Grad student unionization movement awaiting a decision

As graduate students await a decision from the government's National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) about the legitimacy of graduate student unionization, members of two opposing groups at Tufts are continuing to raise awareness about the issue.

Grad students at Tufts voted on unionization last April, though the NLRB immediately impounded the votes to prevent them from influencing the Board's subsequent hearing on the matter.

The government hears most of the grad student unionization cases, according to Kendall Wolf, a member of the anti-unionization group Why Have a Union at Tufts (WHUT). Although they are not willing to make any certain statements, Wolf and fellow WHUT member Jason Walker suspect the motion was defeated.

The University administration has taken a firm stance against unionization. In a statement on Tufts' website, President Bacow said "there is nothing a union can add to what graduate students can do for themselves, working with the university."

Not much has happened since the University appealed the decision to create a union at Tufts last spring, according to Joe Ramsey, president of the pro-unionization Association for Student Employees at Tufts (ASET). "We are expecting an NLRB decision sometime this semester, hopefully," Ramsey said.

Though a decision could be announced soon, grad student and union organizer Carl Martin said that getting new people interested and involved in the cause is paramount. "We can't just wait around for a decision from the labor board," Martin said. "We have to keep campaigning on campus to organize and spread involvement for a union here."

It is especially important to spread awareness since many students are graduating and many new grad students are matriculating into Tufts graduate programs, Martin said.

Tufts unionization advocates have been working with the United Auto-Workers, which filed a petition with the NLRB on behalf of the Medford/Somerville teaching and resident assistants in Nov. 2001.

Some organizers have criticized the choice of UAW as an ally. "U Penn's choice of the American Federation of Teachers makes much more sense," Wolf said. The unionization efforts have also tended to exclude certain students, specifically those in the hard sciences, economics, and engineering, he said.

Another criticism is that the unionization movement went too quickly. "They shot themselves in the foot," and by working with the UAW, they negated the possibility of having an independent Tufts union that would put their issues first, Walker said.

The organization movement began in Nov. 2001 when Martin inquired into the issue along with other grad students. "My father was in a union, so I was familiar with them," Martin said. Martin was also involved with the Tufts janitors' Sept. 2001 movement, which he says got him interested in labor justice.

Graduate teaching assistants (TAs) are currently allotted only four years of teaching in their department at Tufts, which is one of the policies pro-union grad students hope to fight. "The teaching and research we do is directly related with paying [teaching assistants'] bills," Martin said. "There are simply a lot of grad students who have to do the best they can with little or no funding."

Similar unionization initiatives at other universities have failed in the past, such as the union movement at Cornell that "was defeated... even before an NLRB decision," Walker said.

But graduate students at Penn and Tufts are in a similar position in the unionization process. Elections were held on the issue at the end of last month, and, according to a Daily Pennsylvanian exit poll, the union organizers seem to have won. The NLRB is hearing an appeal from the administration, however, and will release the votes as soon as a decision is reached. The NLRB has also impounded the votes of graduate students at Columbia and Brown.

The Columbia Spectator reported earlier this week that now that President Bush has finished his appointments to the NLRB, the unionization process should begin to move along as the board goes through a backlog of cases. The new appointees will give a more conservative slant to the hearings but that will not make much of a difference, Walker said.