Brown faced the most new federal unfair labor practice charges in the Ivy League over the past year, according to a Herald analysis of National Labor Relations Board data.
The University was named a defendant in 15 ULP cases between Sept. 2023 and Sept. 2024, with only one case listed as “closed” after Brown’s Postdoc Labor Organization withdrew a compensation-related complaint after reaching an agreement with the University.
ULP charges — an accusation that an employer, union or employee has violated federal labor law under section eight of the National Labor Relations Act — are filed with the NLRB. The federal agency “investigates and remedies” unfair labor practices under the NLRA and processes 20,000 to 30,000 ULP charges per year.
Cornell was charged in 12 new cases, the second-highest number among the Ivy League. More than 1,000 of its dining, facilities and grounds workers went on strike over working conditions in August.
The 2023-2024 academic year saw heightened tensions between labor unions and administrators at universities nationally, as debates emerged over what constituted protected employment-related speech and protest under federal labor law. The majority, or 10 out of 15 of the charges against Brown last year were filed by the Graduate Labor Organization on behalf of its own members or the four other campus labor groups in its union, RIFT-AFT Local 6516.
In an email to The Herald, NLRB Press Secretary Kayla Blado confirmed that there are currently 18 open ULP charges against Brown, including four were effectively resolved after the NLRB deferred the case to a pre-existing dispute resolution process between the union and University.
“The one(s) that don’t have a deferral are being investigated by the Regional Office,” Blado wrote.
Last year, Brown was charged in one out of every 65 ULP charges filed in the NLRB’s Boston region, which encompasses most of New England.
Graduate students are unionized at all Ivy League institutions except Princeton, but Brown’s GLO was unique in launching an official “Spring Divestment Campaign” that put activism at the forefront of its spring 2024 activity.
Brown’s response to these protests and other related activism during the year led the Union to file several ULP charges alleging violations from unilateral changes to members’ working conditions to “retaliatory threats of discipline.” Graduate worker unions at Harvard, Columbia and Dartmouth have filed similar complaints.
At Brown, GLO considers pro-Palestine protests and other campaign activities — including a rally at the Main Green encampment last semester —as “employment-related” activities protected under labor law. The University responded to some of these protests as violations of the student code of conduct, which regulates green space usage and requires protests to be registered.
Upon receiving a ULP charge, NLRB investigators collect evidence to evaluate the merits of the allegations. If the involved parties fail to reach a settlement and the Board determines a charge has merit, it can issue a complaint and bring the case before an administrative law judge.
“The fact that the vast majority of claims against Brown have been withdrawn, dismissed or not pursued by the NLRB makes clear that many claims are grounded not in unfair labor practices, but rather points of disagreement that can often be resolved through good-faith bargaining,” University Spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald.
In a statement to The Herald, GLO President Michael Ziegler maintained that the union’s charges were a response to unfair labor practices by Brown and denied filing the charges as a replacement for bargaining with the University.
“The intent of any ULP charge we file is to rectify what we view as a violation of workers’ rights on the part of the University,” Ziegler wrote.
“As for past ULP charges we have filed against Brown, it is true that we have been able to settle some by mutual agreement between the University and the union,” Ziegler wrote. But, he added that one of the charges is about “Brown’s failure to bargain with us over a unilateral change to our working conditions” itself.
The cluster of ULP filings at Brown comes amidst a national surge in unionization among student workers at higher education institutions.
“I do see a trend of more ULP filings by student workers, but that also is consistent with the very high level of organizing of new bargaining units of new unions, particularly among grad workers and postdocs,” said UCLA Lecturer Mia McIver, the Chair of Higher Ed Labor United, a national organization with member unions representing over 225,000 higher education-related workers. McIver was elected president of the California Federation of Teachers University Council in 2023.
Brown is home to the greatest number of individual student labor unions in the Ivy League. It has seen an increase in unionization over the past six years, beginning with the unionization of graduate student workers in 2018. Since then, Computer Science Teaching Assistants, Community Coordinators, Postdocs and student workers at the Brown Center for Students of Color have formed labor unions that are part of the GLO-founded union RIFT-AFT Local 6516.
This has led to “a greater volume of (Brown) interactions with union leaders, from formal collective bargaining sessions to discussions about particular terms related to employment,” Clark wrote.
“As more and more grad workers and postdoc unions have been organized, those unions are then in a position to file ULPs in a way that they hadn’t been before,” McIver said, noting that unions provide workers with the structure, resources, staff and leadership that make it easier to file ULP charges.
According to Clark, many of the ULPs filed against Brown are a real-time response to disagreements.
He wrote in an email that “at times when union leaders do not secure agreement on a particular point quickly, we see ULP claims filed.” The fact that “a number of leaders representing students are new to collective bargaining” plays a role in the volume of ULP charges against Brown, he added.
According to the NLRB’s website, it usually takes between seven and 14 weeks for the agency to decide on the “merits” of a charge. During this timeframe, “the majority of charges are settled by the parties, withdrawn by the charging party, or dismissed by the Regional Director,” the site reads.
But, it’s rare for ULP cases to be resolved in this timeframe, McIver said.
“ULPs go on one of those two tracks where they reach some kind of settlement and they get withdrawn — that’s the less common option — or, in my experience, they take years to resolve,” she said.
Ethan Schenker is a senior staff writer covering staff and student labor. He is from Bethesda, MD, and plans to study International and Public Affairs and Economics. In his free time, he enjoys playing piano and clicking on New York Times notifications.
