Graduate employees at the University of Pennsylvania marched across campus on Dec. 8 to deliver a petition and send a message to the well-endowed university: They are fed up with inadequate healthcare coverage and demand healthcare for all employees by the start of the next academic year.

The marchers, part of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania/AFT (GET-UP), have been working for five years to secure the university's recognition of GET-UP as the bargaining agent for the graduate assistants. The university president, Amy Gutmann, has refused to meet with them and on this occasion refused to come out and accept the petition, signed by 350 graduate students. The 75 marchers were joined by 50 AFT staff and unionists who were in Philadelphia for the AFT Collective Bargaining Conference and by 20 members of Jobs With Justice, a national workers rights group.

This was GET-UP's first march of the year, and was timed to coincide with International Human Rights Day events. The lack of adequate healthcare coverage is a real hardship for the graduate assistants and their families. While the university provides generous coverage to some of its employees, a grad employee with one dependent has to pay a $5,717 premium for the Penn Student Insurance Plan, says GET-UP, and that doesn't cover all basic services nor vision or dental benefits.

Gaining adequate healthcare coverage is one concern of GET-UP, but gaining union recognition and a voice in the workplace is the overriding goal. Along with a sister union at New York University, GET-UP has been fighting for voluntary recognition despite a Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board ruling in 2004 that graduate employees at private universities are students and don't have the right to unionize. [Barbara McKenna/Photo by Steve Porter]

December 21, 2005