Twenty years ago, when I was a senior at Yale, the graduate students embarked on a two-week “grade strike,” during which they refused to hand in the fall grades of the undergraduates they were teaching. Grades were due on January 2, 1996, but the grad students, then as now agitating for union recognition, withheld the grades until two weeks later, when it became clear that they were losing the battle on all fronts. The dean of the graduate school brought three union leaders up on disciplinary charges (one was dismissed, though the other two had their punishments overturned); some faculty members threatened graduate students with reprisals, like poor letters of recommendation; and the Yale undergraduates, for whom a transcript without grades was like a scull without oarsmen, turned viciously on their teaching assistants.
That spring, a writer for the late, great small magazine Lingua Franca went to Yale and found that even campus liberals hated the grad-student-union movement. “They undertook an obligation and reneged,” the president of the Yale College Democrats told the reporter. “They’re holding the grades hostage of people they have no beef with.” Farther down in the article, the same student was in high snark mode: “It's hard to tell an undergraduate who’s in debt $27,000 a year that your $10,000 stipend and full-tuition waiver isn’t enough,” he said. “You could argue that there is no one more privileged than the graduate students.”
That student, poster child for anti-union animus, was me. I quickly came to regret, and eat, my words: two years later, I returned to Yale as a graduate student, and I immediately joined the union (then called the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, or GESO), eventually becoming an organizer in the religious-studies department. I couldn’t argue with the basic logic: doctoral students worked as graders and teaching assistants, and workers should have collective-bargaining rights.
On the other hand, I was always conflicted, less about my membership than about my fellow-members. Returning to Yale was a homecoming for me, a return to the womb—if one draped in madras, filled with the yelps of bulldogs and the harmonies of a-cappella singing. Yet my fellow union members talked about Yale as if it were the Man, or at least the Management. Their Marxist analysis of my home felt crass, and disloyal.
But, as the National Labor Relations Board affirmed last week, they were also right. On August 23rd, the board ruled 3–1 that teaching assistants and graduate researchers at Columbia University were workers under federal law and could vote to form a union. In reversing the Brown University case of 2004, which had determined that private-university grad students weren’t employees, and which was itself a reversal of the New York University case of 2000, this case settled (for now) the question of whether graduate students at private universities could unionize. In the past week, graduate students in ten departments at Yale filed for a union election, and the Harvard administration, in what seems to be an obvious effort to thwart the effort to form a local affiliated with the U.A.W., announced several improvements in the school’s financial package for Ph.D. students.
The strangest thing about this bit of news is that, in a sense, it’s really no news at all. While labor supporters have every reason to be gladdened by the N.L.R.B. ruling, there are already numerous graduate-student unions in the United States, as the N.L.R.B. noted—representing sixty-four thousand graduate students on twenty-eight campuses, including the universities of Wisconsin, California, Michigan, and Iowa. But those are all public universities (although private N.Y.U., which had a union and then lost it, won a new contract last year). And until last week the law recognized an arbitrary, and unmerited, distinction between workers at public and private schools. Grade papers on a large, public campus and you were a laborer, with a union and the right to strike; do the same work at Yale or Columbia and you were a student, one who happened to do a little grading, but certainly nobody who needed union protections.
The law has never put the dichotomy so starkly, of course, and students at state schools are just lucky that those institutions are governed by generally more union-friendly state laws, not by the fickle federal board. But the grad-student-union movement at private schools is decades old—by some counts, the fight at Yale is the longest-lasting struggle for union recognition in the country—and throughout its history its opponents, including me, once upon a time, have relied on the élitist logic that unions are for other people, not for our kind.
The standard argument against graduate-student unions, one adopted by the lone dissenter in last week’s federal ruling, is that graduate students are “primarily” students, and that any work they do, like leading discussion sections or grading papers, is educational in nature—that is, they are learning a skill that they will need on the job market. And, the argument goes, if on occasion they do actual labor, they still should not be able to join a union, because the adversarial nature of collective bargaining would threaten to undermine the primary relationship, that of student to professor, advisee to mentor.
It’s telling that professional academics, committed to ruthless empiricism and logic, are reduced to mystical, even spiritual platitudes when pressed to explain their opposition to grad-student unionism. They don’t have arguments so much as feelings. It’s just somehow wrong. Anthony Kronman, the former dean of Yale Law School, once said that, when he was a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, he and his classmates would have seen a union as something alien, or foreign. “It never occurred to us to view the University as a factory or students as factory workers,” he told the Yale Alumni Magazine_,_ in 2001. “I loved the free life of the mind, and the spirit of unionization—the spirit of the collective—seemed as foreign to me then as it does now.” In the same article, Alison Richard, the provost of Yale at the time, dismissed comparisons to state universities, where such unions have worked well for half a century, by saying that any “comparison between a state school like Wisconsin and a private university such as Yale is a truly false one—a real apples-to-oranges comparison.”
I, of course, modelled one of the most common arguments back in 1996, when I said that “no one is more privileged than the graduate students.” This is not so much an argument as a prejudice, one that you’ll hear every time professional athletes strike. The idea here is that unions are fine for true laborers—coal miners, hotel maids, and the like—but not for anyone with a modicum of agency in the workplace, or with a decent salary. Unions are for real grunts only. In the Columbia case last week, Philip A. Miscimarra, the Obama appointee who was the lone dissenter, quoted old language, from a 1973 N.L.R.B. case, which noted that the “industrial model cannot be imposed blindly on the academic world.”
The problem with this reasoning, at least as it relates to graduate students, is that we have had fifty years to find out if unions destroy graduate education. They don’t. The first graduate-student union was organized at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in 1969, and since that time nobody has found solid evidence that unions negatively affect the relationship between graduate students and their mentors. A 2013 paper found that students in these unions report that when their teaching loads and wages are set by contracts, they actually feel better-supported than their non-union counterparts. But that evidence has never counted for administrators at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard, who figure that, somehow, inexorably, quintessentially, their schools are different, purer, better.
In the end, of course, the question of graduate-student unionism does not turn on whether the unions are good or bad for students. Whatever else graduate students are, they are workers now. In 1975, fifty-seven per cent of American faculty were tenured or tenure-track, but by 2011 that number had fallen to thirty per cent. As jobs in the professoriate have disappeared, graduate students have become an indispensable source of labor, without whom undergraduates simply could not be taught. They have become workers, not for their own sake as apprentice-learners but because their schools need them as casual labor.
The National Labor Relations Board has conceded the obvious: that graduate students can have two roles at once. “In other words,” the ruling holds, “a graduate student may be both a student and an employee; a university may be both the student’s educator and employer.” For what it’s worth, the ruling does not reject the master-apprentice relationship that universities say is so beneficial—it just extends the metaphor. The Columbia decision relies on the definition of a worker drawn from “master-servant relationship,” as understood by common law. Such a “relationship exists when a servant performs services for another, under the other’s control or right of control, and in return for payment,” the decision asserts. Graduate students may be apprentices, but they are servants, too. And servants need unions.
