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Graduate students can now form unions at universities

Harvard graduate student have been trying to get the school to recognize a graduate student union.John Tlumacki/Globe Staff/File 2016

The National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that graduate students who conduct research and help teach classes at private universities are considered employees and have a right to union representation.

The board’s 3-to-1 decision opens the door for thousands of graduate students and research assistants at private universities — including many in the Boston area — to band together to negotiate issues like pay, benefits, workload, and class size.

“It’s great news,” said Chamith Fonseka, a PhD student in the biomedical and biological sciences program at Harvard. “For the [NLRB] to recognize what we do is very gratifying.”

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The decision came in response to a petition from graduate students at Columbia University and reversed a decision from 2004 involving Brown University that found private universities are not required to recognize graduate student unions.

In the new decision, board members said they were reversing the Brown decision not only because it incorrectly interpreted the National Labor Relations Act, “but also because of the nature and consequences of that error.”

Ahead of the decision, graduate students have been running union drives and preparing for union elections at top institutions including Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, and the University of Chicago. The efforts ramped up after New York University became the first private university to voluntarily recognize its graduate student union in 2013.

Harvard, Stanford, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were among the universities that opposed the petition before the board, warning that giving graduate students collective bargaining rights could destroy the mentor-student relationship.

In a statement Tuesday, Harvard said: “We continue to believe that the relationship between students and the University is primarily about education, and that unionization will disrupt academic programs and freedoms, mentoring, and research at Harvard.”

The university added: “If a petition for election is filed at some point by a union seeking to represent Harvard students, we would urge our students to get the facts, learn about the issues, understand the impact of unionization, and cast an informed vote. A labor union representing Harvard students will impact not only current students, but also faculty, staff, and future students.

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Organizers of a Harvard unionization effort that began in 2015 told the Harvard Crimson that more than 60 percent of graduate student employees had indicated their support — more than enough to call for an election.

Not all graduate students would be eligible to join unions — only those considered employees of their schools. But around Greater Boston, several thousand students are expected to be permitted to unionize.

Harvard has more than 14,000 graduate and professional students, and MIT has about 7,000, according to each school’s website, though it was not immediately clear how many were employees.

Fonseka, who studies autoimmune disorders at Harvard, said he was interested to see what would follow the landmark ruling.

The varied work graduate students do at colleges and universities all over Boston should not be treated differently than other forms of employment, he said.

“I even have a cubicle,” he joked.

Universities have said that doctoral students were not employees because the research they conducted led them to their PhDs. Doctoral students often don’t pay tuition and in part do research and assist professors as part of the deal to get a degree tuition free.

The universities also argued that they could face disruptive grievances and years-long disputes over issues including graduate students having to grade essays, which students’ tuition gets waived, and how many credits a student need to become a teaching assistant.

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The United Automobile Workers (which, despite its name, represents workers mostly from outside the auto industry nowadays) helped lead the union drive at institutions like Harvard. The union represents student unions at public institutions and NYU.

UAW officials said they hoped that universities would not cause further delay and that union elections could take place this fall.

Students involved said that unionizing would allow them to negotiate stable livable stipends instead of having to rely in part on grants.

Graduate students also said that they could be both students and employees. When they were doing their own research, they were students. But when they were teaching classes, they were employees.

Aaron Nisenson, senior counsel at the American Association of University Professors, said it will be interesting to see which issues any new unions prioritize. Some graduate students, he said, have said it is difficult to get the funding they need to teach a class, while others might want to establish rules regarding taking outside employment.

“What are the issues that they raise when they have the opportunity to do so collectively?” said Nisenson, whose organization supported the board decision.

Nisenson noted that, just as the Columbia decision reversed the Brown decision, a future decision from the board could change the landscape once again. That would of course depend on the views of the board members, who are appointed by the president.

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Avery Davis, who is getting her PhD in human genetics at Harvard, said the decision amounted to “an affirmation of what we’ve known. . . . In addition to being grad students, we also do really valuable work for the university.”

She said that students who support forming a union will be reaching out to students just starting graduate school as the fall term starts and working on planning an election.

As for the university administration, she said, “We really hope that they all agree to be neutral in this and let graduate workers make their own decision.”

Olga Brudastova, a graduate research assistant in civil engineering at Columbia, said she looks forward to ‘‘a speedy, fair election’’ for union representation.

‘‘We instruct classes, grade papers for thousands of students, and push the boundaries of research and the arts, but despite these contributions and more, Columbia administrators have stood in the way of our rights,’’ Brudastova said.

Columbia University, meanwhile, said it “disagrees with this outcome because we believe the academic relationship students have with faculty members and departments as part of their studies is not the same as between employer and employee.”

Columbia announced last month that it would raise the standard nine-month graduate stipend of $26,286 by 17 percent over the next four years. The announcement came after the university acted last May to increase child-care subsidies and paid parental leave, a move that backers of unionization saw as an attempt to placate graduate students and dissuade them from voting for UAW representation.

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Nestor Ramos of the Globe staff contributed to this report, which includes material from the Associated Press. Andrew Joseph of Stat can be reached at andrew.joseph@statnews.com. Follow him on Twitter @DrewQJoseph.