Members insist that GET-UP lost battle, not war

The National Labor Relations Board's July 13 decision declaring that graduate students at Brown University do not have the right to form a union under the protection of the Board brought increased focus on the issue on campus and across the country.

The 3-2 decision was split decisively down party lines, causing many to comment on the partisan decision.

"The majority on the board is quite anti-labor in general," said GET-UP Co-Chairwoman Sayumi Takahashi. The decision has "certainly galvanized us and sort of brought home the partisan structure of the NLRB," Takahashi added. "We're seeing this in the bigger picture of workers' rights."

University Board of Trustees Chair James Riepe observed that the 2001 decision which allowed graduate students at New York University to unionize was similarly partisan -- and a pronounced break with 25 years of NLRB policy.

"In effect it was partisan voting that reversed the 25-year position that the NLRB had taken through both Republican and Democratic administrations," Riepe said. "So it was the 2001 decision that was a departure, and this decision simply put us back where we had been for several decades."

Still, Takahashi noted the changing face of the academic labor movement and the role of graduate student unions within this larger subset of the labor movement in general.

"The thing that is detrimental to intellectual endeavors is not the unionization movement within academia, but in fact the casualization of academic labor," Takahashi said, citing the growing numbers of adjunct and part-time professors across academia, rather than full-time, tenure-track professors.

English professor James English agreed that there is a higher education trend toward more temporary employees.

"If you looked over the last 20-25 years at any major university -- public or private -- in the U.S., you would definitely see a trend toward fewer tenure-track faculty," English said. "We've certainly made an effort in English not to employ adjuncts, but to have our teaching done by standing faculty, or by our own Ph.D. students who are being trained to be standing faculty at other universities."

English said that the problems facing graduate students at other universities are not necessarily akin to those facing Penn graduate students.

"What we have here is a relatively rare and a relatively elite and somewhat anomalous piece of that broader higher education universe," English said. "It's not the typical world of academic labor at all here."

He noted that unions have become important in large-scale Ph.D. programs where students are encouraged to engage in graduate study, not so that they will eventually become professors, but so they can serve as cheap forms of labor for the university at which they study.

"I honestly believe that at some institutions, the doctoral program is so ill-conceived and ill-justified on academic or scholarly merits that all the teaching really is employment rather than training as part of a research degree," English said. "But I think that at places like Penn, quite a lot of teaching is actually necessary and expected in order to get a job and a tenure-track position at a peer institution or at a good college or university English department."

Rich Klimmer, a spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers -- with which GET-UP is affiliated -- said that graduate students are in fact employees in many cases.

"A person may have a job for only six months -- they're still an employee for that six months," Klimmer added. "When you're performing activities under the direction of the employer that are part of the essential services the employee provides to the consumer, and you're paid for it, you're employed.

Riepe said that GET-UP's determination of who should be a part of the union was unfair to many graduate students.

"The group of graduate students that were made eligible [to vote on unionization] was a gerrymandered group that represented just a fraction of all of our Ph.D. students," Riepe said.

However, Klimmer said that GET-UP does not intend to represent all graduate students.

"We're not seeking to organize all graduate students," Klimmer said. "We're seeking to organize all graduate employees, which is a subset of the graduate student population."

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