the right to change one's terms and conditions of employment at their jobs. Such a belief individualizes and frightens people, simultaneously offers them the half-chewed carrot and the sharpened stick, bullies and intimidates people, and fundamentally ignores the law of the land. Such an economy provides jobs, many of which pay very poorly, have few to no benefits, lack security, and provide work under bosses often inflexible and intimidating. Indeed, the trumpeting of such a position among the business community is seen as a necessary yet informal hyper-competitive manner of conducting and running businesses, a "law of the land" run by a den of greedy vipers, ignoring that a law that says the opposite--that workers have rights to think, organize, and act collectively for their benefit--already exists.
We must set out an agenda that does not take for granted that the NLRA, FLSA, and other laws will exist as we currently recognize them. We must move forward with an aggressive agenda that maximizes workers' rights and fits them within a broader progressive democratic agenda that puts us and our interests squarely within the twenty-frst, not the nineteenth, century. If the radical right had its way, it would send us, kicking and screaming or meekly moving for it doesn't care, to our obsolescence. This cannot be, this is not our fate. Let us stop talking falsely now; the hour's getting late.
Let's get moving with organized responses to such heinous setbacks such as the Brown University decision. Let's put the rights of workers, of unions, and of the nation squarely at the top of our respective agendas, and widen the discussion that I have tried, albeit insufficiently, to engage. Just as the right wing has made our concerns fair game for rollback, we can come back thrice-fold by thinking, organizing, and acting collectively, even if we don't agree on every minute issue.
Haven't we had enough of being told to "shut up and get back to work?" Haven't we had enough of our vice-president telling a ranking Senator of the opposing party to "go f#%*" himself? Haven't we had enough of a functionally illiterate antiunion president? Haven't we had enough of "compassionate conservativism?" Haven't we had enough of being told that "outsourcing white-jobs [and blue-collar jobs for that matter] is good for the economy?" Haven't we had quite enough of the bullying that the radical right wing perpetrates on degenerate netowrks such as FOX, and that even the governor of the largest state in the Union utilizes?
If so, then please realize that it starts by drawing the line not just at home, and not just in all forms of media, but in the workplace where tens of millions of hard-working adults spend at least as much time as they do at their homes, away from their kids, fretting about bills, and often harried by managers doing the bidding of executives looking to wring every last bit of dignity and profit out of them. Workers' rights start at work, but can and should certainly be agitated for outside the workplace. Let's start and soon before the unvarnished individualistic nonsense of the radical right wing dominates all discourse with pleas for returning to the good ol' days of yellow-dog contracts, blacklists, violence, company towns, massive prohibitive injunctions, and individuals' right to work without the conspiratorial interference of unions. Think it's far away? Think again.
Let's move forward now. |
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