National Labor Relations Board Issues Three Major Changes in Precedent in a Week

The National Labor Relations Board, now with four members, has begun the long-expected changes to major areas of its interpretation and enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act. 

The Board Directs a Hearing in a Representation Case Concerning University Graduate Students

In 2000, the Board held, for the first time, that graduate teaching and research assistants were employees under the National Labor Relations Act and could be organized and represented in collective bargaining by a labor union. New York University, 332 NLRB 1205 (2000) (NYU I). Four years later, NYU I was overruled by the Board in Brown University, 342 NLRB 483 (2004). In Brown, the Board concluded that graduate assistants were not employees, because their relationship to the university was not primarily economic but instead primarily educational. Therefore, they could not be organized and represented by a union.