On Sept 6, the Cornell Graduate Students United (CGSU) started an organizing drive to establish themselves as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) designated union representing research assistants, teaching assistants and fellows of Cornell.
Graduate students come to Cornell primarily to learn, research and teach. Earning a stipend is only a secondary goal. Nor has the probability of heavy union dues burdens been offset by the prospect of pay and benefit increases. So, union organizers have faced an uphill climb for decades to establish a graduate student union at Cornell. The votes in 2002 and 2017 failed.
In response to the new CGSU drive, last week, the undergraduate Student Assembly passed Resolution 21 which generally endorsed the CGSU effort, but raised a very important point about protecting free expression in the process:
“Whereas, Cornell University’s 2023-2024 theme is Freedom of Expression, and association with a union is a key form of free expression;”
and
“Be it further resolved, that undergraduate students strongly support graduate students’ decision to exercise their right to free expression by signing CGSU union cards.“
Of course, Resolution 21 was talking about the rights of individual graduate students to decide whether or not to join a union. In fact, the last two attempts to organize a union to represent Cornell graduate students failed to gain majority support.
Once a majority of graduate students decide to form a union that is then recognized by the NLRB, what will happen to the rights of future graduate students who decline union membership or of individual faculty to hire non-union research assistants? Unlike the building trades, where a union shop is expected to hire each carpenter from the union’s hiring hall, the process that a principal investigator uses to select a research assistant or a teaching assistant (TA) for a STEM class involves academic merit. The crop of TAs and Research Assistants turn over each year, and most people spend only 4 to 6 years at Cornell in those roles. Further, not all TAs and Research Assistants are PhD candidates; undergraduates and masters candidates have been hired as TAs as well.
So, going forward, can the CGSU force a graduate student to join its union, or limit a professor’s TA and Research Assistant selections to just CGSU members? Will undergraduate research and TA opportunities dry up?
Outside of academia, there are different answers for public employers who are subject to the First Amendment vs. employers who are not state actors.
The United States Supreme Court in Janus v. AFSCME, upheld the First Amendment rights of public employees regarding union activities. In essence, the Supreme Court recognized that each individual was entitled to free expression and could not be forced to sponsor speech that was contrary to his beliefs. Janus has since been applied in a large number of cases involving unions. However, because the First Amendment only covers “state action,” this growing legal doctrine only applies to unions representing public employees.
Since 1947, Congress has addressed the right of workers to be free from forced union membership. Congress gave each state the right to adopt “Right to Work Laws” on this subject. Slightly more than half the states have Right to Work Laws, which guarantee each individual the option to work at a unionized workplace without joining the union. However, New York is in the minority of states that do not protect that right. So, absent a First Amendment argument, once the NLRB recognizes a union, everyone within that bargaining unit could be forced to pay union dues, if Cornell agrees to it.
Cornell has a hybrid nature that is both public and private. Cornell would be too embarrassed to give its endowed college students less rights than those given to statutory college students. So, Cornell claims all of its colleges are “private.”
To date, courts have never decided whether students in the four statutory colleges have First Amendment rights. Some critics have argued that Cornell has gone out of its way to avoid having courts decide this issue. However, if the CGSU drive does prevail, a Janus type challenge can be expected.
Public employees in New York State are regulated by the Public Employee Relations Board (PERB), rather than the NLRB. The PERB has allowed the unionization of SUNY graduate students by the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1104/GSEU. The contract covering SUNY graduate students is posted and can be compared to what Cornell students currently receive. The contract guarantees that stipends increase 2 percent per year with a minimum of $10,779 annually. SUNY grad students get 5 paid sick days per year.
In the meantime, it is ironic that the Student Assembly decided to tie the concept of union membership to the right to free expression. In past union organizing campaigns, faculty contended that the mentor-mentee relationship between a professor and his PhD candidates would be disrupted if any disputes that arise are subject to a labor arbitration process. A union can’t force a professor to write a strong letter of recommendation or assist a PhD in job hunting.
Nor can a union force a professor to fund a graduate student under a professor’s research grants, if the student takes an unusually long time to graduate. Both students and faculty have important free expression and academic freedom rights. Then-President Hunter Rawlings said, “I am concerned [about] a collective bargaining agreement that is, by definition, designed to meet the interests of a collective, rather than tailored to each individual’s educational pursuits.” The CGSU has not come up with a convincing plan to mesh between the dispersed decision making of each individual Cornell research team and the centralized collective bargaining model.
Cornell should protect free expression and academic freedom on campus. As a first step, there should be unfettered and widespread discussion of all of the implications, both positive and negative, for unionizing graduate students.
