Following a National Labor Relations Board ruling that allows graduate students at private colleges and universities to organize, graduate students at Northwestern said they have no immediate plans to form a union.

However, the NLRB decision does benefit NU graduate students because the administration would have to recognize any union that graduate students might form in the future, said John Martin, a spokesman for the Graduate Students Coalition at NU.

“We haven’t formed a union, though there has been a lot of discussion about it,” said Martin, a fifth-year English graduate student. “(The NLRB decision) gives people an opportunity to talk about it because it’s legal, they have a right to do it, and the university would have to respect it.”

The NLRB ruled Tuesday on a case brought by graduate students at New York University who wanted to form a union to negotiate conditions of their employment.

The NLRB rejected NYU’s claim that because the graduate assistants might be “predominately students,” they cannot be statutory employees.

“The uncontradicted and salient facts establish that graduate assistants perform services under the control and direction of the employer, and they are compensated for these services by the employer,” according to the NLRB decision.

NU Graduate School Dean Richard Morimoto said collective bargaining at colleges and universities “has a very strong potential to put the whole basis of teaching graduate students at risk.”

He said he wants to maintain a positive relationship with administrators and students at NU to avoid the need for any potential arbitration.

“There’s no doubt the discussions get to be rancorous at some schools and that it leads to an awkward situation,” he said. “We recognize at Northwestern that we are only as outstanding as our graduate programs, and our graduate students are those programs.”

Part of the reason there is no push to unionize at NU is because the administration has been receptive to suggestions from graduate students, Martin said.

GSC was formed during Spring Quarter when the university decided to fund all incoming graduate students for the entire year.

For current graduate students, however, the university planned to provide only the nine months of funding, which had been the previous policy.

The extra three months of funding mean incoming graduate students receive an additional $4,000, which older graduate students found unfair, GSC spokeswoman Karen Gardenier said.

“It created competition among students for funding, which we told them is not a good way to sell a department and keep it running smoothly,” Martin said.

Students in GSC said they’ve had several positive meetings with Weinberg Dean Eric Sundquist and that the discrepancy in funding for third- and fourth-year graduate students likely will be solved by the end of the quarter, Gardenier said.

Morimoto agreed that graduate students “brought up a very good point” when they protested the discrepancy between funding for incoming and that for current graduate students and that administrators worked to accommodate their requests.

Day care and a lack of health care coverage in the summer are other issues that concern many graduate students, but they’re not enough to spur the creation of a union, Martin said.

Any union effort in the future would likely center around a larger issue such as health care, but the time for organizing is not now, he said.

Administrators will continue listening to the concerns of graduate students and making changes where appropriate, Morimoto said.

“Certainly we are in discussions with graduate students to make sure we hear their concerns about stipends and about health insurance,” he said. “We’re working with them on a number of different levels to ensure their education and support is on an appropriate level.”