On Thursday night, Interim President Michael Kotlikoff and newly appointed Provost Kavita Bala emailed the campus community with a University statement accusing the Cornell Graduate Student Union-United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, or CGSU-UE, of bargaining for a provision that would harm graduate students.
President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala’s Statement was wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. As School of Industrial and Labor Relations faculty experts in labor law and labor relations, we feel it is our duty to explain why.
President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala wrongly stated that under the CGSU-UE’s union shop proposal, “students who decline to join the union could be dismissed from their appointments and prohibited from holding future appointments. These students would no longer have a viable path to a degree at Cornell. Under the proposed union shop agreement, there is no option for students to remain graduate assistants if they object to joining the union.”
Here’s why President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala’s statements were wrong on the facts and the law: The CGSU-UE has proposed a lawful “union shop” provision, which is a “union security” clause that provides that all employees covered by a collective bargaining agreement will become union members, but that only payment of union dues is a condition of employment. In other words, under the CGSU-UE proposed union shop provision, no graduate employee can be dismissed for refusing to become a union member. Under the terms of the proposed union shop clause, only payment of dues (often referred to as an “agency fee”), is a condition of employment as a teaching or research assistant. This is standard and lawful language, and not an extraordinary request.
The CGSU-UE’s proposed union shop clause is lawful under the National Labor Relations Act, which protects private sector employees’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain. Under the NLRA, all employees in the bargaining unit of Cornell Teaching and Research Assistants will be protected by the collective bargaining agreement negotiated by the CGSU-UE. All teaching assistants and research assistants, whether or not they are union members, will benefit equally from the collective bargaining agreement’s provisions for wages, insurance, safety provisions, anti-discrimination protections, union representation in grievance processes and other workplace improvements. Therefore, it is only fair that all employees in the bargaining unit should also pay their share of the costs of collective bargaining, contract enforcement and grievance handling. This strengthens workers’ power, which is the express duty of the union. And so, under a union shop clause, all bargaining unit employees pay their fair share through union dues.
Other universities, as well as Cornell’s agreement with the United Automobile Workers Local 2300, have agreed to similar union shop clauses in their collective bargaining agreements with graduate employee unions. This includes some of Cornell’s peer universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Johns Hopkins University, in their respective collective bargaining agreements with the GSU-UE and TRU-UE. Union security clauses are standard in collective bargaining agreements between universities and graduate student unions, including University of Chicago’s contract with the GSU-UE, Northwestern University’s contract with the NUGW-UE and Yale University’s contract with Local 33 Unite Here.
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Additionally, Cornell President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala wrongly stated, “Accepting a union shop provision would mean requiring every one of our graduate student workers to affiliate with, and financially support, [the UE’s political] advocacy.”
As for why President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala’s statements were again wrong about the facts and the law, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1988 decision in Communication Workers of America v. Beck, under a union shop clause, bargaining unit employees who are not union members may object to paying the full amount of union dues. Instead, they will be required to pay only the portion of the union dues used directly for union representation, such as collective bargaining, contract administration and grievance adjustment. That portion of the union dues — by law — excludes union dues pertaining to political activities.
How could President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala have been so wrong on both the facts and the law? Surely, the Cornell Administration’s attorneys know better than this, particularly on issues that would be part of a “Labor Law 101” course. Consultation with labor law experts on campus could have illuminated this. The statements were so inaccurate and misleading that they may constitute coercion and bad faith bargaining, which are unfair labor practices under the National Labor Relations Act.
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Whatever their motivations, President Kotlikoff and Provost Bala’s University statement was unfair and inaccurate. They should correct the record, retract their email and University Statement and apologize to the CGSU-UE, the graduate students and graduate employees as well as the entire campus community.
Signed,
Rosemary Batt, Alice H. Cook Professor of Women and Work
Sarah Besky, Professor of the Anthropology of Work, ILR
Dina Bishara, Associate Professor of International and Comparative Labor, ILR
Justin Bloesch, Assistant Professor of Economics, ILR
Kate Bronfenbrenner, Senior Lecturer, ILR
Patricia Campos-Medina, Senior Extension Faculty, ILR
Ileen DeVault, Professor of Labor History, ILR
Eli Friedman, Professor of Global Labor and Work, ILR
Shannon Gleeson, Edmund Ezra Day Professor, ILR
Michael Evan Gold, associate professor, ILR
Jeff Grabelsky, Senior Extension Associate, Worker Institute, ILR
Ian Greer, Research Professor and Director of the ILR Ithaca Co-Lab.
Sarosh Kuruvilla, Professor, ILR
Risa Lieberwitz, Professor of Labor and Employment Law, ILR
Tejasvi Nagaraja, Assistant Professor, ILR
Paul Ortiz, Professor of Labor History, ILR
Gali Racabi, Assistant Professor, Cornell ILR
Emma Teitelman, Assistant Professor of Labor History, ILR
Devin Wiggs, Assistant Professor of Labor Relations, ILR
Andrew Wolf, Assistant Professor, Dept of Global Labor and Work, ILR
Duanyi Yang, Assistant Professor of Global Labor and Work, ILR
Yiran Zhang, Assistant Professor of Labor and Employment Law, ILR
Rosemary Batt is a Professor Alice H. Cook Professor of Women and Work in the School of Industrial Labor Relations. She can be reached at [email protected]
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