Hearings over the right of Penn graduate students to unionize will resume tomorrow, after a preliminary hearing was held on Friday.
Friday's preliminary discussions, which were held at the downtown Philadelphia office of the National Labor Relations Board, were intended to initiate the process of determining whether or not the students have the right to elect a body which would collectively represent them in contract negotiations with the administration.
However, since the lawyers representing the administration did not have all the documents that were requested in the subpoena delivered in advance of Friday's hearing, and their witnesses were not prepared to take the stand, the substantive start of the hearing is tentatively set for tomorrow.
Ed Webb, spokesman for Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, said he believes that the University may be delaying the hearings as a method of putting off the election process temporarily. However, Webb said he hopes that the delay is a result of the holiday recess and not a stall tactic.
Webb said GET-UP remains focused on proceeding through the hearings as quickly as possible to ensure that elections will be able to take place before the end of the semester.
"More people can be involved, and it will be more democratic," Webb said.
In November 2000, the NLRB ruled that graduate students working as teaching assistants or paid researchers at New York University had the right to hold union elections. Similar decisions last fall in cases involving students at Temple and Brown universities served as motivators for GET-UP to continue their quest.
Last December, GET-UP filed authorization cards signed by more than 30 percent of graduate students to the NLRB, the minimum portion of petitioning students needed for the NLRB to grant a hearing.
Friday's meeting marked the beginning of the hearing process, during which graduate students, union representatives, University officials and others will testify. There is no timetable set for the NLRB's decision, but similar hearings at NYU and at Brown lasted for months.
GET-UP's petition does not include graduate research and teaching assistants from all departments at Penn. Students working in biology, chemistry, math, physics, astronomy, psychology and the entire School of Medicine, with the exception of teaching assistants in neuroscience, are specifically excluded from the petition.
At Friday's hearing, University representatives broached the question of the validity of GET-UP as a labor organization. In response to the challenge, a staff worker employed full-time by GET-UP strictly for the purpose of aiding the unionization process described his duties and demonstrated that GET-UP did indeed qualify as a labor organization.
"I was very pleased with [the hearing] and feel confident that in the end the NLRB will find, as they did in other cases, that graduate students can simultaneously be employees," GET-UP Chairwoman Tina Collins said.
In an e-mail statement, Deputy Provost Peter Conn said that throughout the debate over unionization, the central argument of the University has always been, and continues to be, that "the graduate students are students, not employees."
"They come to Penn to receive a world-class education in the many disciplines our faculty represent, and they earn degrees that signal their own accomplishments as researchers, teachers and scholars," Conn said.
On the other hand, GET-UP maintains that the work performed by graduate students qualifies them as employees of the University. They believe they should therefore have the right to unionize if they choose.
An NLRB examiner oversees the hearings and collects the information from them. He or she brings it to the hearing officer, a regional representative of the NLRB. The officer makes the final decision in the case.
However, the decision can be appealed in most cases. Upon appeal, the decision moves to the national office.
