ANNALS OF LABOR Brown outlasts grad students in organizing battle BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

If the administration of Brown University wanted a union-organizing effort by graduate students to go away, it need not have pursued a lengthy and expensive appeal to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). As it turns out, time is on the university’s side.

Take Keith Hall, for example. He was a graduate student in computer science and a volunteer for the graduate student unionization effort until he completed his Ph.D. and moved on to a post-doctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins. "One of the reasons we needed the support of an organization like the UAW [United Auto Workers]," he explains in an e-mail, "is that graduate students are relatively short-term positions. It is very difficult to maintain a cohesive group which consists of graduate students only."

Sheyda Jahanbani is a graduate student in history and a member of the Brown Graduate Employees Organization (BGEO), the group that has worked with the UAW in a bid to unionize Brown’s graduate students (See "Illiberal education," News, December 13, 2001). She does not think it a coincidence that the Republican-dominated NLRB waited more than two years to hand down its ruling. "Graduate students move on," she says. "They sort of counted on that."

The NLRB ruled this summer that graduate students are primarily students, not employees, and therefore can not unionize. In the wake of the decision, "the UAW folks have looked over options with a fine-tooth comb," Jahanbani explains. It would not be worth the effort to bring a different, albeit similar case because the board’s makeup is the same. The BGEO can not appeal the case because there is no higher court of appeal for an NLRB decision of this kind

Nevertheless, "we’re not going to be deterred by this really anti-democratic decision," asserts Phil Wheeler, director of the Farmington, Connecticut-based UAW region that includes Rhode Island. "All this . . . says [is] that we don’t have protection . . . to organize." Without the blessing of the NLRB, the Brown Graduate Employees Organization can no longer force the administration to the table, but, Wheeler says, "that doesn’t mean that the we can’t continue to organize."

The BGEO’s plan, for now, is to do just that — stay organized — to mobilize as individual issues arise. What are some of the points of contention? "Class sizes," for one, says Jahanbani. Some teaching assistants have 100 students each semester, and without collective bargaining, she asserts, the university has "no real incentive to cap classes." Most of the BGEO’s other grievances are similar to those of some other disgruntled groups (Providence firefighters and West Greenwich teachers are recent local, and vocal, examples). Graduate students, for example, get no dental and no vision coverage, their health-care co-pays are increasing, and their stipends are not adequate for their cost of living, according to Jahanbani.

Brown spokesman Mark Nickel, however, says there is a difference between graduate students and firefighters. "There’s a student government for graduate students," Nickel says. "It’s a tradition at Brown that graduate students are represented on committees. It’s not as if there is no mechanism for graduate student voices to be heard."

From the BGEO’s perspective, those voices are not being adequately heard. The UAW’s Wheeler says one remaining option is a "strike for recognition." Without protection from the National Labor Relations Act, however, the university could theoretically fire the striking students and the students would have no legal recourse.

Asked whether Brown might actually take this tack in the event of a strike, Nickel returns to the crux of the conflict: "Using the word ‘fire’ is kind of strange because the university does not believe that graduate students are employees," he says, "and it’s kind of hard to fire someone who is not an employee."