The National Labor Relations Board has decided to allow teaching and research assistants at Columbia University to unionize.
Tuesday's decision, which may lead to the second contract ever made between a private university and a student union, has left Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania hopeful that a similar verdict will soon be reached for Penn's graduate students.
A NLRB officer began holding preliminary hearings with Penn's administrators and GET-UP representatives last month. The goal of the hearings is to determine whether Penn graduate students have the right to elect a representative body for contract negotiations with University administrators.
The basic issue being debated is whether or not graduate students should be considered employees and exactly who should be represented in the bargaining unit.
Although graduate students in Penn's professional schools were initially included in the GET-UP proposal, the organization clarified their bargaining unit and excluded those students during the second week of hearings.
GET-UP spokesman Ed Webb said he believes the NLRB decision will only strengthen the case for Penn graduate students.
"We're thrilled for our colleagues at Columbia," Webb said. "With each successive decision, we become more confident that we will win the argument here, too."
The Columbia ruling comes on the heels of the NLRB's decision in favor of graduate assistant unionization at New York University. Although NYU appealed the board's decision, its appeal was rejected.
Now that the NLRB has ruled in favor of unionization at Columbia, a union election at the school will be held within the next few weeks.
In the Columbia ruling, the NLRB expanded the bargaining unit to include research and teaching assistants at Columbia's Health Science campus, as well as undergraduate teaching assistants, whereas the union had initially argued to include a more limited group.
As hearings between GET-UP and Penn's administration continue at the board's local headquarters in downtown Philadelphia, Webb said that he hopes the decision at Columbia will help speed up the process for Penn students.
Webb claimed that lawyers representing the University have been intentionally delaying the hearings, offering repetitive testimonies. The University's goal, he added, is "to prevent graduate employees from actually deciding for themselves" whether or not they want to be represented by a union.
Webb explained that although he believes the hearing is not moving along as quickly as it should -- similar hearings at other universities have concluded in as little as twenty days -- GET-UP hopes that the decision will be made soon so that union elections can be held before the conclusion of the spring semester.
"We've done our best to expedite this from the start," he said.
And recently, tensions between GET-UP and the University have been expressed outside the hearings. Last month, GET-UP held a pro-union rally on College Green sponsored by the Philadelphia Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice, where representatives spoke about the need for graduate assistant unionization at Penn.
Webb said he believes the NLRB's decision at Columbia is a good predictor of how the board will rule on the Penn issue. He added that University administrators should realize that if the board is ready to recognize graduate assistants as employees at peer institutions, the same decision should be released at Penn.
"The implications for Penn are fairly clear," Webb said. "We're confident about the ultimate result. This has increased our confidence."
