Facing uncertain future, graduates continue fight to organize

by C.M. Lewis

For the fourth time in two decades, the National Labor Relations Board is changing its position on whether graduate assistants have the legal right to organize a union.

On September 20th the NLRB issued a press release announcing a long-anticipated proposed rule declining jurisdiction over graduate assistants, arguing that they are not employees under the National Labor Relations Act. In the release, Trump-appointed Chairman John F. Ring claimed that the Board’s intent is to “bring stability to this important area of federal labor law”—one that careened back and forth under Clinton, Bush, Obama, and now Trump-appointed Boards.

The reality behind the highly technical rule, though, is simple: although it does not make it impossible to unionize, graduate assistants will have to find a path other than NLRB-supervised elections.

The announcement is far from a surprise. Over a year and a half ago, graduate unions at Yale, Boston College, and University of Chicago pulled their NLRB petitions, anticipating adverse rulings. Multiple graduate unions (like at Brown) have avoided the NLRB process altogether, reaching agreements to utilize third parties like the American Arbitration Association to oversee elections and adjudicate contract disagreements.

The struggle for graduate unionization isn’t restricted to private universities, either, and continues at public universities across the United States. Following a University appeal, the Missouri Supreme Court is poised to finally rule on a three year fight at the University of Missouri determining whether or not graduate assistants have the right to organize. The right for graduate assistants to unionize is an on-going fight in Hawai’i, the most heavily unionized state in the United States.

Even when the right is recognized—as it is in Pennsylvania—graduate assistants face vicious union-busting campaigns, like the sort that led the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board to overturn a narrow union election loss and order a new election at University of Pittsburgh.

The context for this attack is far different than it was in 2004, when the Bush NLRB overturned a 2000 decision and ruled graduate assistants couldn’t unionize. The assault on graduate unions comes amidst widespread political upheaval in a historically reactionary Presidency, amidst increasing calls to cancel student loan debt and address spiraling college affordability, and amidst a nationwide strike wave and a resurgence of labor power.

So what does the path forward look like for graduate unionists?

For Brown University graduates, the ruling doesn’t change anything—yet.

The situation at Brown is unusual: after a year of negotiation between graduate unionists and the University administration, the University entered into a recognition agreement and agreed to abide by the result of a representation election—which the graduate union won. Since then, the parties have worked on bargaining their first contract.

According to Dennis Hogan, an organizer with the graduate union, the campaign originated when Brown University unexpectedly denied sixth year funding to many doctoral candidates, who were left without employment and tuition remission. Although it started there, many of the issues that brought graduate assistants to the union were of basic respect and equity. Feeling as though they had a voice in the process, that decisions were made fairly, and that they were protected on the job—especially against the racial and gendered inequities rife in higher education—were crucial issues.

For Brown’s part, they’re playing it close to the vest. In a statement to the Providence Journal, Brown indicated that they would “review the decision” while simultaneously bargaining in good faith with the graduate union.

Graduates are optimistic. “We’re at the table, we’re bargaining, we’re making progress, and we’re looking forward to a contract,” according to Dennis. To them, their enemy isn’t the Brown administration: it’s the Trump administration. “We know that the NLRB is trying to attack graduate students; the Trump administration has tried to attack graduate students before.”

There’s reason to hope that the proposed rule will never even go into effect: unlike previous instances, this is a proposed rule, not a decision in a case before the NLRB. Graduates are looking at the legally mandated comment period—during which organizations and members of the public can submit comments on the proposed rule—as an organizing opportunity. Once the comment period has ended, the Board will be forced to review them before finalizing the rule, giving graduates an incentive to make their opinions on the proposed rule vocally known. Reviewing the comments and finalizing the rule could take a long time: long enough, Brown graduates hope, to outlast a Trump presidency. In the meantime, if Brown and the graduate union continue to bargain in good faith, they may reach their first contract.

Courtney Rawlings, Co-Chair of the Emory Graduate Union, is looking at the proposed rule as an organizing opportunity, too. Graduate union activists at Emory University are working hand-in-hand with graduate assistants from AFT, UAW, UNITE-HERE, and SEIU—including Brown graduates—planning comment posting workshops to flood the NLRB and speaking tours to get the word out to graduate assistants. More militant actions aren’t off the table, either: graduate unionists have talked about walkouts, though none are planned as of yet.

But the NLRB’s proposed rule doesn’t change anything for them, either—because they never anticipated an NLRB election. According to Courtney, their message to graduates is clear: management “can come to the table with or without the NLRB telling us whether or not we can form a union, because we have power demonstrated in our wins.”

The wins she’s talking about are the result of constant direct action and organizing through what’s called a “minority union” model: something pursued by other SEIU affiliated graduate locals at Washington University of St. Louis and Duke University. Instead of seeking recognition and bargaining rights, Emory graduates—faced with the hostile organizing terrain of the South—are playing the long game, building power through back-to-basics union organizing and taking the fight directly to the boss.

It’s been successful. They’ve won a number of major victories through militant organizing: most notably, securing at least $15 per hour for graduate assistants. But it hasn’t been easy.

“Organizing the South is always an uphill battle,” according to Courtney, “and organizing graduate students is its own kind of battle.” But they’ve been able to learn from solidarity with other Southern labor leaders. “Southerners always have to be creative about how they organize,” she says, and Southern labor leaders are more than willing to support one another in addressing tough questions like “how do you get people in a right-to-work state excited about unionizing,” or “how do you get people thinking even more broadly about what being in a union looks like,” and “what does being in a union look like when union-busting bosses really have no consequences for their actions.”

Given the different environment—one where the political establishment openly aids companies in union-busting—it’s little surprise that Southern graduate unionists turn to more militant direct action to secure victories. For them, they’re fixed on a different horizon: how to build union power in hostile terrain where the protections of labor laws are few and far between, and have never been guarantees.

Much of the uncertainty faced by both Brown and Emory graduate assistants is in sharp contrast with the legal terrain for University of Pittsburgh graduates.

University of Pittsburgh is one of four “Commonwealth Universities” in Pennsylvania, alongside Temple University, Lincoln University, and Pennsylvania State University. As “state-related” institutions, all four fall under the jurisdiction of the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board—not the NLRB. The question of graduate unionizing isn’t new for Pennsylvania, and unlike at the NLRB, it’s a settled question. Temple University has been unionized since 2002, and Penn State graduates lost a union election in the fall of 2018 after Penn State unsuccessfully attempted to argue that they were not eligible to unionize.

But the problems they face, and the opposition they face, is similar.

Olivia Enders, a graduate organizer in the Pitt School of Education, says that one of the earliest issues that brought the effort together was transparency in decision-making about graduate employment: an issue also cited by Brown organizers, and commonly cited by graduate unions across the country. Like at most universities, Pitt graduates work as researchers and teaching assistants in exchange for tuition remission, wages, and healthcare: and like at most universities, year-to-year decisions about employment are opaque and unequal, with little recourse to appeal career-ending decisions.

Alongside employment decisions, the most common issue brought up by Pitt graduates was Title IX services, echoing concerns voiced by Dennis about the culture of gender discrimination and harassment in higher education. “Issues of harassment in certain departments were pervasive, and never really addressed,” according to Olivia. “We have a Title IX office that’s completely understaffed, and the time that it takes to process cases is ridiculous.”

Pitt graduates also rallied around protections for LGBTQIA graduates. Like many states, Pennsylvania law does not protect LGBTQIA employees from workplace discrimination. In those states, the labor movement and a union contract are often the only form of workplace protection workers have against discrimination.

But fixing issues felt in common with other graduate assistants at other universities raises another common problem: opposition.

Penn State graduates were faced with a vicious boss campaign on the eve of their union election, with University administrators threatening ICE raids and deportation for international students if they unionized. In Pitt’s case, the administration’s anti-union conduct was so egregious that the PLRB ordered a new election, finding that the unfair labor practices committed by Pitt swayed the election result. To aid their anti-union campaigns, Penn State and Pitt both spent hundreds of thousands of public funds and tuition dollars paying union-busters from Ballard Spahr, a Philadelphia-based megafirm with close ties to former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell and Pennsylvania Representative Mary Gay Scanlon.

Even if their legal rights are much clearer, the problems they face—and the opposition they receive from the boss—are similar to those faced by private sector graduate assistants.

Bitter opposition isn’t surprising.

It’s a question of power. Management in any workplace believes it has a right to control and direct the workforce under the notion of “managerial rights.” The idea of workers exercising any power in those decisions—to say nothing of broader concepts of workplace democracy—is deeply threatening to bosses that don’t like it when people say “no.”

And like most workplaces, unionization threatens the bottom line of private or increasingly privatized universities: something of which management is painfully aware. According to some graduate unionists, they see the future of higher education is at stake in their fight for labor rights—and there’s reason to believe them. For decades, public funding for higher education has declined: a process sped by the financial crash in 2008 and subsequent slashes to public spending. Even for private universities—many of which enjoy healthy financial endowments totalling billions of dollars—the recession was an excuse to cut costs by moving increasingly toward low cost, highly contingent labor like adjunct faculty.

To many graduates, unionization offers power to change this: to fight the neoliberal University and its model of privatized, market-driven higher education that reduces college access, drives up student debt, and shifts more and more academic workers into chronic poverty and economic insecurity. On a most basic level, as Jeff Schuhrke wrote for Jacobin, a union allows graduates to fight the pervasive idea that “grad workers should simply adjust themselves to poverty and misery.”

University bosses recognize the stakes, and they’re fighting accordingly. Although universities are often thought of as liberal institutions, and in spite of their education mission, they’ve happily allied with the Trump administration to attack union rights through the NLRB, exploited the Trump administration’s culture of fear and bigotry to frighten international graduate assistants.

In spite of that, graduate assistants are continuing their fight to unionize—because they’re fixed on the horizon where higher education meets its promise, and is a place worth working.

C.M. Lewis is a PSEA/NEA UniServ Representative in Central Pennsylvania and a member of UAW Local 1981, the National Writers’ Union.

He is a proud former Co-Chair of the Coalition of Graduate Workers, MNEA/NEA, a union representing 2,700 graduate assistants at the University of Missouri.

If you would like to submit a comment on the NLRB’s proposed rule denying graduate assistants an NLRB-supervised path to collective bargaining, details can be found here. If you have questions, please contact us at news@thestrikewave.com.

AdminSeptember 25, 2019