Upcoming Vote Mobilizes Union Talks

By Amba Datta

Spectator Senior Staff Writer

Columbia Daily Spectator

February 27, 2002

 

As the first day of the union election for Columbia's teaching and research assistants draws near, Graduate Student Employees United and University administrators have been throwing all their resources into advocating their positions for and against unionization.

While the Feb. 12 ruling of the National Labor Relations Board's Regional Director declared that teaching and research assistants of the University were employees entitled to union representation --a victory for GSEU-- the decision also supported the University's claims for an expanded bargaining unit. The unit the union had originally petitioned for --one restricted to instructional positions on the Morningside campus-- was almost doubled in size to include teaching and research assistants on both the Morningside and Health Sciences campuses and those at the Lamont-Doherty and Nevis observatories.

The task of organizing possible supporters at other sites is one that GSEU organizers have begun since the NLRB decision was handed down. Support from the Health Sciences campus, which adds a significant population of research assistants to the bargaining unit, may be a crucial population of students in deciding the election. Before the decision, union members had been most active on the Morningside campus, from whose members it collected union card signatures about one year ago.

"I think it makes it harder for the union to win the election," said Graduate Students Against Unionization member Nina Bambina, who said she believed research assistants at the uptown campus were happier with their conditions than students at Morningside. "I think [pro-union supporters] have to make a harder case now."

GSEU organizer and graduate student in the History Department Beverly Gage said she was confident the United Auto Workers, the union seeking to represent Columbia's teaching and research assistants, would win the election and that the union was meeting with support from students uptown.

UAW Director for Region 9A Phil Wheeler said the NLRB decision was unusual because the decision had been made by the same director that ruled in the case of New York University, which was the first private university to recognize its union. The bargaining unit approved by the regional director in the NYU case roughly followed the unit that the NYU union petitioned for; in Columbia's case, the original unit the union petitioned for would have contained approximately 1100 Morningside campus TAs and now contains a combination of 1900 to 2000 TAs and research assistants.

"It's unusual for the same regional office [of the NLRB] to all of a sudden make changes," said Wheeler, who said he thought the union would still get support from the research assistants the University argued should be in the bargaining unit.

"Sometimes you can regret what you wish for," he added. "[The University] took the position for a larger unit and they might regret that later on ... It gives us a great opportunity because the more people in a unit, the greater the power of the bargaining unit."

But the administration's stepping up of its anti-union campaign indicates it may very well hope to prove Wheeler wrong. Recent e-mails from University President George Rupp made the University's stance of opposition to a teaching and research assistant union clear. Wrote Rupp in his second e-mail: "Beyond encouraging you to go to the polls, I urge you to vote against creating a union."

University Provost Jonathan Cole added another administrator's voice to Rupp's in a letter to the Columbia community on Feb. 22. He argued, among other things, that unionization was an inappropriate model for a research university to adopt, in addition to being one that would bring no additional economic benefits to members of the bargaining unit.

"First, we continue to believe that defining students as 'employees' for the purposes of collective bargaining is wrong-headed," wrote Cole.

"It fails to understand the essential quality of graduate education and, therefore, tears at the fabric of well-established higher educational policies that integrate teaching and research training and supply fellowship support for students regardless of whether or not they teach in any given semester," Cole continued.

Cole echoed comments made by Rupp last Thursday evening on WKCR. Rupp asserted that "straight on self-interested grounds, universities without unions do better by their graduate students than those that have unions." 		 He said earlier in his comments, which were broadcast live, "On the question of benefits I think the data speak for themselves. I invite anyone to look at it ... the more robust packages, the more generous packages, the [universities] with better benefits, are the ones that are not unionized. I think it's an empirical question that can be adjudicated and anyone willing to look at the evidence can't help but see it."

Cole said universities without unions like Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford had better packages due to competition for top students among these universities, similar to the kind of competition between high-caliber universities for faculty, which drives salary increases.

Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Henry Pinkham said Columbia had increased stipends over the last two years from between $12,000 and $13,000 to the current stipend minimum of $15,000 with a projected increase to $16,050 next year. This would amount to an increase of 33.75 percent over the span of three years.

The NYU contract, which was concluded at the beginning of the month with its union, will raise NYU's minimum stipend by approximately 38 percent over the next four years.

Also citing Columbia's subsidized housing policies, Pinkham said, "From where I sit, it looks like we're doing better without a union."

Union supporters claim that many of Columbia's benefits, and in particular recent stipend increases, are a result of the unionization campaign.

"The thing to keep in mind is that all of those raises have been since the union campaign," Gage said. "It's really been the union campaign that pushed Columbia to offer those raises."

With regard to higher stipend levels at institutions without unionization, like Harvard and Princeton, Gage said, "The larger point is that universities across the board have begun to respond to unionization as a whole whether or not there are unionization campaigns at their specific campuses."

Apart from discussion of Columbia's funding packages, Rupp's e-mails also alerted the Columbia community to concerns the University has with the ways in which a union will affect the faculty-student relationship and concerns with the UAW's record in past union campaigns.

Rupp wrote in his e-mail that unions had been involved in strikes even when barred from striking by state law. But Wheeler, who met with Rupp last week, said the UAW had not been involved in illegal strikes and no one had ever charged that they had been. Wheeler said he had asked at the meeting for examples of illegal strikes. "I said 'Tell me one' and no one could tell me one," he said.

With reference to strikes at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Wheeler said student strikes occurred before they had been ruled employees under the law who could not strike.

While the lines have been drawn in the weeks before the election between the two sides, there is still opportunity for appeal to the NLRB regional director's decision. Neither the union or the University has yet announced a decision to appeal.

The union may yet appeal to the NLRB concerning the composition of the bargaining unit. Associate General Counsel for Columbia Patricia Catapano said she did not know whether the union would appeal but noted they did need more time to come to a decision. The deadline for appeals was moved from Feb. 25 to March 4 last week.

The University may appeal to the NLRB in Washington on the question of whether teaching and research assistants are employees at all. Wheeler said he expected the University to appeal. Both Brown University and NYU, whose appeal was overturned, appealed to the NLRB. Brown is still in the appeals process.

The appeals process will not impact the holding of the union election on the dates that have been set. Voting will begin on March 13 at the Morningside campus. If either or both sides appeal the NLRB regional director's decision, the ballot boxes will be sealed and impounded until the appeals process is concluded.