TAs Are Not Workers

The staff's knee-jerk defense fails to offer compelling supporting arguments for its position.

That the graduate students draw salaries does not necessarily make them employees with a right to unionize. Graduate students are students, first and foremost; their job is to learn how to teach and do research at a university, and their work as teaching assistants is essential to these ends. In this respect, TAs are more like apprentices than laborers.

In addition, unionization is hardly in the best interests of Yale undergraduates. We have already seen how the Yale TAs have sabotaged the prospects of some Yale undergraduates by withholding grades; who knows what could happen in the next labor dispute (under the blessing of the federal government)?