Posted on 08/23/2016 12:46:26 PM PDT by oblomov
Students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities will be allowed to vote to unionize under a ruling Tuesday by the National Labor Relations Board that found that they are employees under federal labor law.
The case arose from a union election petition filed by a group of primarily graduate students at Columbia University, who are seeking to form a union that will join the United Automobile Workers.
The three Democratic members of the board made up the majority; the lone Republican member dissented. A fifth spot on the board has been vacant since last year.
The decision reverses a 2004 ruling by the board involving graduate student assistants at Brown University. The ruling held that the assistants could not be considered employees because they “are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university.”
The current board disagreed, arguing that it could treat students as employees if they perform and are compensated for work that the university oversees, even if their relationship with the university was substantially broader.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
OH PLEASE let them form a union. I LOVE seeing progressives eat progressives.
I just emailed my son and told him not to even think about it.
So when students can’t afford the university’s graduate school education because the university no longer offers teaching and research assistant positions to offset tuition, tey will have this group to thank.
Our son was a TA while earning his Graduate Degree. They provided him with a small stipend, but free tuition, so his Grad degree was essentially “free.” (he lived at home and commuted the 20 miles to the University.)
He had to put in 16 hours a week as a TA for a prof.
So he worked 3 days at his “regular” job, worked 2 days for the Prof, went to classes 3 nights a week 6-9, and fit his studying into spare bits of time.
If you worked out the pay per hour, it was probably around $25 an hour. What kid with a just a bachelor’s is starting out getting $25 an hour, so why unionize. Plus it looks great on your resume as your first job.
Let them unionize.
College professors are constantly lecturing us on how the under class is abused by the greedy capitalist system.
Let’s see what happens when these professors discover they are that system.
First and foremost, public or private universities have little care for the costs, since all they have to do is raise the tuitions again - it is all done with other people’s money, so little incentive to fight this much.
Then there’s all the professors who would have to start showing up for classes and maybe even grade their own student’s work if they dismissed these graduate students. That’s not going to happen.
Most especially, these aren’t employees. It is settled law which the labor board rejected in a clearly partisan action.
Funny how law is settled when it favors liberals, and a ‘bad decision’ when it favors rational thought.
Good for you.
I do not think anyone who gets government funds should be able to form or participate in a union.
The University getting government funds, it’s staff should be barred from forming a union.
Agreed...
The football team at Northwestern had a vote on unionization last year - I believe as United Steel Workers. The unionization vote failed, or the decision to allow it was disqualified, or something of that sort (but it’s only a matter of time).
In the sciences, grad students are basically apprentices learning their trade - they essentially get paid for learning how to be professionals. They do work long hours, however, at least at the elite schools.
Not sure why folks go to grad school in the humanities - there aren’t that many academic jobs to compete for, and they should have received sufficient leftist indoctrination as undergrads.
“I had a friend who had his doctrine in Physics and was doing a student teaching at Penn “
Your friend is a stud, dude. ;)
Hire adjuncts instead.
Can hardly wait till teaching assistants and interns can get tenure from the universities via their stupid union.
As if tuition isn’t high enough now?
Exactly. Bad bad bad...
Columbia was already a hotbed of cultural Marxists, so as far as I am concerned, it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch. Hopefully grad students at Cornell and Ithaca will organize next. Let their collective (in multiple senses of the word) administrations deal with the conundrum of being hated, evil Management.
I just hired two entry level people at the equivalent of $25 an hour. It happens regularly.
A union could act as the only shield that graduate students have against the vile and corrupt system that allows tenured professors to terrorize everyone on campus.
Think about it for a second.
If you were in graduate school today, and you had to answer to the jerk-offs that are tenured professors...
Wouldn’t you want some kind of support structure in place to watch your back?
I am a graduate student TA at a private university. I don’t think this will affect me as I only have a year left in my degree. I support collective bargaining rights for the TA’s if only because the entire university is so bloated with non-teaching staff (e.g. “Vice Provost for Social Media Engagement”) who get all the goodies and we don’t even get a staff discount in the cafeteria. However, I think students and parents are all getting wise to the farce of higher education and pursuing other options to the traditional 4-years at an expensive school like mine that is using TA’s and adjuncts as the normal instructors. For that you’re better off going to community college.
You can predict where this will go.
Private college tuition with non-union grad students will be around $35,000 a year.
Private college tuition with union grad students will be around $45,000 a year.
Dimwit kid will go and borrow $250,000 for a six-year period of schooling, and wake up at age thirty to realize that he will never be able to conclude the loan, and he’s broke for the rest of his life.
But the college itself is the one who created this mess....by allowing professors to sit around and just do one class per semester with 40-odd students, and then pay the professor $150,000 a year. It just won’t work under this type of gimmick.
The smart colleges will open up some auditorium situation with 150 students in the hall, and have the professor do one single class with that many students. Then fire or release all the grad-student instructors.
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