SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
INSIGHTS BY BETHANY HALFORD
IN HARM'S WAY Graduate students injured while doing laboratory research often face an uncertain fate Τ S BEEN A ROUGH SUMMER FOR STU-
dents. Graduate students at Brown University in Providence, R.I., were denied the right to form a labor union when, on July 13, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that they are only students, not employees (C&EN, July 26, page 12). The ruling reversed a landmark decision NLRB made four years earlier in a case involving New Y)rk University that, for the first time, allowed graduate stu dents at a private university to unionize. The reversal also put a damper on a num ber of similar organizing efforts at private universities across the country. Two weeks after the latest rul ing—in completely unrelated news—three students at California State University, Los Angeles, were injured by flying shards of glass when a bottle of nitric acid explod ed in a chemistry teaching lab. For me, it was one of those reminders that studying chemistry is a little more dangerous than studying his tory or foreign languages. The two events got me triinking: What would happen to a chemistry graduate student who was serious ly injured while doing reseai ~h? Would this student be eligible to rt ceive some kind of workers' com pensation? Does it make a difference, in terms of benefits, if the student is at a pri vate university, like Brown or NYU, or at a public university where graduate students may belong to unions and be considered employees? Everyone I asked—professors, deans, lawyers, students, workers' compensation administrators—agreed that these are im portant questions. Most, however, could not give me any simple answers. Just in case you don't know how work ers' compensation operates, here's a primer: The state pays workers' compen sation benefits—usually a percentage of one's salary—to employees who are injured on the job. In most cases, this is a tempo rary source of income until the employee
recovers from the injury and can return to work. Ultimately, the state decides whether or not a graduate student is considered an employee for workers' compensation pur poses. This employee status is independ ent of how the university or other agen cies—state and federal—view graduate students. So, while a graduate student may not be an employee in the eyes of NLRB, she may be an employee for tax or work ers' compensation purposes. Confused? It gets more complicated. In some states, the law is clear on grad
uate students and workers' compensation. In Newlbrk, for example, the law says that graduate students are employees for work ers' compensation purposes. So, if an NYU graduate student were hurt in a laborato ry accident while doing doctoral research, he would be able to claim workers' com pensation benefits. In other states, the statutes are consid erably more vague. A graduate student in the same situation at Brown University wouldn't receive workers' compensation, according to officials at the school. Rhode Island's workers' compensation officials were less definite, however, telling me that it was a tricky matter that's decided on an individual basis. For good measure, I made a few calls to
Massachusetts, but the answers I got were even murkier. When I inquired about grad uate students' employee status at the work ers' compensation offices of Harvard Uni versity and the state of Massachusetts, the most reliable answer I could get was, "It depends." While graduate students at private uni versities in Massachusetts are left to wres tle with this legal uncertainty, their col leagues at the University ofMassachusetts, Amherst, have some definite answers. There, the graduate students are unionized. The school recognizes them as employees, and, under the terms of their employment contract, the university will continue to take care of an injured student's stipend and fee waivers for whichever is longer: the du ration of his contract or as long as the in jury keeps him from the bench, up to two years beyond his contract appointment. ο UMass students say this part of 1 their contract provides for them I better than the state's workers' compensation would. In Massa chusetts, workers' comp pays 60% of one's salary—not a lot of money considering graduate student sti pends rarely top $20,000. The NLRB decision has no di rect bearing on workers' compen sation issues for graduate students. But it does keep students at private universities from negotiating con tracts like those at UMass, and it al so keeps them from protesting un safe working conditions. Considering that it would not be unusual for chemistry graduate students to work with flammable, explo sive, corrosive, biohazardous, or carcino genic substances as part of their disserta tion research, I'm surprised that these issues aren't always clearly outlined. I'm even more surprised that these stu dents don't demand that their universities provide them with some sort of assurance of compensation if they are injured while doing research. Perhaps it's because of chemists' char acteristically cavalier attitude, but as far as I can tell, the majority of chemistry grad uate students don't seem to care if their university sees them as employees or stu dents. When faced with unionization ef forts, most say they would prefer to be left alone to do their work.
Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS. HTTP://WWW.CEN-ONLINE.ORG
C&EN
/ AUGUST
30, 2004
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