See the story in IHE here. In effect, the ruling questions the story of "apprenticeship" used by Brown University to win a 2004 decision from the NLRB that graduate assistants are primarily students whose teaching is an apprenticeship, rather than employees exchanging labor for wages and benefits.
This is important, because the job system in US universities does *not* begin post-PhD, but post-BA. It's just that the lowest-level jobs are aren't called "jobs," they're called "assistantships." But anyone involved in graduate admissions knows it's a labor market, with competition at the level of salaries, benefits, and styles of labor offered by universities and weighed by students. That there's *another* labor market post-PhD shouldn't blind us to that fact, nor should it blind us to the relations between those two markets, a theme of Marc Bousquet's commentary.
[UPDATE: a nice discussion of these issues, especially with regard to NYU, is here at Crooked TImber.]
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