Gradual Students at Columbia and Yale University have decided to go on strike and stop teaching classes. This is in spite of the fact that they are not recognized as having the right to organize.

The strike will be the first by Ivy League graduate students since the National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that graduate students at private colleges are students, not workers, and cannot form unions.

"By asserting this as one voice, we're identifying what we have in common: that we should be recognized as legal workers and be respected and given bargaining rights," said Dehlia Hannah, a philosophy graduate student at Columbia.

I would imagine that graduate teaching job at an Ivy League school would be hard to come by. If the University were so inclined, they could fire everyone and hire replacements almost immediately.

What is most interesting about this however, is that people with Ivy League degrees that actually do enter the work force, usually work in non-unionized white collar jobs. I mean, why go through the trouble of attending a top tier elite school, only to be lumped in with the rest of your co-workers in a system that rewards people based not on merit, but solely on who got there first. Under those rules, a guy that went to a state school and didn't bother staying for his gradual degree would have seniority over the Ivy Leaguer.