Word: tas
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...students draw salaries does not necessarily make them employees with a right to unionize. Graduate students are students, first and foremost; their job is to learn how to teach and do research at a university, and their work as teaching assistants is essential to these ends. In this respect, TAs are more like apprentices than laborers...
...addition, unionization is hardly in the best interests of Yale undergraduates. We have already seen how the Yale TAs have sabotaged the prospects of some Yale undergraduates by withholding grades; who knows what could happen in the next labor dispute (under the blessing of the federal government...
Although we said a year ago on this page that Yale University teaching assistants (TAs) should not be allowed to unionize, recent events, including the National Labor Relations Board's endorsement of their right to unionize, have changed our mind. The TAs are certainly students; otherwise, they would not be at Yale in the first place. However, they are also employees, and they should be given the right to negotiate their salaries and benefits like any other group of employees, so as to prevent the university from taking unfair advantage of them...
Take a look at what has happened to the graduate students over the past year--practices that the NLRB classified as a violation of federal labor law because they intimidated and threatened them. When 250 graduate student TAs instituted a "grade strike," in which grades for fall semester courses were withheld in order to pressure the university into recognizing a union for TAs, the university threatened a ban on future teaching, academic disciplinary hearings, negative letters of recommendation and possible expulsion. To respond, Yale's Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) filed a suit with the NLRB earlier this year...
...understand the argument that the Yale TAs are students and not employees; after all, they accept teaching positions as part of their financial aid packages. We realize that there is a danger inherent in allowing graduate students at Yale, who already are in a privileged position and likely on the road to becoming university professors, to make demands on the university. However, the merits of unionization outweigh the drawbacks...