U Rochester Ph.D. Student Workers Strike for an Election Without the NLRB

University of Rochester Ph.D. student workers began striking this week to pressure the institution to agree to what they call a “fair union election.” And for the process to be fair, they say, it can’t be handled by the Trump-era National Labor Relations Board.

“We don’t see any kind of path through the NLRB at present,” said George Elkind, a Ph.D. student on the proposed UR Graduate Labor Union’s organizing committee.

The strike began Monday and continued Tuesday. Elkind said it’s unclear how many of the more than 1,400 students who would likely be represented by the union are withholding their labor. The walkout is another example of labor agitation continuing into the Trump era.

Roughly a year ago, university officials and the union organizers began discussing plans for a private election, which both parties were amenable to. If they had reached an agreement, the NLRB—which usually handles unionization votes at private nonprofit institutions such as UR—wouldn’t have been involved.

However, in February, after Donald Trump retook the presidency and fired a Democratic NLRB member and the agency’s general counsel, a university lawyer told student organizers that UR no longer wanted a private election, according to a document union members provided Inside Higher Ed. Instead, the lawyer wrote that they could pursue an election with the Trump-era NLRB.

Scott Phillipson, president of SEIU 200United, a multi-university union that’s helping to organize the students, said UR officials “simply do not want these employees to have a union. That is what is going on here.”

Phillipson said university officials were being disingenuous in suggesting the students use the NLRB.

“They know it’s not an option,” he said. “But it’s a better public messaging, frankly, than ‘Just go away.’”

An NLRB spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed Tuesday that the agency’s “regional offices are functioning as normal” and can run elections. But any appeals of election results would go to the actual board for which the agency is named. And since Trump ousted the Democratic board member, Gwynne Wilcox, and has left previous vacancies unfilled, the panel now doesn’t have the minimum required number of members to make decisions.

If Trump eventually does appoint his own members to the board, allowing it to operate again, some union supporters worry the NLRB might use a grad student unionization case such as Rochester’s to overturn the 2016 Columbia University case precedent establishing that private nonprofit university grad workers can unionize through the NLRB.

Student workers could continue to unionize at public universities in the states that allow such action, but those at private institutions would be left with no other path than to seek voluntary recognition from their universities.

Elkind said UR officials know that the NLRB “is defunct—and would be hostile if it weren’t.” He said they want grad workers to go to the NLRB and risk a ruling decertifying grad unions at private universities nationwide. He called this “an extreme anti-labor position.”

‘Unprecedented Times’

In an email, William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, said the strike “to compel the university to agree to a non-NLRB election is a sign of these unprecedented times.

“There is a growing distrust and frustration among unions and their members with NLRB procedures and remedies, both of which are also under constitutional attacks by employers like SpaceX, Amazon, and the University of Southern California,” said Herbert, whose center is at Hunter College. “The firing of NLRB Board member Gwynne Wilcox and the reported removal of sensitive labor data from the NLRB by Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] staff has further undermined confidence in the agency.”

The university, which didn’t provide an interview Tuesday, hasn’t said it abandoned the move toward a private election because it thinks grad workers would lose in front of the Trump-era NLRB. UR has cited other reasons, including a December court decision involving Vanderbilt University grad workers’ attempt to unionize.

NLRB policy required Vanderbilt to reveal names, job classifications and other information about student workers whom the union might represent. But more than 100 students objected to sharing that, and Vanderbilt sued the NLRB and one of its regional directors, arguing that requiring students to turn over the information would violate their privacy under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).

A judge in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee ruled that Vanderbilt was likely right and granted a preliminary injunction blocking the NLRB requirements. A UR lawyer wrote that this made the university concerned about being “seen as facilitating the dissemination of potentially protected student data to a third party” if it went forward with the private election.

But the lawyer went beyond the Vanderbilt case, saying that not requiring a prospective union to go through the NLRB would be a “significant deviation from the university’s typical practice.” He also noted the recent “sweeping and still unclear changes in the federal government’s support for the university’s missions,” adding that the Trump administration’s upheaval “includes a likely reduction in federal funding.”

In an emailed statement Tuesday, a university spokesperson said "contingency plans are in place to ensure minimal disruption to our academic mission— including teaching and research activities—during a strike. In the event of prolonged strike activity, University officials are confident that the academic enterprise will continue as normal without interruption."

The spokesperson said "we are steadfast in the belief that entering into a private election agreement at this time is not in the best interests of the University community."