An Uninformed Trickle Theory

Mike Petrilli over at Flypaper has himself all worked up about the recent Kennedy/Miller bill that would amend the the National Labor Relations Act to include graduate teaching and research assistants as employees.  He suggests that this is a new twist.  In this case a bad idea (unionization--gasp!) is moving from K-12 to higher education rather than the usual bad ideas trickling down from higher education into K-12.  While it would be fun to question that whole theory, perhaps we should just point out that when writing, it is good to have your facts straight--I think that is pretty widely accepted in both K-12 and higher ed.

So, for the record--higher education, including graduate employees, have been forming unions for the purpose of collective bargaining for nearly 40 years.  There was a notable acceleration of that effort in the '80s and '90s as more and more TAs and RAs were being employed to teach undergraduate courses.  As a result (and I don't mean to scare you Mike), there are now over 40,000 graduate employees represented by unions, which actually represents a significant portion of that workforce. 

What the Kennedy/Miller bill does is provide graduate employees in private institutions the protections of the NLRA.  There is a significantly smaller number of graduate employees in the private sector, but were it not for a politically motivated decision by the Bush-appointed national Labor Relations Board, a good percentage of them would also be legally represented by unions as well. 

Oh, and by the way, that level of unionization is true for faculty and staff in higher education as well.  So much for Karma.

Update:  Mike responds here.