Graduate students will win union rights…for now

This past June the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) sought written opinions on whether the board should reconsider the Brown University case which prohibited unionization at private universities. The request was only surprising in that it came so late in the President Obama’s administration, caused by the Senate Republicans stubborn refusal to nominate NLRB members. […]

Potential graduate-student unionization re-re-reversal?

New York University graduate students seems to have prevailed in letting a regional director of National Labor Relations Board hear arguments on a long-standing union drive at the university. NYU graduate students have the magic touch, since they were the first to overturn a 40-year 28-year precedent prohibiting graduate-student unions at private universities in 2000–only […]

Oh the Humanities

The New York Times has an article on the hardships of a humanities Ph.D. Among the highlights: it takes an average of 9 years to finish a humanities Ph.D. (if you do); high amount of debt (over $25,000); and the old age of graduates (35 years-old) which means less time available to recover all of […]

Non-economic Benefits to Graduate-student Unionization

I’ve done quantitative research on graduate-student unionization before. In my research I found unionization has a modest effect on increasing wages and little to no impact on reducing wage inequality for graduate assistants. However, I wasn’t able to investigate non-pecuniary effects of unionization. For instance, a union may want to specify manger-employ protocol. University of […]