University of Hawaii graduate assistants are public employees with the constitutional right to collectively bargain, and should not be placed in 12 of the existing 15 bargaining units, the Hawaii Labor Relations Board ruled unanimously Thursday.

“We are gratified that after half a century of ceaseless struggle, the time of graduate assistants’ treatment as second-class workers is over,” Dianne Deauna, chair of Academic Labor United, a union of graduate assistants, said in a news release from ALU.

The ruling reconsidered decisions by the labor board in 1972, which denied graduate assistants their right to collectively bargain. Since these decisions, multiple bills have been introduced to overrule the labor board. In 2015, House Bill 553 was vetoed by then-Gov. David Ige.

In 2021, ALU sued the UH Board of Regents, the labor board and the state of Hawaii in state Circuit Court. In the suit, they argued that graduate assistants are public employees, that barring classes of public workers from the right to collective bargaining is unconstitutional and that the labor board didn’t have a process through which graduate assistants could challenge the board’s interpretation.

After an appeals process, the state Supreme Court ruled last April that graduate assistants were “entitled to have the labor board reconsider its rulings from 1972,” according to the release.

ALU then petitioned the labor board “seeking a declaration” that graduate assistants are public employees with the right to collective bargaining, and do not belong to any of the statutory excluded categories.

ALU officials said they will “continue to lobby the legislature to create a new bargaining unit for graduate assistants.”