Frequently Asked Questions

1. What’s the status of efforts by the American Federation of Teachers to form a union for graduate students at Penn?

The American Federation of Teachers (the AFT) is one of the two largest unions representing K-12 public school teachers, classroom aides, clerks, secretaries and other paraprofessionals. In recent years, the AFT has launched a campaign to expand beyond its experienced role in organizing public employees in basic and secondary education. It has moved into higher education by seeking to unionize graduate students in colleges and universities across the nation. Graduate Employees Together UPenn (or “GET-UP”) is the graduate student labor organization founded and funded by the AFT to organize graduate students at Penn.

At the beginning of the 2001-2002 academic year, GET-UP started to circulate union authorization cards among graduate students for signature. The signed cards are typically used to establish the necessary showing of support for the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to hold a representation election. In the middle of mid-winter break last year, GET-UP used these signed cards to file a petition with the NLRB seeking recognition as the union representative for certain Penn graduate students.

The NLRB followed its normal procedure and scheduled a hearing that began in the middle of January 2002. Because of the novel legal questions presented, the particular circumstances of graduate students at Penn, and GET-UP’s repeated changes in the scope of the bargaining unit it was seeking, the hearing lasted until the middle of March 2002. GET-UP and Penn filed briefs with the NLRB in the middle of April 2002.

On November 21, the National Labor Relations Board's Regional Director issued a Decision and Direction of Election finding that certain groups of graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania are employees when they are teaching and research assistants at the University. The NLRB authorized an election to determine if a majority of these graduate students desire to be represented by a Union. The election is set for February 26 and 27, 2003 in the Benjamin Franklin room at Houston Hall.

As Penn’s president Judith Rodin and Provost Robert Barchi noted in their statement about the decision:

The complicated decision arbitrarily divides and discriminates among graduate students in determining who would be eligible to vote and who would not. For example, the decision includes some professional master’s degree students in the proposed bargaining unit and excludes other comparable professional master’s degree students. Even the regional director recognizes that there is no basis for the distinction drawn between PhD candidates in the natural sciences (excluded) and the social sciences (included). The regional director says that she is "compelled to follow the NYU case," even though she concedes that she would "otherwise agree with the University's contention that Natural Science RA's should be treated the same way as other RA's." We disagree with this decision and plan to appeal to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, as have Brown, Tufts and Columbia.

Dr. Rodin and Dr. Barchi said it was both inexplicable and unfair to discriminate between different graduate students, depending on their chosen area of scholarship, which is one of the primary reasons why the University will appeal this decision by the Regional Director to the full National Labor Relations Board in Washington. “We are convinced that holding an election in which some graduate students are allowed to vote on the issue of unionization, while others are barred from participation would be unnecessarily divisive. If there is to be a vote, then every Teaching Assistant and Research Assistant should have a voice; not only a few.”

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