Collective Bargaining Rights of Academic Student Employees in The US
Academic student employees who may be either graduate or undergraduate students at public colleges and universities in the United States are covered by state collective bargaining laws, where these laws exist. The various state laws differ on which subgroups of academic student employees may bargain collectively, and a few state laws explicitly exclude them from bargaining. Some states have extended collective bargaining rights to graduate employees in response to unionization campaigns. They are excluded from Federal bargaining rights under the Taft-Harley Act's exclusion of state and local government employees.
Graduate student employees at private colleges and universities in the US are covered by the National Labor Relations Act. The rulings of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) have shifted in recent years. After years of rejecting graduate employee unionization, the NLRB ruled in 2000 that graduate employees at private universities were covered under the national labor law. In 2004, with newly-appointed members, the Board reversed this decision, revoking the collective bargaining rights of graduate employees.
At the heart of the debate over graduate student employee unionization in the United States is the question of whether academic student employees are employees or students. The employer position, and that of the current NLRB, is that the work graduate employees do is so intertwined with their professional education that collective bargaining will harm the educational process. Supporters of unionization argue that graduate employees' work is primarily an economic relationship. They point especially to universities' use of Teaching Assistants as part of a wider trend away from full-time, tenured faculty.
For tax purposes, the Internal Revenue Service considers the compensation of graduate student employees to be wages. When graduate students receive payment for teaching, it is not taxed on a 1042-S form (for scholarships), but on a W-2 (which is the form for employment income). The income from teaching is taxed differently from scholarships, and treated like employment income.
Read more about this topic: Graduate Student Unionization
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