NEW HAVEN, Conn. ― Efforts to unionize graduate students at private universities are gaining momentum as the National Labor Relations Board shows new openness to arguments that they are not just students, but also school employees.
A union for teaching assistants is in place at only one private U.S. school, New York University, where the administration gave its blessing in 2013.
Since then, organizing campaigns have sprouted or gained new life at other major northeastern universities, including Yale, Harvard and Columbia. Students and schools around the country are closely watching the NLRB following its recent decision to reconsider its decade-old ruling that graduate students at private schools are not entitled to collective bargaining.
At Yale, the Graduate Employee and Students Organization delivered a petition to the administration last month at the latest of several rallies since the NYU decision. Supporters in attendance included New Haven’s mayor and Connecticut’s attorney general and its two U.S. senators, all Democrats.
The Yale students are asking for recognition and for negotiations on issues including pay and benefits, mental health services and racial and gender equity among faculty and students.
“The argument that we’re students and not employees falls flat for me when I think of how much time I spend teaching,” said Michelle Morgan, a graduate student in American studies and a single mother who said she was hurt by a pay cut last year for upper-year teaching assistants. “My students see me very much as a teacher.”
A Yale spokesman, Tom Conroy, said that the university provides some of the most generous support in the country, including full tuition fellowships, stipends and benefits, and that graduate students already have a voice in university affairs through student assemblies.
