Jeff Alfred and Jordan Stanger-Ross: Penn's idle threats on health care

A specter is haunting campus -- the specter of unionization. All the powers of College Hall have allied to exorcise it and to protect us from its grasp. Or so we thought after reading the University's recent publications regarding graduate students organizing. We had both liked the idea of a graduate employee union from the start, thinking of it as a new tool to express our interests as members of the Penn community. Taken as a unit, we are a 57-year-old male with a growing and unprintable list of bodily ailments, so healthcare is a particular concern. Is it true, as the pamphlet entitled "Think About It" claims, that we "would likely have higher premiums and more limited benefits" after unionization? With our blood pressures already on the rise, we set out to find an answer. Let's consider the fine print. The pamphlet suggests that worse health coverage would result from a federal law that "would require graduate students to participate in an employee benefit plan covered by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, rather than the Penn Student Insurance Plan." We're no lawyers, but we can't see why coverage under the ERISA would do any harm. The 1974 act claims to "set minimum standards" for health plans and "to provide protection for individuals in these plans." It's hard for us to see why the University's adherence to "minimum standards" would diminish our benefits. Next, the administration's pamphlet suggests that a union would split one class of students -- those designated as "employees" at any given time -- off from the rest. Therefore (so their logic goes) graduate employees would be forced into "such a small plan" that they would have to pay more for less benefit. That worried us enough to call New York University, where graduate students successfully unionized last spring. NYU can be considered a "test case" for our decision here at Penn: it's the first private university to have a graduate student union and has set important legal precedents for our own organizing efforts. In the case of healthcare, the NYU example is especially instructive. The graduate employees there comprise a bargaining unit similar in size to the one proposed at Penn -- about 1000 employees. Furthermore, they negotiated their plan with our current provider, Aetna/Chickering. So we asked NYU graduate students and healthcare administrators whether graduate student coverage had suffered either because of cumbersome federal regulations or a reduced number of plan participants. The answer there was clear: students' health coverage has only gotten better since unionization. The university now pays for NYU student employees' insurance premiums, and their benefits are better than they were before. Furthermore, graduate employees now have free access to special services that were previously offered only to faculty and staff. Even non-employed students have benefited: administrators have raised their level of coverage to meet the standards set by union negotiations. Even with all of this information, something made us uneasy. The pamphlets were still vague and scary. Hearing the good news from NYU was one thing, but what if our administrators intend to play politics with Penn students' health benefits if we vote for a union? Hoping to put our remaining fears to rest, we decided to attend last Thursday's meeting between graduate students concerned about unionization and University President Judith Rodin. There, we told her that the pamphlets had made us nervous and asked a simple question: should we worry that our stipends and especially our health benefits would be reduced if we voted "yes" later this month? On this crucial point, Rodin didn't equivocate: she assured the audience that there was no threat that health benefits and stipends would decline as a result of a pro-union vote. So in the end, our worries of a spectral presence wreaking havoc on our graduate student careers here at Penn vanished. Going into the elections of Feb. 26 and 27, we hope indeed that graduate students can "think about it" without vague threats about healthcare creeping into the picture.

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