Penn graduate student unionization efforts received a boost from a recent National Labor Relations Board ruling stating that Brown University's teaching and research assistants are employees and have the right to unionize.
The Nov. 16 ruling will make Brown the first Ivy League school and the second private university in the nation to hold a union election for graduate students. The election will decide whether the Brown Graduate Employees Organization will represent the students.
New York University graduate students became the first to negotiate the right to unionize and hold elections after a similar ruling from the NLRB in October of 2000.
The ruling at Brown came after several weeks of NLRB hearings, during which graduate students, union representatives and University officials testified. In order to be represented by the various unions, the NLRB requires 30 percent of the graduate students at a given university to sign and turn in authorization cards.
Last spring, the Brown Graduate Employees Organization turned in their signed cards. Currently, Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania is following the same process.
As they continue to collect authorization cards, GET-UP members say they are pleased by the decision at Brown.
"We're not breaking out the champagne yet because this is not our victory, this is a victory for [Brown students], but it definitely is a shot in the arm in terms of morale," GET-UP spokesman Ed Webb said. "It helps reconfirm that we're on the right path."
Members of the Brown group say the ruling in the NYU case was influential in motivating their unionization effort and they hope that this most recent ruling will encourage other schools to follow suit.
"Here at Brown and at other private universities the victory at NYU did really lay the groundwork for folks to move forward," said Connie Razza, the lead organizer at Brown.
"I think that the ruling here is going to be just another step in that process in making sure those graduate employees who want to have fair representation... can have that with much less of a fight and much less delay," Razza added.
GET-UP members said they hope the decision at Brown will weaken some of the arguments against Penn unionization.
"I think this is a reconfirmation of the points and undermines any argument to the contrary," Webb said.
Brown and Penn administrators maintain that graduate students are primarily students, not employees, and that unionization is inappropriate for graduate students and could jeopardize student-faculty relations.
But in her decision regarding unionization at Brown, Rosemary Pye, director of the Boston office of the NLRB wrote, "The work performed by the TAs is the same work, in some instances, that is performed by faculty."
The ruling, which upheld the decision at NYU, also said, "Students who perform services for a university in exchange for compensation are entitled to collective-bargaining rights."
Union elections for graduate students at Brown will be held on Dec. 6 and Dec. 7. If a majority of those who vote are in favor of unionization, the Brown Graduate Employees Organization will represent Brown's graduate students in bargaining with the university.
About 450 TAs, teaching fellows, research assistants and proctors will be eligible to take part in the elections.
Union organizers at Brown say they hope the election will create an opportunity for all those who would be represented by the union to voice their opinions.
"What the unionization drive here has been about has been graduate assistants having a real voice here, and that part of that is always going to be disagreement and trying to come to an acceptable resolution," Razza said.
However, the election outcome will only take into account those who actually vote. Graduate students who are eligible to vote but decide not to will not be included in the results.
But those who serve as research assistants in departments, such as the life sciences and physical sciences, will not be eligible to vote.
Administrators at Brown have until Nov. 30 to file an appeal to the NLRB office in Washington. NYU's appeal last year failed.
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