About 1,500 graduate students are prohibited from unionizing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because they’re not university employees, a National Labor Relations Board official ruled.
NLRB Regional Director Laura Sacks said in a decision issued late Monday that grad students at the university who aren’t currently teaching or research assistants can’t be represented by the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union.
UE represents 3,700 research and teaching assistants at MIT and sought to incorporate graduate fellows into the unit. Sacks ruled that the fellows don’t count as employees because they receive funding for personal research and ...