Graduate students at New York University have been on strike for several weeks because the university has decided not to continue bargaining with its union. Clinton’s National Labor Relations Board (one of the most useless relics of the New Deal) decided that grad students were “employees” and therefore could unionize, but the NLRB reversed that decision last year. Therefore NYU doesn’t have to negotiate with the union and isn’t going to.

As The Wall Street Journal reports today, the administration is taking a very soft line. Grad students who ignore the back to work ultimatum will still get free tuition and full medical benefits. You can read all about it here.

Since unionization does nothing to increase productivity (often, it lowers it), the demand that workers get more money necessarily means less for others. But who? The traditional union theory was that “fat cat” business owners would take less profit when unions negotiated more of a “fair share” for the employees. That theory ignores the important role of profit and to the extent that unionization lowers profits, its impact is to slow the accumulation of capital and thereby lower future living standards. That theory, however, has no applicability here, where the strike is against a non-profit educational institution. If the grad students want more, where will the money come from?

NYU does have an endowment, but the proceeds from the investments are spent every year on stuff like campus maintenance and faculty salaries. Do the students want cuts in the university budget? Or do they want tuition to go up, making the parents of students cough up the money they want?

Each of the grad students knew what the deal with the university was when they chose to enroll. That deal might not seem terrific to outsiders, but it’s comparable to the package offered to grad students elsewhere. I just don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who take a contract and later insist on renegotiating it when they think they have leverage.