Upending recent precedent, the National Labor Relations Board, yesterday, proposed a rule that, if adopted, will exempt from the NLRB’s jurisdiction undergraduate and graduate students who perform services in connection with their college and graduate school studies.
The proposed langauge reads:
Students who perform any services, including, but not limited to, teaching or research assistance, at a private college or university in connection with their undergraduate or graduate studies are not employees within the meaning of Section 2(3) of the Act.
The proposed rule embodies the Board’s current position, subject to public comment, that the relationship between a post-secondary school and its students is predominantly educational, not economic.
The Board took a circuitous route to reach that conclusion.
Nearly 50 years ago, in Adelphi University, 195 NLRB 639 (1972), the Board held that graduate student assistants are primarily students and should be excluded from a bargaining unit of regular faculty. The graduate students assistants were working toward their advanced academic degrees. And, the Board concluded that “their employment depends entirely on their status as such.” The Board also emphasized that graduate student assistants “are guided, instructed, assisted, and corrected in the performance of their assistantship duties by the regular faculty members to whom they are assigned.”
Two years later, the Board decided Leland Stanford Junior University, 214 NLRB 621 (1974), holding that graduate student research assistants are not statutory “employees.” In support, the Board pointed observed that (1) the research assistants were Ph.D. candidates in the school’s physics department; (2) they had to perform research to obtain a degree; (3) the school gave them academic credit for their research work; and (4) while they received a stipend from Stanford, the amount was not dependent on the nature or intrinsic value of the services performed or the skill or function of the recipient, but instead was determined by the goal of providing the graduate students with financial support. The Board distinguished the graduate student research assistants from employee “research associates” who were “not simultaneously students,” having already completed their graduate degrees.
The Board reversed course, about 25 years later, in New York University, 332 NLRB 205 (2000). Citing the breadth of the statutory language, the lack of any statutory exclusion for graduate student assistants, and the “uncontradicted and salient facts” establishing that the assistants in that case performed services under the control and direction of the university for which they were compensated, the Board concluded that “ample evidence exists to find that graduate assistants plainly and literally fall within the meaning of `employee' as defined in Section 2(3)” and by the common law.
