Organized Labor Pushes Blue States to Protect Private University Student Workers

Without a quorum at the NLRB, state legislation that codifies collective bargaining for private-sector employees may be key to preserving workers’ rights.

by James Baratta September 1, 2025

For the past 90 years, the ability of private-sector employees to form unions, collectively bargain, and engage in union-protected activities has fallen under the purview of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). For the past several months, however, the Board has lacked its three-member quorum, which has meant it can no longer make any rulings. By removing Biden-appointed Board member Gwynne Wilcox within a week of his return to the Oval Office, Donald Trump plunged the Board into this sub-quorum territory. With the Republican justices on the Supreme Court poised to quash the powers of independent commissions like the NLRB, or to enable Trump to fire any member at his whim, the future of workers’ rights looks tenuous at best.

Fearing an unprecedented gutting of the NLRB, and its ability to enforce workers’ legal rights to have a union and bargain collectively—something no other federal agency is empowered to do—legislators and organized labor in New York, Massachusetts, and California have been pushing to implement statutes that would protect the right of private-sector workers to organize and bargain collectively if the NLRB is unable to carry out its functions—as is currently the case—or is stripped of that jurisdiction altogether. These so-called “trigger laws” are designed to patch a gap the aforementioned states never found a need to fill when they began establishing labor boards in the 1960s. To date, the vast majority of state labor boards have exclusively regulated public-sector bargaining, since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) covers only private-sector workers. (In a number of Southern or Republican-controlled states, however, public employees have never won the right to unionize or collectively bargain.)

But for one group of private-sector employees, their ability to form unions and collectively bargain has fluctuated in recent decades, with the pendulum swinging toward workers’ rights under Democratic administrations and away during Republican administrations. That group is private university graduate student workers.

Despite Trump’s unsuccessful efforts to strip teaching and research assistants of their employee status during his first term, the NLRB’s 2016 Columbia decision affirming this status and the Biden administration’s efforts to support workers in hard-to-organize sectors have underpinned the upswell in student worker unionization at private colleges and universities. As my colleague Harold Meyerson observed at the time, the NLRB conducted elections at 17 private universities over the 16-month period prior to May 1, 2023, and close to 90 percent of student workers voted to unionize. This wave continued to gain amplitude in 2024, with the majority of new bargaining units emerging at private institutions. In California, student workers at the California Institute of Technology and University of Southern California organized under the United Auto Workers (UAW).
https://prospect.org/labor/2025-09-01-organized-labor-pushes-blue-states-to-protect-private-universities/