Perspective: Unionization: The people behind the debate

Whether they see themselves as fighting a necessary battle for what's right and just or just want to be left alone, Penn's 10,000 graduate students have been in the spotlight, silhouetted by tracer fire and targeting-flares in the continuing struggle over unionization. But somewhere along the way, the ideas and ideologies have obscured the human faces of the very people over whom this war is being waged. These are three of those people. Black doesn't seem like the best camouflage for an environment bordered by neon-yellow walls and chrome light fixtures. Still, from her black boots to her black sweater and stylish black glasses, Francesca Bregoli blends effortlessly into the trendy Bucks County crowd. "I actually have meetings here sometimes," the second-year history doctoral candidate says on the way in, a testament to the office-space crunch in College Hall. Though the department returned to College Hall over a year ago, redistributed furniture and space have yet to settle. After completing her undergraduate degree in Venice, quirks in the Italian admissions system for graduate programs led her to choose to study abroad. The lure of Penn's Center for Judaic Studies wooed Bregoli both from Manhattan and from three other graduate programs' offers of admission. Making the transition from museum work, Bregoli admits to missing the more concrete rewards of preparing exhibitions. "When I was working as a curator, you prepare an exhibition..., people see it, it's over," Bregoli remembers. "As a grad student, your work never ends ---- either you're reading or you're writing," Bregoli says, comparing her current life to her past career. "It's not a 9-to-5 job." Still, Bregoli doesn't regret the choice. Even TA-ing a survey course outside of her field, Bregoli finds satisfaction in her new calling. "It can be a very exciting and challenging opportunity... to teach that history can be fun, to be as engaging as possible and leave some lasting impressions," Bregoli enthuses. As cleverly placed speakers bounce driving retro beats off the hardwood counters and floors, it becomes clear that life as an international student on a graduate stipend is not all peaches, cream and fulfillment. "My greatest fear is getting sick or injured," Bregoli confides. "I pray not to have dental problems here." Though health coverage for graduate students has improved, dental and eye care remain prohibitively expensive. "On the SAS minimum of $14,000 -- $1,100 a month -- half goes for rent, the rest for food and books," Bregoli explains, demonstrating the devastating effect emergency healthcare would have on a budget that is almost cracked by start of semester course-book purchases alone. And on an ideological level, Bregoli, "a strong believer in personal responsibility," remains frustrated with the unionization debate. "I don't like having things imposed on me," Bregoli posits. "It would have been nice to have the vote and let students decide." Breezily describing her political past, summing up her activities as an undergraduate with a nonchalant admission that she and her colleagues "did take over the university for a while, took over a few rooms and sort of occupied them," Bregoli was immediately drawn to Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania. "There seems to be a... decision not to listen from the administration," Bregoli says, frustrated that the process has not been more constructive. Originally hoping that "unionization at Penn could help make for a better teaching experience, a better environment, not as a question of more money but more in terms of being recognized as a professional," Bregoli continues to support the efforts of her colleagues. But her own experience has been positively positive. "The professor I work with calls us colleagues, treats us as peers," Bregoli says. "That's really all we want." Heading toward her Center City home, Bregoli fades into the Sansom Street night. But some, despite the administration's wishes, won't just fade away. • From College Hall's perspective, Ed Webb has the resume of a troublemaker. Yet the advocacy coordinator and founder of Graduate Parents at Penn and onetime spokesperson for GET-UP, considers himself content. "I'm having a good time," he says. "I really want to emphasize that." Sitting comfortably in his kitchen, in the home he and his wife purchased to accommodate their second child, the pony-tailed, third-year political science doctoral candidate is at ease, a cordial host. Over dishes of homemade apple crumble, Webb explains what brought him from a career in the British Diplomatic Service to Penn, from London and Cairo to West Philadelphia. The life of a diplomat is unpredictable. "You could end up in Port Moresby, the gang-rape capital of the world," Webb continues, glancing at the crackling baby monitor on the kitchen counter. "Especially with a family, that's not the kind of chance you want to take," he says. After an eight-year career that saw him rise from college recruit to head of the Central Asia and South Caucasus Section, Webb traded his "dream job," embassy housing, international lifestyle and all, for a graduate stipend and the chance to study again. Now, settled into a family neighborhood on 27th Street, Webb has been putting the skills he honed as a diplomat to uses of which the University administration is not entirely supportive ---- advocating for graduate students with children in particular. "It's a blind spot," Webb maintains. "They don't even know how many people at Penn have child dependents." Webb also notes the unexplained cessation of family housing programs the year of his matriculation, the paucity of affordable on-campus childcare and the problem of family healthcare. "Let's say you're on a stipend of $14,000, the SAS minimum," Webb offers. "Healthcare with two or more dependents costs $7,000 -- half your income." At least Webb accumulated some savings during his earlier career, money that made the down payment on his house possible. His wife, Francesca Amendolia, also supplements the family's income. Dividing the childcare between them, their position is "relatively secure." But Webb, green card in hand, is one of the lucky ones. He is free to work any U.S. job, as is his wife, a New Yorker. On a student visa, international students are largely forbidden to work off campus. Their spouses would likely not be allowed to work at all. Either way, supporting a family complicates the lives of "hundreds of Penn graduate and professional students," according to Webb. "I founded Grad Parents at Penn to give a voice and a community to these people," Webb says. "Something that I've been hearing muttered is 'What are these people doing having children in graduate school?'" Webb adds incredulously. Given the University's preference for candidates with work experience in their fields, Webb wonders at the administration's inability to understand that such people tend to "have gathered a few family members along the way." As a stranger's presence in the kitchen begins to unnerve Webb's son Daniel, the interview pauses until the preschooler is mollified by a pad, pencil and page of stickers that let him, too, play reporter. Standing, holding 4-month-old Helena, who has since decided to wake up and make her presence known over the monitor, Webb insists that he has no illusions about the lifestyle of a graduate parent, paying for diapers and formula instead of blacklights and beer. "But is this a corporation that produces degrees, or is it a community?" he asks, voice rising. "If it's the latter, then the welfare of its members and their families should matter." Recalling meetings with administrators, Webb briefly vents his frustration. "Penn has this habit.... They say, 'Well, what do other schools do?'" Webb's response is succinct -- "What's the right thing to do?" But for some, the answer doesn't include the words "collective bargaining." • Since graduating from Cornell in 2000 and becoming an Asian and Middle Eastern studies doctoral candidate that same year, Max Dionisio has been as loud a student voice against unionization as Penn has yet seen. Wary of GET-UP's claims and convinced that graduate student unionization is inappropriate both for Penn and universities in general, Dionisio has risked pariah status, publicly broadcasting his skeptical take on the proposed union. Planted at a study table in the Graduate Student Center on Locust Walk, he describes running an anti-unionization campaign ---- alone. "We don't have money from the union... and we're not the University with their resources," he says. "So how do you get your message out there?" Apparently, you don't. "In this debate, there's only been two voices," he notes. "The voice of anti-union students -- who are anti-union for different reasons -- has gone unheard." Asked why there is no formal anti-union student group, as was formed at Cornell and Brown, Dionisio describes how difficult it is standing in the cold, lonely no-man's land between the AFT-supported GET-UP and the sheer muscle of the Penn administration. "Speaking as the guy who tried to start [such a group], I encountered a lot of apathy, people who were only willing to jump in once there was an organization already in place," he explains. "I asked the guys at Brown what they did," Dionisio recalls. "They told me, 'Tough it out.'" Easy as it is to give such advice, fitting an anti-union campaign into a lone grad student's schedule between classes, grading, teaching and research is about as pleasant and feasible a prospect as passing an elephant-sized gall stone. With the group he formed against the union disbanded and time running out, it may be "too late for any kind of unified opposition voice" besides the administration. And that's what worries him. Fighting to bargain collectively, the unit will struggle to meet the diverse needs of its constituents, Dionisio believes. "A lot of people who want to join the union aren't doing it for the same reasons," he says. Meeting the needs of a father who has to find affordable child care to free up time to study Japanese and a single political scientist stuck with an unreasonable workload through one contract would be challenging to say the least. Whatever their positions, few students are willing to risk publicizing them. "They feel that their actual social lives, their interaction with their colleagues would be jeopardized," Dionisio continues, modestly failing to point out that he himself was brave enough to stand alone. Still, with the Feb. 26 election start-date looming large, apathy seems to be dissolving. "People are suddenly realizing this is really happening," Dionisio says. Reddening visibly at the thought of a strike, as has happened at grad unions at state universities, Dionisio voices his disgust for people willing to use undergraduates as a bargaining tool. "What does it say when teachers walk out on students?" he asks. Dionisio is frustrated that the situation has reached this point at all. "It's like Bush and Iraq," he says. "War is never inevitable, except when everything else has fallen apart... GAPSA, GSAC, SHIAC ---- I would like to see people coming to those bodies and utilizing them. "How out of hand is this going to get? We have no idea." Henry Kissinger once quipped that university politics are vicious because the stakes are so small. For a man who helped send men to die in the jungles of Vietnam, bickering over pay and work status in ivory towers probably isn't going to inspire waves of empathy. While the unionization process has yet to demand blood sacrifice, the stakes are no smaller than Ed Webb's children, Francesca Bregoli's health or Max Dionisio's future.

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