Graduate employees at the University of Pennsylvania last week raised the curtain on the final act in their two-year struggle for the right to bargain collectively. On Feb. 26-27, they cast ballots in a National Labor Relations Board election to determine whether the unit of nearly 1,000 would be represented by the AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP).

The NLRB decided in November that the research and teaching assistants are employees and do have the right to vote on the issue of union representation. Since then, GET-UP has garnered support from the community, which has turned out at rallies to cheer on the graduate assistants. The Philadelphia City Council, the Philadelphia Central Labor Council and the Greater Interfaith Council on Worker Justice have passed resolutions backing the union and urging the university to drop its appeal. The week of the election, a majority of eligible graduate employees signed a public petition avowing their intention to vote "yes" for the union.

The votes are impounded, however, while the NLRB considers the appeal the university filed after the board ruled in the union's favor. "The administration has encouraged all graduate students to vote," says GET-UP spokesperson Joanna Kempner. "We are curious to know how they can justify this when they are, at the same time, refusing to have these votes counted."

An exit poll of voters conducted by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the university's undergraduate-produced newspaper, reveals that the majority of Penn's eligible graduate employees voted to unionize. The poll shows that 60.4 percent of those surveyed supported unionization; 35 percent opposed it and 4.6 percent would not say.

A large number of challenge ballots were cast in this election as well, due to the administration's encouraging all graduate students to vote, whether or not the NLRB had defined them as eligible to be part of the unit. Even counting those votes, which the poll shows run heavily in opposition to a union, the Daily Pennsylvanian poll shows a majority of votes in the election were cast for GET-UP. [Barbara McKenna]

[March 4, 2003]