After graduate students won the right to unionize last week, many are now facing the difficult decision of whether or not they think they would be best represented by a union.
And Penn's administration is making its stance known to the potential voters. Following the National Labor Relations Board's ruling, University President Judith Rodin issued a statement -- which was e-mailed to all faculty, including teaching and research assistants -- recommending that all graduate students vote no on the issue of unionization.
Last Thursday, the NLRB gave Penn graduate students the right to be recognized as employees of the University and to vote on forming a union to represent them in contract negotiations.
Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania -- a group formed two years ago with the aim of organizing a union to represent graduate students in negotiations for better health care and stipends -- is gearing up to hold elections early next year, despite the University's announcement that it will appeal the NLRB's decision within the next two weeks.
The decision marked the fifth time the NLRB has permitted union elections for graduate students at a private university.
"The decision makes no sense for graduate students at Penn," Rodin said in the e-mail statement. "We hope that the students themselves, like their counterparts at Cornell [University], would come to the same conclusion."
Last month, Cornell students decided against forming a union in a landslide vote.
GET-UP spokesman David Faris said that Rodin's mass e-mail has angered some students, who claim that the University misused resources to promote a strongly anti-union voice from the University administration.
"A lot of people were pretty upset that the University is using its monopoly on campus communications... to pit graduate students against graduate students," Faris said, noting that many students had called him concerning the e-mail.
"There's not too much we can do about that," he said of the University's reaction, but noted that he does not think the statement will change students' minds.
"Graduate students can see right through... typical anti-union strategy," he explained.
"I don't think that's a very good strategy for winning over graduate students," he said of the University's quick move to appeal the NLRB's decision.
"It was disappointing to me to see that kind of reaction from them," he added. But "I can't say that I'm surprised," he said.
School of Arts and Sciences graduate student Theodore Benke noted that although he has not followed the debate too closely, he is "completely, 100 percent in favor of unionization."
As a teaching assistant, Benke received Rodin's letter and thinks that the University "should recognize graduate students" and "let them be represented."
"The nature of a university... [is] an intellectual community, but it's also a place where people work," he noted.
Benke also argued many students feel the University's strongly anti-union stance is "a big pressure, a big factor" in their decision.
"The whole climate is so... anti-union," he said. "It kind of brings out my support for the underdog."
School of Social Work student Tamara Brooks acknowledged that she is not yet eligible for joining a union because she will not begin work as a resident advisor until next year, but said she supports the union effort.
Brooks said the University "can pay students less" in the absence of union negotiations.
"It's a money issue," she said.
Graduate students "have no protection" without a union and the lack of adequate health care benefits and stipends "puts some people in a bind," Brooks added.
Brooks said she is mainly concerned with "domestic partnership [health care] benefits" that a union may or may not be able to secure but is willing to support unionization due to the need for better health care benefits as a whole.
She added that because the job of graduate students is so similar to that of professors, the administration should reimburse students "on a professional level."
"This is serious work," she said.
Although Brooks admits a union may not be the best answer to the problem, graduate students should "at least be allowed the choice," she said.
