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Push for TA Unions Continues Despite Obstacles
Graduate teaching assistants at Columbia University filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) in March, requesting union representation. The petition follows a collective bargaining success at New York University, which earlier this year became the first private university in America that will bargain formally with graduate-student employees. Columbia’s teaching assistants teach more than half the courses in the university’s core curriculum and typically receive $6,500 a semester plus minimal health benefits, according to Columbia’s Graduate Student Employees United (GSEU), which is affiliated with the United Auto Workers. A majority of the 1,100 teaching and research assistants on Columbia’s main campus signed the petition.
The university is challenging it on the grounds that the work of teaching and research assistants is educational and does not qualify them as employees. This argument was rejected by the NLRB in the NYU case. Columbia is also contesting the scope of the proposed bargaining unit and attempting to expand it to include Columbia’s health-sciences campus, where GSEU is not active. NLRB hearings on the issue are scheduled to end in June.
The graduate-student organizing movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign suffered a setback in March when the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board (IELRB) issued guidelines under state law restricting union eligibility to only a few graduate assistants, excluding all those whose duties include teaching or research, or who work at other kinds of jobs in their own disciplines. The Graduate Employees’ Organization at Illinois (GEO) estimates that about 3,500 graduate assistants belong in the unit. Hearings on the guidelines were held in May and June, and a final order is expected some time in 2002, says Michael Stewart of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, with which the GEO is affiliated.
Though a serious obstacle for graduate-assistant organizing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the guidelines are of limited consequence outside of Illinois. The IELRB’s jurisdiction extends only to public educational employers and employees in Illinois.
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