Brown Grad. Students Allowed to Unionize

In a decision that activists say could ripple through the Ivy League, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled on Friday that graduate students at Brown University were employees legally entitled to form a union.

The decision was almost identical to a spring 2000 NLRB ruling on New York University (NYU), but Friday’s announcement applies to universities in New England rather than the mid-Atlantic states, according to Sheyda F. A. Jahanbani, a member of the Brown Graduate Employment Organization (BGEO) who has been active in efforts to organize a union at Brown.

“The NLRB ruling was quite a hopeful sign for us, and because it’s New England, especially [a sign to] the Ivy League,” Jahanbani said. “It’s in the back of everybody’s mind that we can be a beacon of hope, because there was definitely a ripple effect the NYU success had on us.”

While the latest ruling could apply to Harvard, graduate student representatives say that the new legal sanction for unionization does not imply that Harvard teaching fellows are likely to organize anytime soon.

“Because the administration is so amenable to us, it’s not a contentious relationship,” said Harvard Graduate Student Council Co-President Shaun Rein. “The decision will provide firepower for the people who are really interested [in unionization], but we were the least interested of all the schools at the Ivy Council. We’ve invited people who are pro-union to come [to the Graduate Council], but they haven’t shown up.”

For years, graduate students at colleges across the country who have said they are overworked and underpaid have advocated for the right to organize.

Jahanbani stressed that unionization is not for everyone.

“It’s an ultimately democratic thing,” she said. “It depends on graduate students’ relationship with each university and the circumstances.”

Harvard’s Graduate Student Council has been divided about whether to explore the possibility of unionization, Rein said, because many believe it is an effective body for relaying concerns to the administration and fear that it might become defunct if a union were formed.

“One of the dilemmas is, if there’s a union, what is our role?,” Rein said. “We wouldn’t do anything.”

At Brown, however, Jahanbani said that students were planning to take advantage of the ruling. NLRB regulations require that eligible graduate students at Brown be able to vote in a secret ballot election on whether to unionize within 30 days.

When the election takes place, it will make Brown the first university in the Ivy League and just the second private university in the nation to put the question of unionization to a vote.

Brown argued to the NLRB that its case differed from NYU’s because the school requires its graduate students to teach as part of their degree requirements, but NLRB Region One (New England) Director Rosemary Pye was unconvinced.

“I find, first, that Brown has failed to demonstrate that most teaching assistantships at Brown are undertaken in order to fulfill a degree requirement,” Pye said in his decision. “Even if Brown had demonstrated that most graduate students teach as a degree requirement, however, I disagree with its contention that the Board in NYU meant to imply that if the work in question also fulfills a degree requirement, the students necessarily lost their status as employees.”

—Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.