When Penn's teaching assistants say they are tired, overworked and underpaid, undergraduate students feel the effects.
So yesterday, a couple of undergrads organized a teach-in to educate themselves about the issue of graduate student unionization.
"I think it's good for some undergraduate leaders to have a chance to learn more about unionization... [and] to hear the other side of the administration's anti-union story," said College senior Lincoln Ellis, an organizer of the teach-in.
"I'm a little bit annoyed about... the casualization of the teaching profession," Ellis said, citing "underpaid and overworked" teaching assistants.
"From an undergraduate perspective... we think our TAs are great," he added. But "it's worrisome that more and more TAs" are doing the work that professors should be doing.
Co-organizer of the teach-in and College senior Eugena Oh said the event was put together in order to "get the word out to undergraduates" to let them know about Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania.
"We think it's important that this issue gets out to the community at large," Oh said.
GET-UP -- the group of students that will represent graduate students in negotiations for better benefits should they win the election to organize a union -- was on hand to provide information to the students, as was a member of Penn's American Civil Liberties Union chapter.
GET-UP spokesman David Faris said that if he were an undergrad, he would be angry about graduate student teaching conditions.
"Our working conditions are your learning conditions," Faris said.
"When we're overwhelmed and underpaid," he said, "we get screwed... but you guys do too."
GET-UP was granted the right to hold elections and be recognized as employees of the University by the National Labor Relations Board less than two weeks ago.
The University has until today to appeal the NLRB's decision and has yet to formally announce plans to do so, although last week University spokeswoman Lori Doyle said the University would appeal the decision within the two-week period.
The union election will be held at Penn early next year regardless of the University's expected appeal, but if the University appeals the decision, the votes will be impounded until the decision from the appeal is in.
GET-UP is holding a rally for the right of graduate employees to vote tomorrow in front of College Hall at 4 p.m., in hopes that both graduates and undergraduates will come together to support unionization.
Although Oh said there were no plans to organize a more formal group of undergraduate students in support of graduate unionization, the goal for the organizers of the teach-in was to create information sessions that are "really informal and open" so undergraduates "can come in and just give as much time and effort as they want."
"It's an important cause," said College junior Spencer Witte, one of the few undergraduate students in attendance.
"Because I plan to be a graduate student at some point," Witte said, "it would be nice to know I'd be under good working conditions."
Witte hopes to help change the working conditions of graduate students who work as research and teaching assistants "just by supporting GET-UP in any way possible."
