FACULTY MEMBERS COMMENT ON GRADUATE STUDENT UNIONIZATION

A Letter to Graduate Students in Linguistics from Graduate Chair,
Professor Donald Ringe

On Wednesday, Feb. 26, and Thursday, Feb. 27, there will be an election to determine whether graduate students at Penn will unionize…. The result will be determined by a simple majority of those voting, but it will bind all grad students who could belong to such a union. This is the most important decision you will make while at Penn, because it will affect the entire community for the foreseeable future. From my perspective as graduate chair there are two areas of concern.

FIRST, we do not want a decision that will have a major impact on our program to be made by non-linguists. We can’t do anything about the fact that voting graduate students in some other programs are much more numerous—that’s just the breaks. What you can do is vote if you are eligible (see below), and I strongly urge you all to vote no matter what your opinions are. EVERY VOTE COUNTS….

SECONDLY, we do not want a decision that will have a major impact on our program to be made by voters who are not well informed. I expect that both sides in this debate will be bombarding you with information (beginning Monday), but you should also do some digging on your own rather than just listen to what the partisans think is important. Here are some suggestions:

I believe that GET-UP has a website; so does the University (accessible through its main web page). You ought to look at both. The University has a lot of hard information and some comparative data in the “Frequently Asked Questions” section, though of course it’s presented from their point of view. (The administration is saying up front that it thinks unionization would be a bad idea.) In addition, you can take a look at the NYU grad student union contract on that university’s web site (see below on its relevance).

People of various persuasions will be trying to tell you that if we have a grad student union at Penn things will be thus and so. Many such statements are not credible, for the following reason. If a grad student union is formed, there will have to be a negotiated labor contract, which will govern conditions of grad student employment, and until such a contract is negotiated, no one can say what most of the details will be. To get some idea (some!) of what it might be like, the obvious thing to do is go look at comparable contracts. Unfortunately there is only one negotiated under Federal labor law—the body of law that would govern Penn’s contract —and that’s the one at NYU, currently in its first year; all the others in existence are at state universities and conform to various bodies of state labor law. (The union that proposes to represent Penn’s grad students already represents those at Temple, so you can get some idea how they operate by looking at that case; but Temple is state-affiliated, so the relevant laws are different.)

One example in its shakedown year isn’t much, but it’s definitely better than nothing; still, conclusions have to be drawn with caution. (There would be less need to speculate if the grad students at Cornell, which is somewhat more like Penn, had voted to unionize; but they voted not to by a more than 2-to-1 margin.)

On the other hand, some definite statements about what would happen if we had a grad student union can be made.

Most obviously, we would all be operating under Federal labor law, which was devised for industrial unions and is not very flexible. That’s the reality, and as far as I can see, it trumps any theoretical considerations about what unionization ought to be like or represent.

The labor contract negotiated between the union and the University would be binding on all TA’s, RA’s, etc. That means that in service years the union would effectively represent you whether you wanted it to or not. So far as I can see, that means that if we do have a grad student union, you’d be much better off being active in it and trying to set, or at least influence, its policy—again, whether you felt inclined to do so or not.

Grad students would move in and out of the union as they passed from nonservice years to service years and back again; that’s how it works at NYU, and that’s what the National Labor Relations Board ruled for Penn.

If there are fees for joining and leaving this particular union (the American Federation of Teachers), that would be relevant, but the details are still up in the air; for instance, the union might allow grad students to remain members even when not TAing, though they would not be subject to the labor contract in those years. We just don’t know.

In the years in which they were governed by the labor contract, grad students would pay the full city wage tax, because they would be employees of a business operating within Philadelphia. There would presumably have to be two different student health plans, because the current plan does not meet the legal specifications for unionized employees, and grad students would move from plan to plan as appropriate. The two would presumably be at least a little different, but at this point no one knows exactly how, because the union plan would be part of a negotiated contract.

There would certainly be union dues of some sort; there are at Temple (see the University’s FAQ page).

Legally well-informed parties say that they anticipate no difficulties or complications regarding the visas of students from abroad if we have a grad student union, and apparently there have been none at NYU. That much seems clear to me. You should get as much information as you can from all available sources before the election.

FINALLY, there are two tangential matters. To everyone’s relief, the legal “pendency period” will end with the election, and Penn will be able to adjust stipends from “competitive necessity;” so the freeze on stipend increases will end.

Secondly, the University has filed a request to be allowed to appeal the NLRB’s decision regarding the election, just as Brown, Columbia, and Tufts have done.

(At least one ground for the appeal is the fact that grad students in the hard sciences have been excluded from the bargaining unit, as per GET-UP’s petition, and therefore from the election. The University says that that is arbitrary and unfair. All grad students were allowed to vote at Cornell.)

If the request is granted (and it probably will be), the University will certainly appeal; in that case the uncounted ballots will be sealed pending the appeal, and we probably won’t know the outcome for a year or so. That means, in effect, that you will be making the unionization decision mostly for the grad students of the future. Please take it very seriously and vote as conscientiously as possible...

Dr. Donald Ringe,
Graduate Chair, Linguistics