Graduate student employee unionization

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Graduate student employee unionization, or academic student employee unionization, refers to labor unions that represent students who are employed by their college or university to teach classes, conduct research and perform clerical duties. As of 2014, there were at least 33 US graduate employee unions, 18 unrecognized unions in the United States, and 23 graduate employee unions in Canada.^[1] By 2019, it is estimated that there were 83,050 unionized student employees in certified bargaining units in the United States.^[2] As of 2023, there were at least 156 US graduate student employee unions and 23 graduate student employee unions in Canada.^[3]

Prior to the 2000s, almost all US graduate employee unions were located in public universities, most of which formed during the 1990s. However, that is no longer true today with many private universities now being organized. In 2014, New York University's Graduate Student Organizing Committee, affiliated with the United Automobile Workers (UAW), became the first graduate employee union recognized by a private university in the US.^[4] In September 2018, Brandeis University became the second private university to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement for graduate student employees,^[5] followed by Tufts University in October 2018^[6] and Harvard in July 2020.^[7] American University and New School were in the process of negotiating an agreement as of September 2018.^[5] Many of these unions refer to their workers as Academic Student Employees (ASEs) to reflect the fact that their membership may also include undergraduate students working in represented job classifications. In 2019, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposed a new rule that said graduate students are not employees, which could affect unionization efforts at private universities, although the final rule has yet to be published.^[8]

Labor laws in the United States and Canada permit collective bargaining for only limited classes of student-employees. In the US, public and private institutions have different authorities governing collective bargaining rights. In public universities, state labor laws determine collective bargaining and employee recognition. In private universities, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has power to determine whether graduate students are considered employees, which would give them collective bargaining rights. The NLRB ruled that graduate students at private universities are employees in a 3–1 decision on August 23, 2016,^[9] setting the stage for widespread unionization efforts at universities such as Columbia, Johns Hopkins University, University of Chicago, Duke, Yale, Cornell, and Harvard.

In the U.S., many university administrators and university associations like the Association of American Universities have vigorously opposed the unionization of graduate student employees on their campuses through legal challenges on the grounds that unionization threatens academic freedom of institutions and harms the relationship between faculty and students, although recent research suggests that unionization neither negatively affects academic freedom nor harms faculty-student relationships.^[10] Many faculty associations like the American Association of University Professors support the right of graduate students to form unions.

In Finland and Sweden, graduate students are often regular employees and are represented by their respective professional unions, such as member unions of Akava in Finland.^[11]