An academician explores major issues in higher education labor law during the 1990s: union organizing by graduate teaching assistants, bargaining and workload issues, developments concerning grievance arbitration, and rights of individual faculty members within unions. Issues likely to arise in the next decade include alternatives to tenure, nonstandard employment contracts, nature of faculty work in light of new technologies, and the use of for-profit educational institutions. (Contains 65 footnotes.) (MLF)