University of Rochester graduate and teaching students are announcing plans to form a union. As it turns out, they aren’t the only ones now that a National Labor Relations Board has lifted the ban on graduate assistants’ right to unionize.
Yesterday’s ruling reversed the 2004 Bush-era Brown University decision, in which the same board ruled that grad assistants weren’t employees.
The Service Employees International Union is now working with some U of R and also Syracuse University grad assistants on an organizing drive. SEIU is working with graduate assistants at Duke University, Northwestern and St Louis University. And they’re not the only ones.
The United Auto Workers is the union that, together with grad students from Columbia University, brought the case that overturned the earlier ruling. The American Federation of Teachers is also working with grad assistants at Cornell.