| The Chronicle of
Higher Education Friday, September 24, 2004 Senators Get Mixed
Messages at Hearing on Graduate-Student Unions |
| Washington:
Friends and foes of graduate-student unionization testified at a Senate
hearing on Thursday, continuing their longstanding battle over whether teaching
assistants are really employees or students.
Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican and the chairman of the Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on labor and education, held the hearing to discuss a recent ruling by the National Labor Relations Board. In 2000 the board had overturned decades of precedent to allow a graduate-student union to form at New York University, the first at a private institution. But this past summer a new board voted on party lines to overturn that decision, ruling that TA's at Brown University could not unionize. Mr. Specter, who is running for re-election this fall, said he was concerned that the board's recent decision had stemmed from partisan, not legal, reasoning. But he also dashed the hopes of labor leaders who would like to see federal legislation that would clearly settle the matter by defining graduate assistants as employees. "I think, candidly, that is unlikely," Senator Specter said, given lawmakers' other priorities. Two members of the NLRB testified at the hearing. Robert J. Battista, the board's Republican chairman, defended the Brown decision, saying that the NYU decision was "erroneous" and that he had given considerable weight to the board's rulings from the 1970s. Wilma B. Liebman, a Democrat and the only member of the current board who also voted on the NYU decision, said the NLRB must be willing to adapt to changes in the workplace. That's what the NYU decision reflected, she said. To return to precedents set 30 years ago will not change the current reality of universities. "Graduate students are cheaper," she said. "And, of course, they will stay cheaper if they cannot unionize." Mr. Specter asked Ms. Liebman what had changed between the NYU ruling in 2000 and the board's decision in the Brown case this summer. She said that the composition of the board had changed. "That's not necessarily a very good reason," the senator replied. After the Brown ruling, similar cases involving Columbia and Tufts Universities, as well as the University of Pennsylvania, were sent back to regional NLRB directors, to be decided under the new standard. John B. Langel, a
lawyer for Penn, also testified at the hearing. He argued that the money
given to graduate students is not a payment for services but part of a
large financial-aid package, which covers tuition and health insurance,
and is worth more than $50,000 per student per year. The standard stipend
for Penn graduate students is now $15,750. The university recently "They're not cheaper labor," Mr. Langel said. If university officials were looking for cheaper labor, he said "they would find it in their adjunct instructors." Christina Collins, a Ph.D. student in history at Penn and a leader of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, told the subcommittee that the recent board decision was a "significant misinterpretation" of federal labor law and that the 40,000 graduate students who are unionized at public universities demonstrate that such labor organizing does not harm academic freedom. Teaching assistants are clearly employees, she said. "Without our
work," she said, "institutions like Penn would need to hire
other employees to do these jobs." |