Recent coverage of and commentary on the graduate employee unionization issue in The Daily Pennsylvanian has suggested that many members of the Penn community are confused about which graduate students are legally defined as graduate employees, as well as about the procedures of the National Labor Relations Board hearings currently being held.
As participants in this process, Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania, are committed to taking part in an informed and honest discussion of the issues at hand. We are concerned, however, that arguments made by both the University's Office of General Counsel and by their hired law firm -- Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll -- are being taken at face value and are not being subjected to critical scrutiny.
After a year of one-on-one conversations between dozens of member-organizers and hundreds of their peers, it became clear that there was overwhelming support for a union at Penn. On Dec. 27, 2001, we filed a petition with the NLRB signed by the majority of a unit of approximately 1,000 graduate employees, a unit wholly consistent with established legal precedent. Our intention was to afford Penn's graduate employees the opportunity to vote for or against unionization in a timely manner. The Penn administration and its legal team, rather than following existing law and agreeing to an election where a democratic choice could be made by the employees involved, chose to argue instead that none of the graduate students who perform service for pay are employees.
The result of the University's legal action has been more than three weeks of hearings, in which the University has called numerous witnesses from the administration who have reiterated this argument. The University's lawyers have simultaneously argued, however, that should some graduate students be ruled to be employees -- and therefore to have a right to collective bargaining -- GET-UP must seek to represent a bargaining unit of a type wholly unprecedented in the history of either graduate employee or faculty unionization.
Our formal petition included "all graduate students employed as teaching assistants, teaching fellows, research assistants, graders, administrative assistants, lecturers and research assistants," and excluded "research assistants in the life, physical, and engineering sciences, undergraduates, post-doctoral employees, adjunct, visiting and regular faculty, guards and supervisors as defined in the act." At the insistence of Penn's lawyers, GET-UP modified the exclusions in our original petition in order to move the process forward, although the NLRB hearing examiner expressed her opinion that the initial petition was sufficiently clear for the hearings to proceed.
We amended the petition to specify that we had not intended at any time to include graduate employees seeking degrees other than the Ph.D. or a research master's degree, including those in the schools of Dental Medicine, Law, Medicine and Veterinary Medicine. In both the NYU and Brown cases, student-employees in these professional schools were excluded from the final bargaining unit approved by the NLRB. Nowhere among the more than two dozen recognized graduate employee unions are students in these schools included in the bargaining unit.
Moreover, in the more than 300 bargaining units of full-time faculty in the United States, only one includes any faculty from such professional schools. All state laws providing for the unionization of faculty either deny collective bargaining rights to faculty from these professional schools or grant them the right to form separate units. A nearby example is Temple University, where the full-time faculty of the University are represented by an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, while the faculty of the Law School are represented in a separate bargaining unit by an independent union.
From the beginning, and consistent with precedent, GET-UP has sought to represent all teaching assistants, regardless of discipline and all research assistants in the humanities and social sciences in a single bargaining unit. We have had extensive conversations and received support for unionization among research assistants in the natural and engineering sciences. We made it clear to those we spoke to that emerging law in the private sector and a significant part of the established law for the public sector either excluded them from coverage or assigned them to separate bargaining units. The reason for this distinction is that graduate employees in these disciplines work under different systems of supervision, follow different work schedules and have different relationships between the work they do and their academic requirements than research assistants in other fields.
Our own organizing efforts and discussions with both RA colleagues and member-organizers in these disciplines confirmed that these patterns also exist at Penn. GET-UP remains committed to continued organizing among the research assistants in the natural and engineering sciences in order to find ways of effectively addressing their issues, concerns and needs.
In the larger context, the fundamental issue is that the University has always had the option of agreeing to a democratic election among the employees included in the original petition. Instead, the University and its lawyers have chosen to spend thousands of dollars and consume numerous hours re-asking a question the law has repeatedly answered affirmatively: Are the people who are paid to do the work of the University employees? We urge them to accept the law -- and the logic -- that holds that we are and to respect our right to decide for ourselves whether or not we wish to be represented by a union.
Christina Collins is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Education from Philadelphia, Pa. and chair of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania.
