Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) demonstrated on Feb. 26 to mark the fourth anniversary of the day they voted in a National Labor Relations Board-sponsored election on the question of bargaining. After a university appeal of the election, the votes were impounded, never to be released. In 2004, the NLRB reversed an earlier ruling that had found grad employees at private institutions had the right to bargain. The reversal concluded that graduate employees at Brown University were students, not workers, and so could not bargain working conditions.

Bottom line: GET-UP got snared in an anti-union stalling maneuver that paid off for the employer when a board made up of political appointees limited the political climate for labor.

But, perhaps to the employer's surprise, GET-UP hasn't gone away. While very few of the faces in the union are the same as when it formed in 2001 and fought for the election in 2004, the determination remains. GET-UP wants to talk to Penn president Amy Gutmann and seek discussion of the issues it says aren't being handled by the campus graduate student organizations.  Gutmann, who has been president for two years, won't meet, which is a reneging of a promise she made when she first came to campus.

To drive the point home, the graduate employees constructed a 10-foot puppet with Gutmann's signature blond hairdo and chased it across campus. "Why is Amy Gutmann running away?" read some of the signs the 70 demonstrating students held alongside other signs asking the university to discuss such issues as adequate stipend increases, adequate health benefits, including dependent coverage, and the right of graduate employees to be recognized as a union. GET-UP chair Julie Kruidenier delivered a letter signed by GET-UP officers, asking the president to meet with the group to discuss these and other issues.

On the same day that GET-UP was acting up in Pennsylvania, the AFL-CIO and the United Auto Workers filed a complaint against the U.S. government with the United Nation's International Labor Organization. It alleges that the NLRB ruling on Brown University violates two provisions of the ILO Conventions regarding fundamental rights of teaching assistants. It asks the ILO to condemn the Brown University ruling, "the latest attempt by the Bush board to strip working people of the right to come together to bargain with their employers for a better life."

A few days later, the U.S. House passed the historic Employee Free Choice Act, which would prevent exactly the kind of union-busting tactics as have taken place at Penn and at Brown. [Barbara McKenna]

March 1, 2007