Last time I checked, student workers generally do not manufacture cars.
“It is much more difficult to get rid of a union than it is to certify one. Entire generations of student workers may become stuck paying dues to a union they do not need or want.”
That did not stop the United Auto Workers (UAW) from winning the right to unionize student assistants at Columbia University in a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) case decided on Tuesday. The ruling, known as Columbia, clears the way for students at private colleges who perform any sort of paid service for their institution—such as course instruction, grading, research assistance, or other roles—to form a union. Though media outlets have portrayed the ruling as applying to graduate student employees only, the ruling is broader and also allows undergraduate student assistants to unionize.
The ruling, which overturns decades of NLRB precedent, applies only to private colleges. Unionization of students at public universities is governed under state law, rather than by the federal NLRB. According to researchers at the City University of New York, around 64,000 graduate student assistants were members of collective-bargaining arrangements in 2006 (latest data available). This represented around a quarter of the public university graduate assistant workforce at the time.
The Columbia majority cited a 2013 study by researchers at Rutgers University on graduate student unions at public universities to make the case that unions were beneficial. The study found that unionized graduate student employees have higher pay and better relationships with professors and the university. But the study relied on a small, nonrandom sample of schools, and used a survey to assess the effects of unions rather than objective measures of outcomes. Only 22% of those surveyed actually responded in full—and for obvious reasons, the subset of individuals who perceive a greater benefit from unionization are more likely to respond to a survey about the benefits of unionization.
On the contrary, there are several reasons to imagine that student workers will see little benefit from unionization. First, students would have to pay dues. A cut of what little money student workers have would go to support a union hierarchy with dubious returns.
Second, students graduate. Within a few years after the initial vote to form a union, none of the students represented by the union will have even voted for it. As my Manhattan Institute colleague Diana Furchtgott-Roth explained last week...
Read the entire piece here on Forbes
______________________
Preston Cooper is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute's Economics21. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Forbes