[LINK] "Graduate students [at Columbia University] fight for union recognition"

[rfmcdonald]

Ned Resnikoff of Al Jazeera America notes that presusre is growing at Columbia University to unionize graduate students.

Hmm.

Graduate students at Columbia University are hoping to form a labor union, potentially upsetting nearly a decade of legal precedent. On Friday, some 200 Columbia students delivered a letter to the office of university President Lee Bollinger, asking that he agree to “a fair and efficient process to recognize our union without delay.”

“Like other workers, we deserve living wages, adequate benefits, clear workload expectations and consistent and transparent employment policies,” write the graduate students who signed the letter.

If the students’ unionization bid is successful, Columbia will become one of just two private U.S. universities to bargain with a graduate student union. The other university would be Columbia’s downtown neighbor, NYU, which granted union recognition to its student workers roughly one year ago.

The Columbia graduate students are hoping the school’s administration will follow NYU’s lead and agree not to challenge their bid for union recognition. Should Columbia fight the students’ efforts to organize, they will have to take their case to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). And if the labor board allowed the Columbia students to hold a unionization election, it would overturn a decade-old legal precedent against recognizing graduate students as workers and would have a ripple effect throughout higher education.

The labor victory at NYU emboldened some Columbia University graduate students to seek out a union of their own. They began seriously discussing the possibility of unionization in late 2014 with Uniting Academic Workers (UAW) Local 2110, the union that represents NYU graduate students and some full-time staff at Columbia University.