Washington, D.C. (July 15, 2004) – By a 3-2 vote, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) this week struck down an activist Clinton-era ruling which had allowed union officials to corral university graduate teaching assistants (TAs) into unwanted union affiliation, and ultimately to force them to pay union dues to maintain their status.

In the case involving the United Auto Workers (UAW) union’s attempt to forcibly unionize TAs at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, the NLRB voted to return to its long-standing position of more than 25 years that TAs have an academic, rather than economic, relationship with universities, and that TAs are not “employees” under federal labor law who can be subjected to union monopoly bargaining.

Agreeing with the position taken by National Right to Work Foundation attorneys in an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief filed in early 2002, the NLRB found that, because TAs are admitted into, rather than hired by universities, they are students in, rather than employees of, the institution.

“While some students may have Marxist dreams that they are ‘workers,’ rather than students, who will be in the vanguard of an economic revolution when the workers of the world unite, the fact remains that they are students and not employees, and have little commonality of interest with most employees,” the Foundation pointed out in its brief.

In their brief, Foundation attorneys cited that grades are the central form of “compensation” for TAs and questioned whether grades would ultimately become a mandatory subject of monopoly bargaining if TAs were treated as “employees” for purposes of unionization. Foundation attorneys also argued that allowing union officials monopoly bargaining power over all TAs would violate the First Amendment freedom of association rights of dissenting TAs, thereby undermining academic freedom.

UAW union officials sought monopoly bargaining privileges over roughly 450 TAs at Brown University. While UAW officials relied on a NLRB decision in 2000 involving New York University which, for the first time, classified TAs as employees, Brown University contended that “[c]ommon sense dictates that students who teach and perform research as a part of their academic curriculum cannot properly be considered employees without entangling the…[National Labor Relations]Act into the intricacies of graduate education.”

“This was a shameless attempted power grab by UAW officials to corral graduate students into unwanted union affiliation and force them to pay dues for unwanted union ‘representation,’” stated Stefan Gleason, Vice President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.