Faculty unionization in the United States and Canada started in much the same way in the 1960s and 70s, but the American version ran into a legal roadblock in 1980 when the Supreme Court decided by a 5-4 vote in Yeshiva that faculty were part of management and thus could not unionize. This judgment applied only to private universities such as Harvard and Yale, but governors and legislatures across the land took heart from this and passed legislation to prohibit or limit collective bargaining in the public sector. A handful of states such as New York and California resisted, but the results have been clear. While most faculty in Canada are unionized, most in the U.S. are not.

In recent years there has been a revival of interest in the U.S. particularly among the most exploited in American universities - graduate students, part-time and full-time non-tenure track faculty, none of whom by the wildest imagination could be considered management. Among the liveliest have been the graduate students. This book is a collection of essays reporting from that front.

Most people in academe know that community colleges in the U.S. rely on armies of part-time and non-tenure track faculty. But fewer will be aware of how the major private universities in the eastern U.S. are among the most notorious of employers of graduate students, the untenured and the support staff. This book will disabuse them of any illusions.

The centrepiece is the battle for unionization of graduate student teaching assistants at New York University (a private university not to be confused with its public cousin City University of New York). An intercepted e-mail from the dean of the school of education, which was used in evidence in a related case, says it all: "We need people we can abuse, exploit and then turn loose." NYU, cheered on by most of the administrations of Ivy League universities, fought the union tooth and nail. It could hardly, however, argue that the graduate students were management.

It, therefore, turned to two tactics. One was to argue that graduate students were not employees because their work was part of their education. The union replied with witnesses describing "such educational activities as blanching asparagus for departmental meetings ... booking hotel rooms for a conference" and endless "xeroxing." (p.153) More pointedly, witnesses testified that teaching assistants did more than 50 per cent of the teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences and 80 per cent in its core undergraduate curriculum. The National Labour Relations Board was not impressed by the administration's arguments.

The second administrative tactic was good old-fashioned union-busting. It spent prodigiously on legal fees to a law firm well-known for such tactics. This involved as much delay as possible since graduate student bargaining units are by definition volatile in membership. A memo went to faculty suggesting how they could intimidate graduate students and still stay within the law. The administration refused to give the union the legally-required list of all members of the bargaining unit citing student privacy, but phoned and mailed these students itself thereby violating their privacy. It tried to include MBA students in the bargaining units even though they were not paid by the university. It tried to intimidate and to divide international students from the rest. It tried scare tactics about fees, strikes and faculty/student relations.

One has to admire the street smarts of the students and of their agent, the United Autoworkers. They didn't ask the faculty for support but rather for neutrality and further asked them to pressure the administration to take the same stance, thereby neutralizing many of the anti-union faculty. The mantra was let the graduate students decide for themselves. They secured support from a wide range of the liberal intellgentsia of New York, including the New York Times among many others.

They found support in the liberal churches. They turned up at the state legislature when NYU was soliciting funds and persuaded Democratic members from the city to ask pointed questions about the graduate students. They worked with the support staff union and with the building trades unions who had their own problems with the university.

Once the NLRB had sided with the students and once they had won the election, the administration stalled on negotiations. The president of Yale, Richard Levin, urged NYU to break the law and refuse to bargain. In the end the administration capitulated and negotiated a contract. It was an important precedent among the private universities.

Other chapters deal with the AAUP-inspired coalition in Boston, the contract in the California State University system with the California Faculty Association, and the failed campaign in Minnesota. The chapter on Yale gives names of distinguished faculty who blacklisted their own graduate students because they supported the union. One chapter deals with the successful campaign to persuade the MLA to find and publish the rates of pay in English and modern language departments across the country. One particularly American aspect of all this is the importance of health benefits which many graduate students cannot afford to buy in the open market.

The authors attempt to provide a more general analysis, arguing that whereas in the past critics were concerned with attempts by corporate America to influence the universities (the Monsanto campaign etc.), now the universities have become corporations themselves and act no differently from any other such employer, particularly in their desire to turn departments into profit centres, casualize their labour, and union bust with the zeal of the Rockefellers of old.

Donald C. Savage is a consultant in higher education, former executive director of CAUT and an adjunct professor of history at Concordia University.