Grinnell College must alter its course

Nathan Rickard and his Julia Gage, guest columnists


Two weeks ago, students at Grinnell College voted in favor of expanding their existing dining services union to encompass all undergraduate workers by an 84 percent to 16 percent margin. Despite the overwhelming support for a labor union, on Friday, the students announced they were abandoning their efforts to unionize in the face of the decision by the Trustees of Grinnell College to seek a reversal from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In one legal filing, the Trustees argued that changes in the composition of the NLRB — in particular, the appointment of Members Marvin Kaplan and William Emmanuel — created an opportunity for the federal agency to revisit existing law holding that students qualified as “employees” entitled to protections under the National Labor Relations Act.

The students were placed in an impossible situation. If they defended their newly formed union against the Trustees’ legal appeal, the existence of unions composed of undergraduate and/or graduate students around the country was imperiled. If they didn’t defend the union, the Trustees won and all of the students’ organizing efforts would have been for naught.

In choosing to engage in an egregious attack on established labor rights, Grinnell College met its students, who were representing themselves pro se, with high-priced New York City-based attorneys that had previously attempted to reverse the NLRB’s position in cases involving Duke University, the University of Chicago, Washington University, and Yale University. Just like in Grinnell, hardball brinkmanship tactics by these attorneys led students at those schools to abandon efforts to organize.

As alumni of a great Iowa institution, we are deeply troubled by Grinnell College’s eagerness to be the face (and name) of an ideological campaign against labor. The prospect of an NLRB decision named “Grinnell” standing for the loss of student rights is fundamentally inconsistent with the values of the school, its history, its alumni, and its current students. Beyond us, alumni from across the country and across class years have stridently condemned the actions taken in our college’s name.

Read more: https://www.thegazette.com/subject/opinion/guest-columnist/grinnell-college-must-alter-its-course-20181220