Labor & Employment Law

NLRB Orders New Hearing on NYU Grad Students Union Vote

By James Parks

One of the most egregious decisions of the Bush-era National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was the 2004 ruling in the Brown University case that graduate teaching and research assistants were not employees and could not form a union. This week, the Obama NLRB began to set things right by reversing a ruling which prevented some 1,800 graduate assistants at New York University from voting for union representation.

The board reversed a regional director?s dismissal of an election petition by the Graduate Student Organizing Committee/UAW (GSOC/UAW Local 2110). Even though the board stopped short of overturning the Brown University ruling, it did say there are ?compelling reasons? to reconsider the 2004 board precedent. The board remanded the case to the regional director for a hearing, and development of a ?full evidentiary record? on the election petition. The students held a mass rally in April where a large majoriity of the students signed the petition to the NLRB (see video above).

The Bush NLRB decision was condemned by the UN’s International Labor Organization (ILO) as a violation of the internationally recognized right to organize. Dissenting board members called it “woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality.” The ruling also nullified union authorization elections at Brown, Columbia, Tufts and the University of Pennsylvania.

NYU’s graduate employees won their first NLRB election in 2000, followed by university recognition and a first contract in 2001. The contract, the first ever to be won at a private university in the United States, included a 40 percent salary increase, fully paid healthcare, sick leave, and workplace protections.

But after the Bush NLRB ruling, NYU withdrew its recognition and refused to negotiate a second contract.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on October 27, 2010 (boomark / email).