Graduate employees who serve as research and teaching assistants at the University of Pennsylvania are employees and do have the right to hold an election for collective bargaining, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled. The director's Nov. 21 ruling came 11 months after Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) had filed a petition for an election. GET-UP, which is affiliated with the AFT, and the university had participated in NLRB hearings on the question from Jan. 11 to March 13 of this year.

In her 103-page decision, Dorothy Moore-Duncan relied on two precedents to determine both whether graduate employees at the private university had the right to be represented by a union and who would be eligible to vote. The first was an NLRB decision in 2002 involving New York University teaching assistants. "Similar to NYU, the graduate students and the university mutually benefit from the students' service as TAs," Moore-Duncan found. But, "the university sets the terms of the compensation, including tuition payments, fee waivers, stipends, and health insurance coverage."

The other precedent the regional director relied upon addressed the question of whether graduate employees serving as research assistants in the university's science programs worked for the university if their tuition and stipends were funded by external research grants. Relying on a prior case involving Stanford University, Moore-Duncan excluded science graduate assistants from the unit eligible to vote.

GET-UP had filed cards for 55 percent of a unit of 950 on Dec. 27, 2001. A year later, the unit is closer to 1,000 eligible voters, says AFT national representative Rich Klimmer, and the organizing committee has 60 activists working on specific weekly tasks.

That committee is particularly pleased that the NLRB decision calls for an election in early 2003. The date, expected to fall in February, "maximizes voter turnout and allows time for a full and measured discussion of the issues," says GET-UP spokesperson David Faris, a political science teaching assistant. The biggest issues, he says, are professional respect, compensation commensurate with the work performed and which provides a living wage for the area, and affordable healthcare that covers dependents.

"After all this time spent waiting and fighting the university," Faris adds, "we can't wait to kick the campaign into high gear." [Barbara McKenna]

[November 25, 2002]