Labor News & Commentary April 2 administrators appear to be pushing back in negotiations with academic unions

https://onlabor.org/april-2-2025/

By Henry Green

In today’s News and Commentary, a look at on-campus labor stories here in Massachusetts, where university administrators appear to be pushing back in negotiations with academic unions.

At Clark University, the Boston Globe reports that undergraduate student workers (which include students who earn hourly wages through work-study programs) ended a ten day strike without winning an agreement for card check recognition. Teamsters Local 170, which has represented graduate students at Clark since 2022, filed a petition with the NLRB to represent the undergraduates in February, but later withdrew the petition and was seeking a card check agreement. A blog post from Proskauer chronicles a wave of undergraduate organizing since 2016, with unions representing resident advisors, tour guides, and students who work in dining halls, libraries, and cafes, among other roles.

Notably, the Globe reports that “attorneys for Clark also argued in a legal filing to the National Labor Relations Board that a federal ban on undergraduate unions in place until 2016 had been wrongly overturned,” referring to the NLRB’s decision in Columbia University. Columbia approved a bargaining unit that included both graduate and undergraduate teaching assistants. A Clark spokesperson later said the university would not challenge Columbia University, though the issue may have been mooted by the Teamsters withdrawing their NLRB petition.

FULL story at link above.