Labor Notes September 14, 2017 / John Trumpbour and Chris Tilly
Harvard is asking the NLRB to change how union elections are run, as part of its ongoing fight against graduate student unionization. Photo: Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW
The richest university in the world, with an endowment of $36 billion, is asking the National Labor Relations Board to change how union elections are run. Harvard University sees itself in the vanguard of resistance to the Trump administration. So why is the university now courting the support of Trump's appointees by challenging an obscure—but far-reaching—labor relations rule? In order to prevent a fair vote by its graduate student workforce on whether to unionize.
Last fall Harvard graduate research and teaching assistants voted in an election to decide whether to pursue collective bargaining via a union local affiliated with the United Auto Workers, which represents 65,000 academic workers on campuses including New York University, the vast University of California system, and the University of Connecticut.
The vote was close, with 1,456 “no” votes against 1,272 “yes,” with an additional 314 votes uncounted pending NLRB hearings. (Of the original 314 uncounted votes, 195 have been deemed eligible, 119 deemed ineligible.)
But the Harvard Graduate Students Union-UAW argued that the election was tarnished because the Harvard administration had failed to supply a complete and accurate list of workers eligible to vote, as it is bound to do by law...