Cornell officials announced June 20 that, on June 14, Vice President for Human Resources Mary George Opperman received a subpoena duces tecum from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), issued at the request of the associate general counsel of the United Auto Workers in Detroit, demanding that the university produce by July 9 an "enormous array" of materials dealing, not only with graduate and undergraduate students serving in teaching assistant, research assistant and related titles, but also dealing with all faculty of the university and all employees of the university "exclusive of TAs [teaching assistants], supervisors, managers and guards."
Opperman observed that, since the initial hearing before a regional hearing examiner of the NLRB held in Ithaca on May 29, the university has been actively engaged in attempting to determine which individuals have been included in the proposed bargaining unit in the petition filed May 13 by the Cornell Association of Student Employees CASE/UAW. She said the inclusion of undergraduate students in the proposed unit has substantially complicated the data-gathering activity, since the university has no centralized record-keeping of undergraduates serving in the job titles identified by the union: teaching assistant, research assistant, tutors, graders, readers and consultants.
"We are making every effort to comply with the hearing examiner's request that we identify all individuals in the proposed unit by July 9, the date of the next scheduled hearing, but that does not mean that it is easily possible to do so," Opperman said.
(A complete news release listing many of the documents requested by the union can be accessed online at www.news.cornell.edu/releases/June02/NLRB. opperman.hnd.html.)
"This is an extraordinary request," said Opperman. "It demands detailed and individualized data over the course of several years. It calls for information concerning the faculty and Cornell's academic programs. It seeks academic status information on individual students, information that the university may be prohibited by law, under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, from providing to anyone without the student's consent. While Cornell will attempt to comply with all legitimate requests for information under the law, there is no doubt in my mind that it will be physically and administratively impossible to do so by July 9 and long thereafter. The subpoena served upon the university at the request of the union clearly demonstrates, better than any document that the university itself could prepare, the wisdom of waiting upon the outcome of the Columbia and Brown appeals before going forward into the detailed fact-finding demanded by the union," she noted.
"The cost in dollars and in human resources to both the university and the union of protracted fact-finding hearings, which may be necessary in view of the union's inclusion of undergraduate students in the proposed bargaining unit, will be substantial," said Opperman. "This situation will only be exacerbated if the union's subpoena requesting unprecedented information on faculty and staff, in addition to student assistants, is allowed to stand. Given the nature of the appeals that are pending before the NLRB in the Columbia and Brown University cases, the NLRB's rulings in these cases may well result in the avoidance of substantial unnecessary expenditures of time and energy, no matter which side prevails," she said. "The university will move to set aside the subpoena received on June 14."
Cornell officials also announced June 20 that the university is seeking special permission from the NLRB to appeal the denial by the Buffalo regional director of its motion to postpone the scheduled hearings on the unionization of Cornell graduate and undergraduate students until the full NLRB renders its decisions in the appeals that have been filed in similar cases by Columbia and Brown universities.
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