Student dining hall workers are among the undergraduate groups seeking to unionize on many campuses.
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post/Getty Images
The list of ways next week’s presidential election could affect higher education is long, with Trump and Harris administrations likely to differ significantly on issues such as student loans, accreditation, diversity and Title IX, to name just a few.
One less visible area that could also be reshaped is around labor policy, with a second administration for former president Donald Trump likely to take a very different approach regarding the National Labor Relations Board than the relative continuity that would probably follow if President Biden passes the torch to Vice President Kamala Harris.
The NLRB released data Monday that underscored one way that could manifest itself. The federal agency said that it has certified 54 bargaining units for more than 50,000 student employees since 2022, in the wake of its 2021 withdrawal of a rule proposed by the Trump administration that would have made it much harder for graduate students on private college campuses to form unions.
The Biden administration’s 2021 action both responded to, and fueled, growing student interest in unionizing—interest that experts attributed to the pandemic and to aggressive efforts by national workers’ unions to seek members.
Roughly half of the 54 unions certified that the NLRB said it had certified since 2022 were for graduate teaching and research assistants, the students most likely to have unionized historically.
Since April 2023, though, the number of unions certified for undergraduate students who work in housing and dining facilities (16) has actually outnumbered the units approved for graduate teaching and research assistants (13), though the number of students involved is much smaller. A handful of unions have been certified for postdoctoral scholars.
Those numbers could grow by thousands of students. The NLRB noted that elections are pending on petitions for unions at numerous other campuses: for 2,200 graduate student instructors at Vanderbilt University, for 1,300 undergraduate students at Berea College and for 57 student employee dining workers at Pomona College.
The most unusual union certified by the NLRB in the last few years has been the men’s basketball team at Dartmouth College. Dartmouth has refused to bargain with the union and has effectively, so far, blocked the NLRB’s efforts to force it to do so.
