Reference no: EM133657481

Problem: Before conducting a representation election, the Board must determine what constitutes an appropriate bargaining unit. Typically, the appropriate collective bargaining unit is a group of employees that share a community of interest, meaning that they have similar compensation, working conditions, and supervision and work under the same general employer policies. In this case, the Board ruled that a group comprising all the paid student teaching, course, and research assistants at Columbia University comprised an appropriate bargaining unit. Over the protests of the Yale University administration, the NLRB regional office permitted the union seeking to bargain on behalf of the graduate students working as teaching, course, and research assistants at Yale to use nine separate academic departments as the appropriate bargaining units for a representation election on February 23, 2017. After the assistants in six of the departments voted to unionize, Yale refused to bargain with the union pending its appeal of the regional office's acceptance of what Yale called a "micro-unit strategy" unprecedented in higher education. Has Yale engaged in an unfair labor practice?