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chapter 20 Do Graduate Students Work? Hundreds of thousands of graduate students grade millions of papers and blue books every year. The work is absolutely vital to the “product” put out by just about every American university, and of course they get paid for it, though not very much. Thousands of teaching assistants and research assistants are union members, and others would join if more statutes, on either the federal or state level, allowed. These unionized grad students negotiate with their university administration over pay, class size, and other working conditions. Sometimes they go on strike. At the same time, these graduate students are also “in school.” They are apprentice scholars whose teaching and grading tasks are integral to their learning experience, even as they put most of their effort into completing their own classes and moving on to a terminal degree. So how do we categorize these many thousands of young people: as workers or students, as fish or fowl? Or must we come down on one side or the other? The question has been up for grabs for several years in Congress, at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and in the courts. The issue is important not just because such a decision will help advance or retard the enrollment of thousands of graduate students into trade unions. Rather, this is the kind of question that bedevils and confuses our understanding of the nature of work, of the purposes of the labor law, and of how we think about class in a society when the vast majority of people wear collars that are neither blue nor white. The unionization rights of graduate students at public universities come under the jurisdiction of state law, so in traditionally liberal states like New York, California , Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Illinois, thousands have successfully formed legally recognized trade unions. In contrast, the conditions under which employed students may form unions at private colleges and universities are determined by the NLRB, whose decisions have been highly politicized in recent years. After rejecting graduate employee unionization for decades, a new board with a majority of appointees chosen by President Bill Clinton ruled in the year 2000 that Lichtenstein_ContestofIdeas_TEXT.indd 249 5/24/13 8:04 AM 250 intellectuals and their ideas graduate students at private universities were indeed “employees” and hence covered under the national labor law. Four years later a GOP-dominated board reversed that decision, which may yet be revised once again as the set of board members appointed by President Barack Obama make their views known. The NLRB’s 2004 decision that excluded graduate students from the protections offered by federal labor law illuminates why a labor law designed for an earlier industrial era has proven so dysfunctional when it comes to the work lives of graduate students, but it also explains how that very legal ossification of a once radical labor law has proven so useful to twenty-first-century conservatives. That 2004 ruling, which was brought to the board by Brown University to discourage unionization of its teaching assistants, doomed to defeat the energetic organizing campaigns that teaching assistants had mounted at Brown and at other highprofile private universities such as Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and New York University.1 At one very important and consequential level, the Bush-era NLRB won another skirmish in the long and successful war that conservatives have waged to marginalize the labor movement and confine it to a shrinking blue-collar ghetto. For the better part of a decade, Bush administration appointees at the NLRB and the Labor Department were busy overturning Clinton-era rulings, like the 2000 New York University decision that declared working graduate students to be employees, or the rules that forced companies to bargain with, or pay overtime and benefits to, tens of thousands of employees whom management sought to label as “independent contractors” or exempt professionals.2 Is Barack Obama’s administration likely to reverse this right-wing advance? He was elected president in 2008 with the enthusiastic and effective support of the unions, and like all other Democratic presidents, he has appointed labor-liberals to the NLRB; however, the courts, which normally rule on all important NLRB decisions, remain notably conservative when it comes to the organizing rights of American workers. Equally important, virtually the entire Republican establishment —from Congress to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and on to the dozens of statehouses now in GOP control—remains intransigent when it comes to labor’s organizing...

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