student workers

Labor 101 for Undergraduate Workers Seeking To Unionize

Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” plays in a classroom at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst) as students mill about with pink “Undergraduate Workers UNITE!” buttons pinned to their shirts. Nearly 40 students from 10 institutions across the Northeast gathered Nov. 15–17, 2019, at UMass Amherst, a highly unionized workplace, for the Northeast Undergraduate Worker Convention (NEUWC). …

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Graduate Workers Are Going to Fight Like Hell to Stop the Trump NLRB’s New Rule

At universities across the country, graduate student workers perform essential labor. We teach classes, grade exams and assignments, tutor and mentor undergraduates, maintain labs, and perform clerical duties. Some 66,000 graduate employees at over 30 universities in the United States are currently represented by unions and protected through collective bargaining agreements, because public-sector labor laws in many …

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Think It’s Tough for Labor Now? Just Wait Until Trump Takes Office in January

In 63 days, organized labor is going to find itself in a new political reality, which it seems totally unprepared for. Donald Trump will be president; the Republicans will control the House and Senate and one of Trump’s first tasks will be to nominate a new Supreme Court justice. Though Trump was tight-lipped about specific …

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It’s Game On for Grad Students After NLRB Rules They Can Unionize

December 5 fell on a Friday in 2014; in New York City, the air was crisp. At Columbia University, about 200 graduate student-workers pulled on hats and scarves to gather on the imposing steps of Low Library, which houses the university president’s office. While most stood in a block formation, holding signs declaring their department …

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Labor board says graduate students can unionize

According to the George W. Bush-era National Labor Relations Board, graduate students at private universities didn’t count as employees of those universities, no matter how much employment-type work they did. That means those students couldn’t unionize. Now, the NLRB has reversed that, saying graduate students can unionize: First, the board rejected argument that graduate students …

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Madeline Messa

Madeline Messa is a 3L at Syracuse University College of Law. She graduated from Penn State with a degree in journalism. With her legal research and writing for Workplace Fairness, she strives to equip people with the information they need to be their own best advocate.