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Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Thanks again, Ralph!  and all your friends!

From last week’s Chronicle of Higher Education:

Labor Board Rules Against TA Unions
Decision is major blow to organizing efforts at private colleges

By Scott Smallwood

Graduate students at private universities do not have the right to form labor unions, the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday, striking down its own landmark 2000 ruling that had led to a wave of organizing.

The long-awaited decision was split along party lines, with members of the board ruling, 3 to 2, that teaching assistants at Brown University are primarily students and are not covered by federal labor law. The United Automobile Workers had organized graduate students at Brown in 2001 and had successfully petitioned for a union election. Those ballots were impounded when the university appealed to the NLRB, and have remained uncounted ever since.

In 2000 the board, then controlled by Democratic appointees, ruled that graduate students at New York University could unionize, prompting organizing drives across the nation that signed up thousands of graduate students over the last four years. That work is now undone by the board’s ruling.

In the Brown case, the three Republican members appointed by President Bush ruled that the precedent before the NYU ruling was “sound and well reasoned.”

“Graduate-student assistants, including those at Brown, are primarily students and have a primarily educational, not economic, relationship with their university,” the majority wrote. They further found that since the money received by teaching assistants is the same as that received by students on fellowships, it is not “consideration for work” but financial aid.

The two Democratic members dissented, arguing that the majority was “woefully out of touch with contemporary academic reality” and that their decision was based on an outdated view of academe.

Brown’s provost, Robert J. Zimmer, said in a written statement that the board “correctly recognizes that a graduate student’s experience is a mentoring relationship between faculty and students and is not an appropriate matter for collective bargaining.”

Phil Wheeler, a regional director of the United Automobile Workers, called the decision a blatantly political ruling and said it was disappointing that supposedly progressive universities
had appealed the case to an “anti-union Bush board.”

. . .

As word of the decision spread, the American Federation of Teachers was holding its annual convention in Washington. Minutes after learning of the decision, Nat LaCour, the executive vice president, told members: “The ruling is outrageous. This must change.”

A spokeswoman at Columbia University said the institution would not comment on the ruling since it did not directly involve Columbia.

Lori Doyle, a spokeswoman for Penn, said administrators there are “delighted” by the ruling.  “We are pleased that the NLRB has recognized what we’ve been saying all along: that graduate students are students, not employees,” she said. After quickly reviewing the decision, lawyers there said they expect to see a ruling soon on their case that would be consistent with the Brown decision.

Union leaders were holding out a sliver of hope, though. While acknowledging that the decision was a “major blow,” Lauren Nauta, the Penn union’s organizing chairwoman, said leaders of her group believe their case is different enough from the one at Brown that the NLRB’s ruling could be different.

Ms. Nauta, a Ph.D. candidate in history, said students at Penn were outraged by the decision and what they see as its political aspect. “Basically this comes down to Bush’s Republican appointees overturning the NYU precedent,” she said. “It’s very unclear what the distinction between graduate students at a public university and a private university would be. We feel that we’re employees, we pay taxes, and we should have the right to bargain collectively.”

All right, now, people familiar with this blog and/or with my work in academe know that I’ve been a passionate supporter of graduate student unions, and that I’ve been a bitter critic of Ralph Nader’s run for President in 2000 (his current run is simply evidence of dementia, and though I’ve promised not to say any more about the man himself on this blog, I will have a few questions for his remaining supporters, the Five Percenters, a bit later on).  But is it fair of me to blame Ralph for this mortal wound the NLRB has inflicted on graduate student union drives?  Or am I reading history backwards, retroactively applying criteria to the 2000 election that no progressive-left voter could possibly have taken into consideration at the time?

The correct answer is (a), it is fair of me to blame Ralph for this mortal wound inflicted by the NLRB.  But that’s not because I went around arguing about the composition of the NLRB four years ago-- it’s because Eric Alterman did.  Check out this Nation column from November 2000, and you make the call:

Providence put me on a panel debating the Gore/Nader choice with Cornel West at New York University in late October. Most of the audience was for Nader, and the lineup on stage did nothing to improve those odds.

Before the debate began, its organizers took a few moments to speak on behalf of the university’s graduate students’ struggle for unionization. So did West, who had been handed a flier about it from the floor. And as a man about to lose a debate (and a longtime grad student as well as an occasional NYU adjunct faculty member), I was happy for the interruption. Days later, the National Labor Relations Board set an important precedent by ruling in favor of the students. But here’s what I don’t understand. How can the student union supporters also be Nader supporters? Nonsensical “Tweedledee/Tweedledum” assertions to the contrary, only one party appoints people to the NLRB who approve of graduate student unions, and only one appoints people to the Supreme Court who approve of such NLRB decisions. No Democrat in the White House, no graduate student union; it’s that simple. An honest Nader campaign slogan might have read, “Vote your conscience and lose your union...or your reproductive freedom...your wildlife refuge, etc., etc.”

No Democrat in the White House, no graduate student union; it’s that simple. He really did say it-- the very same week that Bob McChesney, who has since come to his senses, called for Gore to drop out of the race, writing that “Only Nader can defeat Bush. All that progressives stand for-- the Supreme Court, a woman’s right to choose, the environment-- is on the line. The sad truth is that on November 7 a vote for Gore is a vote for Bush.”

Like McChesney, many Naderites have begun to smell the rancid GOP coffee, even though it’s been on the burner for over a decade.  Barbara Ehrenreich recently repudiated Nader as well, in her new (and welcome) incarnation as a New York Times op-ed pinch hitter, but, as Digby pointedly argued the other day, picking up on an item from Brad DeLong,

It was clear to many of us in 2000 that the Republican Party had completely run amuck and that George W. Bush was simply a brand name in a suit that the Party was putting forth to hide their essential ugliness from the American people. It was obvious to some of us that this was an unprecedented partisan battle and that this insular, myopic view on the left was going to hurt us very badly. I have little patience for the idea that it took this massive demonstration of GOP power under the Bush administration to convince people that the first, most important order of political business was to check the Republican power grab. It was obvious in 2000 to anyone who was paying attention.

Thanks, Digby, for reminding everyone of the “paying attention” criterion.  And thanks also, Brad, for reminding me that Ehrenreich called voting for the Democrat in 2000 a “playful new postmodernist form of politics.” Ha ha!  That was a good one, Ms. Ehrenreich.  You really got us postmodernists there!

So yes, I know, among the travesties and outrages the Bush administration has visited upon us-- and note that this blog, like most American media, is doing its patriotic duty in not saying anything about the torture and rape of children at Abu Ghraib-- this NLRB ruling is very small beer.  But just for future reference:  no Democrat in the White House, no graduate student union.  It’s that simple.

UPDATE:  Oh, all right, I can be more constructive than this.  Stop over at The Nader Factor and show ‘em some love.  They’re doing the Right Thing, and you should too.

Posted by Michael on 07/21 at 03:23 AM
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