A hearing that could grant Penn graduate students the right to unionize will begin on Friday at the National Labor Relations Board's regional office in downtown Philadelphia.
Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, filed a petition last month to the NLRB for permission to allow a portion of graduate students at Penn to unionize. If they win the ruling, GET-UP will hold an election to determine whether the AFT/GET-UP will be the exclusive representative of graduate student employees at Penn in contract negotiations.
The University would be legally obligated to allow graduate student employees to vote on the union issue if the judge rules in favor of GET-UP. The decision, however, may not come for months.
Only recently has unionization become a possibility for Penn's graduate student workers. In November 2000, the NLRB -- in granting New York University graduate students the right to hold union elections -- legalized the unionization of graduate students working as research and teaching assistants at private colleges.
Since that ruling, the prospect of unionization has become increasingly more popular among graduate students at many schools. Temple University graduate students formed a union last October, and in November, the NLRB granted students at Brown University the right to hold a union election.
GET-UP launched a public campaign promoting unionization last spring. According to GET-UP spokesman Ed Webb, a union would address issues such as salaries, benefits, office space and class size.
"At the moment, we have no direct say in the conditions and terms of our employment," Webb said. "We need a voice and an ability to negotiate on our behalf."
But Penn administrators have openly discouraged the unionization of its graduate students. University officials say they regard graduate-level research and teaching assistants as students and not employees.
"We don't think that the interposition of an adversarial, industrial, labor-management bargaining model would bring good results," Deputy Provost Peter Conn said. "Penn's tradition of collegiality and close academic partnership would be jeopardized."
However, Webb argues that studies have shown that graduate worker unionization has no negative effect on the faculty-student relationship.
"Our employer is the administration," Webb said. "The faculty is not responsible for determining our pay or our benefits."
But Conn said that the administration deems unionization as an unnecessary tool, contending that the University has acknowledged the demands of graduate students in the past and has worked hard to address their needs.
"We share with our graduate students exactly the same objective, which is that Penn continue to be a world-class institution of choice for all graduate students across various fields of knowledge," Conn said. "I simply don't see what problems a union model would solve that we cannot solve collaboratively."
Conn mentioned that the University has already answered some of the graduate students' grievances with the establishment of a health insurance plan, the new graduate student center on Locust Walk and University stipends.
But these efforts have not been enough to satisfy many graduate student employees, as a significant portion of them signed authorization cards for the petition -- the signatures of at least 30 percent of the graduate employees are required for the NLRB to grant a hearing.
According to the petition, the union would seek to represent "all graduate students employed as teaching assistants, teaching fellows, graders, administrative assistants, lecturers and research assistants." It also would exclude research assistants in the life, physical and engineering sciences, undergraduates, post-doctoral employees and adjunct, visiting and regular faculty.
The hearing will consist of a discussion of the size and definition of the unit's membership, a detailed inquiry into the role and activities of Penn's graduate students and the ways in which they receive financial support, a submission of briefs summarizing the arguments from both sides and finally, the release of the hearing officer's decision.
It is unknown how long the process will take, but similar hearings at New York, Brown and Columbia universities lasted for several months.
However, GET-UP hopes to win the ruling and hold an election by the end of the semester.
"Past hearings have taken so long as a result of resistance from the administration," Webb said. "We filed the petition over the holiday to ensure that the election takes place as soon as possible."
