WASHINGTON – Republicans and Democrats squared off at a particularly cantankerous hearing Wednesday that dealt with whether graduate student assistants and faculty should have the right to unionize.
The highly partisan debate took place in a U.S. House Education and Workforce joint subcommittee hearing titled “Expanding the Power of Big Labor: The NLRB’s Growing Intrusion into Higher Education.”
Democrats blasted the hearing as unnecessary and misguided while Republicans decried recent moves by the NLRB as encroachments that could restrict religious and academic freedom and drive up tuition.
U.S. Congressman Robert E. Andrews, D-New Jersey, lamented that, instead of focusing on creating jobs for the 23 million unemployed Americans, lawmakers are taking up the issue of whether graduate student assistants and faculty members should be able to bargain on campus and whether a college is religious enough to get a religious exemption from the National Labor Relations Act, or NLRA.
“Only here in this city in this institution would these be regarded as the compelling questions on which the committee should spend its time,” Andrews said, later adding that the hearing represented a “classic case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.”
“We are not fiddling while Rome burns,” countered U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-North Carolina, chairwoman of the House subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training.
“We are looking at the issues, at threats to our constitution that have been established by this Administration, and in fact we probably should do a lot more, particularly with threats to our First Amendment,” Foxx said. “If we can erode our constitutional values, if we can erode our God-given rights, then anything can be taken away from us.”
