All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

This article presents data, precedent, and empirical evidence relevant to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposal to issue a new rule to exclude graduate assistants and other student employees from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The analysis in three parts. First, the authors show through an analysis of information from other federal agencies that the adoption of the proposed NLRB rule would exclude over 81,000 graduate assistants on private campuses from the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. Second, the article presents a legal history from the past half-century about unionization of student employees at private and public sector institutions of higher education, including the NLRB’s oscillation on the question of whether student employees are protected under the NLRA. The inconsistencies of the NLRB is in stark contrast to state and Canadian provincial precedent during the same period. Lastly, the authors analyze the terms of 42 current collective bargaining agreements covering student workers, including 10 at the private sector institutions. The empirical evidence from five decades of relevant collective bargaining history, precedent, and contracts demonstrates consistent economic relationships between student employees and their institutions.

No abstract

The efficacy of U.S. antipoverty policy is shaped both by its reliance on categorical sorting and by its decentralized structure. To examine the implications of these features, this study introduces a novel disaggregation of U.S. poverty reduction instruments into four mechanisms: taxes and transfers at the (centralized) federal level, and taxes and transfers at the (decentralized) state level. Using microdata from the Current Population Survey’s Annual Social and Economic Supplement, and a sequence-independent decomposition, this analysis assesses the relative effectiveness of the four mechanisms over time at the national level, between 1996 and 2016, and across the U.S. states in 2016. The study finds that absolute and relative poverty reduction is greater and has increased over time for working-age households with children compared to those without children, a difference rooted in the disparate structures of the programs that serve them. The study also finds substantial variation across the U.S. states in market and disposable income poverty, and in the poverty reduction attributable to each of the redistributive mechanisms, which highlights the importance of examining poverty and antipoverty policy subnationally. (Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality Working Paper)