Labor Official Rules That TAs at Columbia U. Can Form Union

By Scott Smallwood

Chronicle of HIgher Education

February 15, 2002

 

A National Labor Relations Board official has ruled that teaching and research assistants --including some undergraduates-- at Columbia University can unionize, opening the way for the second such union at a private institution.

The labor board had previously found that graduate assistants at New York University could unionize, and last month, after lengthy negotiations, the administrators and union agreed to the first-ever contract between a TA union and a private university.

The 52-page decision by Celeste J. Mattina, a regional director for the labor board in New York City, was released Tuesday. Ms. Mattina is not the same regional director who issued the landmark ruling in 2000 that teaching assistants at NYU could unionize, but she relied heavily on the precedent set in that case. The Columbia decision also follows a similar ruling last fall by a different regional director in a case involving a TA union at Brown University.

"We think it's fantastic that the labor board has rejected Columbia's argument that we're not employees and affirmed that we do work for the university," said Beverly Gage, a Ph.D. student in history and spokeswoman for Graduate Student Employees United. The TA union at Columbia, like the one at NYU, is affiliated with the United Auto Workers.

In a statement released after the ruling, Columbia's president, George Rupp, maintained that the university still believes that teaching and research assistants are primarily students, and "we contend that collective bargaining does not make sense for students because we hold that they are not employees within the meaning of the National Labor Relations Act."

Mr. Rupp said the university had not decided whether to appeal the decision to the full labor board in Washington, the choice NYU made when faced with a similar ruling. The board ruled against NYU, and the university eventually agreed to bargain with the teaching assistants. Brown recently appealed its unfavorable ruling to the full board and is awaiting a decision.

Mr. Rupp said the university was pleased that the regional director did not approve the union's proposed bargaining unit, which would have included teaching assistants and other instructors on just the Morningside Heights campus. The university had argued that any unit should include all graduate assistants at every campus.

Ms. Mattina expanded the bargaining unit to include teaching and research assistants at the Health Sciences Campus, including those in the public-health and dental-health programs. She also ruled that undergraduate teaching assistants would be part of the bargaining unit, a move that could affect about 80 students.

But Ms. Mattina declined to include TA's in the School of International and Public Affairs, the law school, and some graduate assistants in the film division. She ruled that like graders and tutors at NYU, who are not covered by the union, those graduate assistants are appointed for temporary, finite periods of time and thus are not eligible to unionize.

Ms. Gage said the union may ask the labor board to reconsider parts of the ruling, especially the exclusion of teaching assistants who work in the School of International and Public Affairs. She said a union organizing committee would meet Wednesday night to begin planning the union's next steps.

The ruling means a union election can be held in the coming weeks. Recently, similar elections at NYU and Temple University have resulted in victories for the unions. But at Columbia, the expansion of the bargaining unit means that many people who haven't been lobbied by union organizers will be able to cast ballots.