A controversial decision by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has called into question the status of Tufts teaching assistants (TAs), who are pushing for the third consecutive year to be recognized as University employees.
The unionization process was stalled for about two years before the NLRB, a federal board of five judges that deals with labor union matters in the U.S., reversed itself this summer by ruling that TAs at Brown University could not unionize.
In 2000, the NLRB had ruled that TAs at New York University (NYU) had the right to form unions.
The issue is complicated by allegations of partisan voting in the recent Brown decision. In late September, Sen. Arlen Specter held a hearing on the issue in the subcommittee on labor and education for the Appropriations Committee.
Based on this turnabout, the Tufts case, as well as similar cases at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania (U-Penn), was sent back to regional NLRB directors to be considered under the changed standards, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Little headway has been made by grad students at Tufts since April 2002, when the NLRB held an election in which Tufts 500 graduate students, recognized by the NLRB as "employees," voted yes or no for unionization.
According to Joe Ramsey, a Ph.D. student and organizer for the Association of Student Employees at Tufts (ASET), he and other ASET members were "confident that, of the 70 percent of [graduate] students that voted, the majority voted yes."
Yet the votes remain uncounted because Tufts filed an appeal immediately after the election that challenged the classification of graduate students as employees. The NLRB impounded the votes to prevent them from influencing the appeal.
Tufts filed the appeal on the grounds that TAs should not be considered employees, but rather apprentices, who can be adequately paid with financial aid.
But Ramsey says this argument is specious and that the "key evidence" against it is that Tufts would "have to hire outside help" if it were not for the TAs.
He said TA positions are not apprenticeships because many TA's are required to work outside their areas of specialty. "My specialty is 20th century literature, but I am a teaching assistant in an 'Intro to Expository Writing' course," Ramsey said.
Ramsey is among those concerned that the NLRB had changed its decision based on partisan reasoning as opposed to legal issues.
At the Brown hearing, Wilma Liebman, a Democrat and the only current member of the NLRB who took part in the 2000 decision, argued against the outlawing unions.
Liebman said the only thing that had changed between the NYU and Brown decisions was the composition of the board. The recent decision was three votes to two. In 2000, the decision was unanimous. Since then, the NLRB has lost four of its five members.
Liebman said the unionization of TAs is fair and is in no way harmful to academics.
"To return to precedents set 30 years ago will not change the current reality of universities," Liebman said.
But supporters of the recent decision say that TAs are entitled to financial aid packages, rather than salaries.
John Langel, a lawyer for U-Penn who testified at Specter's hearing, argued that TAs are not merely used as cheap labor by universities. "If university officials were looking for cheaper labor, they would find it in their adjunct instructors," he said.
ASET members say they should be recognized as employees by the University, however, permitting them to unionize and secure healthcare coverage, salary increases, and improved housing benefits.
"The salary increases [that a union could achieve] would help prevent the growing debts that many graduate students will face once they graduate," Ramsey said.
Ramsey said as long as universities can avoid a contractual agreement with graduate students, there will not be a principle set for how much TAs earn.
But other graduate students contend that unionization would hinder more than help them. The anti-unionization student group Why Have a Union at Tufts? (WHUT?) argues the benefits of unionization are outweighed by the disadvantages, including paying dues, conducting lengthy contract negotiations with the University, and possibly holding strikes.
In the coming semester, ASET hopes to expand to every academic department on campus, and acquire a majority of "working" graduate students as members.
In the last year and a half, ASET has collected over 150 signatures on a petition demanding the administration to recognize TAs as employees. The petition is still circulating.
Organized in the fall of 2001, ASET started off as an informal group of graduate students who had heard about the 2000 NLRB decision allowing TAs to unionize at NYU and decided to act at Tufts.
