AFT President Randi Weingarten on NLRB Ruling in Columbia

WASHINGTON—AFT President Randi Weingarten statement on the National Labor Relations Board’s decision in Columbia University overturning its 2004 Brown University decision and recognizing private sector graduate students as workers under federal labor law:

“This is a great day for workers. Graduate employees at private institutions, just like their peers in public universities across the country, deserve the right to organize to have a real say over their wages and conditions. The National Labor Relations Board took a hard look at the flawed reasoning in Brown and concluded, rightly, that grads should be afforded exactly the same workplace rights as their colleagues.

“The truth is graduate workers are the glue that holds higher education institutions together—without their labor, classes wouldn’t get taught, exams wouldn’t get graded and office hours wouldn’t be held. The evidence considered by the board clearly showed that far from being detrimental, collective representation enhances the professor-graduate employee relationship so important to academic success. 

“At Columbia, Cornell, Chicago, Brown and hundreds of other campuses, graduate employees are standing up to have a say over their work lives; this board decision recognizes and validates their fight to win a meaningful seat at the bargaining table and for the fruits of those negotiations to be protected by law.”