Kansas City infoZone, August 11, 2011, Thursday

Kansas City infoZone

August 11, 2011, Thursday

Kansas City infoZone (full article)

Graduate Students Split on Campus Unionization

By Rebecca Koenig

It’s an argument familiar to Nick Salvatore, an industrial and labor relations professor at Cornell University. Having participated in the drive for unionization as a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s, Salvatore publically supported Cornell graduate students’ efforts to unionize in 2002. The movement was voted down in a campus-wide election by what Salvatore called a “definitive” 69-31 percent margin.

“The way in which funding works is often very different from department to department,” Salvatore said. “Sciences generate their own research money, not bound by university rules. They made the point that if they accepted unionization they would actually lose money. I had never understood that difference before.”