Graduate students unite?

LAST OCTOBER, THE NATIONAL LABOR RELAtions Board (NLRB) rekindled the controversy over graduate student labor unions. An NLRB panel decided that "ample evidence exists to find that graduate students plainly and literally fall within the meaning of `employee... as used in the 1935 National Labor Relations

The October decision overturned several NLRB rulings from the 1970s that "the mutual interests of the services being rendered [by graduate students] are predominantly academic rather than economic in nature [and therefore] are completely foreign to the normal employment relationship and ... not readily adaptable to the collective bargaining process." Those rulings, unlike the recent one, showed an understanding of America's system of higher education a system that does not easily adhere to the labor-management model. But, absent legal challenges, the new decision ends the long and vehement debate over the nature of graduate students' "employment." It also opens the way for considerable difficulties for the academy and society.