Graduate students holding teaching and research positions at Cornell University announced late last week that they would not join the United Auto Workers, bucking a growing trend toward grad student unionization. According to Allen MacKenzie, co-founder of At What Cost?, a student group opposed to unionizing, many students disliked the UAW’s political views, especially regarding the environment. The union strongly opposes stricter fuel-economy standards for cars and trucks. The UAW began courting graduate students as potential union members after the National Labor Relations Board granted grad students at private schools the right to unionize, in 2000. If students at Cornell had approved unionization, the school would have become the second in the U.S., after New York University, to have a graduate-student union affiliated with the UAW.
