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-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

Common Dreams reports:

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said [August 23] that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private colleges are employees--a ruling with "big implications" for both higher education and organized labor in the United States.

Inside Higher Ed explains:

The NLRB said that a previous ruling by the board--that these workers were not entitled to collective bargaining because they are students--was flawed. The NLRB ruling, 3 to 1, came in a case involving a bid by the United Auto Workers to organize graduate students at Columbia University. The decision reverses a 2004 decision--which has been the governing one until today--about a similar union drive at Brown University.

[...] Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and "the entire Ivy League" had jointly submitted a brief, the Washington Post reports, "arguing that involving students in the bargaining process would disrupt operations, if they want to negotiate the length of a class, amount or grading or what's included in curriculum. Bringing more people to the table, they said, could lead to lengthy and expensive bargaining to the detriment of all students".

But the NLRB, in its ruling (pdf), sided with the students, in a decision that "could potentially deliver tens of thousands of members to the nation's struggling labor movement", according to The Wall Street Journal.

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