Yale professor Nicholas Christakis is a physician and sociologist best known for his research on human social networks. But Christakis gained new expertise on Twitter mobs after he remarked on the website that graduate students, now moving to unionize at the school, are “not ordinary workers” and predicted unionizing might leave them with fewer opportunities in university labs.
The digital caterwauling included a myriad of accusations, including that Christakis doesn’t care for graduate students’ welfare. One attorney even said he reported Christakis to federal regulators for his “threat of reprisal.”
But the professor had offered a sound diagnosis. Separate from questions about how graduate students should be compensated, people who receive money while pursuing advanced degrees were never meant to be covered by the National Labor Relations Act, the country’s creaky labor relations law crafted almost a century ago.
Congress adopted the NLRA to establish guardrails that make negotiations preferable to strikes and lockouts. The law, albeit imperfectly, reflected a serious public concern: disruptions at U.S. ports, coal mines, or other industries threatened the economy at large and the millions of individuals who depend on it.
Shoehorning graduate students into the 1935 framework requires overlooking glaring dissimilarities with the workers Congress had in mind: graduate students are, first and foremost, customers of the institutions at which they’re enrolled. They work primarily as part of their own professional training rather than for wages, they tend to arrange their hours and other work parameters directly with an individual professor rather than university management, and their service is always meant to be temporary. A cadre of Yale graduate students laying down their pipettes isn’t going to leave food rotting in warehouses or families without heat.
The vitriol against Christakis can be explained, in part, by the fact that he was himself disrupting commerce. Older blue-collar unions, clobbered by the nationwide decline in union membership, see graduate students as a new revenue opportunity.
The United Auto Workers, for example, (whose membership has slipped 43% since 2005) has been organizing students at NYU and Harvard for the past several years. And UNITE HERE, the national union looking to rep about 4,000 Yale graduate students, is still clawing its way back from losing more than half its members after the pandemic crushed the hospitality industry.
Labor-friendly state politicians years ago showed the unions how lucrative these arrangements can be. After New York Gov. Mario Cuomo’s administration let them unionize state university graduate students in 1992, the Communications Workers of America began receiving an additional 2% of their base salaries, grossing the union $1.7 million in 2017.
But recent years have shown what a poor fit that was for the students. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 blocked unions from forcing public university students to pay dues-like fees, and roughly three-quarters of SUNY graduate students had stopped doing so by fall 2021 — though they’re still stuck with the terms of a union contract.
That won’t be the case at private universities in New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Absent state right-to-work protections, a union winning just a plurality can force the remaining students to pay. A Yale student’s first $19 in monthly dues (or compulsory union fees) will flow directly to UNITE HERE’s national headquarters.
That amounts to a near-permanent million-dollar revenue stream. Federal rules make it impractical for graduate students to kick a union out, sometimes making workers wait for years before they can hold another election. Given their transient nature, it’s another reason the NRLA is a poor fit for students, and why unions smell a worthy investment.
Graduate students aren’t the only group outside of “ordinary workers” that labor has targeted. Illinois, New York, and several other states have forced informal childcare providers, who often watch children in their own homes, to pay a union if the family they were helping received state assistance. In other cases, unions were skimming from Medicaid stipends paid to people caring for a friend or family member with a disability. Unions gorged on tens of millions of dollars in diverted social-services payments before the Supreme Court cracked down on the involuntary deductions in 2014.
The NLRB moved in 2019 to exempt graduate students because their relationships with universities are “primarily educational in nature” rather than economic. The Biden administration, which took unconventional steps to seize control of the NLRB rulemaking process in early 2021, scotched the proposed rule and let UAW, UNITE HERE, and other politically aligned unions keep cashing in.
A future administration — or better yet, Congress — should clarify that graduate students were never meant to unionize under federal law. Fortunately for American higher education, Twitter won’t get a vote.
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Ken Girardin is a fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy in Albany, New York.
