Frequently Asked Questions

2. When is the election deciding whether or not to have GET-UP represent graduate students? Who gets to vote ¯ all graduate students, or just some of them?

The Regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has set the election for Penn graduate students to determine whether or not they want a union representing them.

The election will be held on Wednesday, February 26 and Thursday, February 27, 2003 in the Benjamin Franklin Room at Houston Hall. The polls will be open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. both days.

The only students who may vote are those who are potential members of the bargaining unit as determined by the regional director of the NLRB in her November 21 decision involving Penn and GET-UP. (See decision text on-line at: http://www.upenn.edu/grad/unionization/NLRB_decisiontext.html#85) In January, we will be able to determine just who that is and inform you and your fellow graduate students who will be eligible to vote under the NLRB ruling. In the meantime, if you have any questions concerning the election you may call the regional office of the NLRB at 215-597-7601.

It is important to note that the election will be determined by a simple majority of those who vote but the results will bind everyone who is eligible to vote, so every vote matters.

Brown, Tufts and Columbia all have pending appeals in their own cases before the NLRB to determine whether graduate students are employees under the National Labor Relations Act and to seek clarification of an appropriate bargaining unit. Although Tufts, Brown and Columbia have held elections, the NLRB has sealed their uncounted ballots until various appeals in their own cases can also be decided. Cornell is exceptional because the union there sought to represent all of the graduate students and did not try to gerrymander the bargaining unit to try to assure a particular election outcome. At Cornell, where all graduate students were eligible to vote, the graduate students rejected the union by a vote of 1351 to 580.

Like Tufts, Brown and Columbia, Penn has raised before the NLRB important issues about the process for union recognition. Among these is the especially confusing question of just which graduate students GET-UP wants to include or exclude from its proposed bargaining unit and which graduate students would be included or excluded under the NLRB’s ruling of November 21, 2002.

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