Bernie Sanders introduced legislation Wednesday intended to ensure that graduate students have the right to organize. Sanders said the bill would override a regulatory attempt to curb such unions.
“Stronger unions and worker protections are a key part of solving this crisis in our colleges and universities,” said the Vermont senator, a top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination. “But instead of protecting graduate workers, the National Labor Relations Board is trying to strip them of their rights.”
The legislation would rewrite the National Labor Relations Act to say that “graduate student workers at colleges and universities are employees and should be granted every right and responsibility conferred to them” to organize unions.
The NLRB, the main federal labor law enforcement agency, in September proposed a rule establishing that graduate students are not eligible to form unions. It is currently soliciting public comments on the proposal. The rule would settle a long-running controversy over whether the students are truly employees and therefore eligible to form unions, as labor activists argue, or still mainly students, in which case the labor act’s rights wouldn’t apply to them.
A coalition group including the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities backed the NLRB in a letter to the board last week. Allowing graduate students to strike, they argued, would result in significant hardships for nongraduate students by raising the cost of tuition while preventing them from learning.
“If students and their college or university are turned into economic adversaries, significant financial consequences are possible, and frankly probable, for students,” the coalition warned.
Union backers countered that the graduate students are being denied basic rights. “Graduate workers are a vital part of teaching and research in colleges and universities and should have an equal voice in their workplace,” said Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat sponsoring the House version of Sanders’s bill.
The five-seat NLRB currently has three members, all nominated by President Trump. The board has reversed itself on the issue three times in the last five decades, the changes largely reflecting the current administration’s viewpoint on unions.
