Ivies await rulings on unions

Unique as the Penn experience may be, the process of contested unionization is currently affecting thousands of students nationwide. Though a few months further downstream, Brown and Columbia universities are in the same boat as Penn, as graduate employees and administrators await decisions from the national office of the National Labor Relations Board. "At the moment, it doesn't seem to be a hot issue," said Samuel Brenner, co-president of Brown's Graduate Student Council. "We're all waiting to see what happens so we're not discussing it on a daily basis." As President Bush's appointees to the board take their seats and the backlog of cases only begins to be cracked, relative calm descends over Brown, whose appeal was formally served on Dec. 13, 2001. NLRB policy creates a strange dynamic -- while elections can and do take place given a regional director's blessing, the results cannot be counted until appeals to the national office are resolved. Similar surface calm and continuing tension reign at Columbia, whose administration's appeal has been pending since February 2002. "Things are very, very quiet," said Roosevelt Montas, a ninth-year English doctoral student. "There has been very little movement. Every now and then the organizers will come and hold up signs, but it's very low key." Since Brown's union organizing committee -- assisted by the International Union, United Automobile Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers -- "can't win at the moment and can't lose at the moment," Brenner said he sees the debate to be held in a "deep freeze" as both the administration and the union shift their time and resources elsewhere. While Brenner admitted that "almost everybody" agrees there are serious issues to be addressed -- especially unclear guidelines regulating the teaching assistant workload -- the history doctoral candidate believes that students and administrators at Brown can still be amicable. "The debate here was intense but on the whole, very civilized," Brenner said, noting that since Brown is "such a small community," it tends to enjoy a relatively congenial atmosphere. "We also got a new president, who I think has been doing a very good job" of addressing graduate students' concerns, Brenner said. Some, however, aren't ready to kiss and make up. Forty-three-year-old history doctoral candidate Chris Frazer had already been around the block a few times before deciding to go back to school. Still, the former journalist, photographer, construction worker, short-order cook and auto mechanic claims to have "never encountered" an anti-union campaign as heavy-handed as that of the Brown administration. "They tried to impugn the organizing committee as being anti-foreigner, anti-environment, anti-democratic," Frazer said. "There was a deliberate attempt by the administration and the anti-union committee to cultivate an atmosphere where people were afraid, and where it was impossible to have a clear and reasoned dialogue," Frazer continued. A father of two and a Canadian international student without a green card, Frazer dismissed claims that Brown's unionization debate has been especially congenial, confiding that "a lot of us harbor... bitter feelings toward the administration." "There will be a union here at Brown... one way or another," Frazer said. "They have not dealt seriously with any of the issues that led to the union drive in the first place." Over at Columbia, Montas was stuck in the thick of the debate last year as the school's student caucus president, doing his best to provide neutral ground for an informed exchange of opinions. "I worked very hard to make a real and civilized debate," Montas said, lamenting that both the administration and the pro-union activists made "the overall tone... very propagandistic, generalistic, sloganish." Opinions shifted, however, as elections approached. "Last year when the campaign was in its prime, people's initial response tended to be in favor" of unionization, Montas said. "That changed for a lot of people as elections drew near, as they weighed the positions of both sides rather than the posturing."

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