In the face of resistance from the two largest public university systems in Pennsylvania, graduate employees trying to organize unions there are finding their strength--and raising their voices.

At Pennsylvania State University, the Graduate and Fixed-Term Employees Organization/AFT (GFTEO) has spent the semester building its base of volunteer organizers in departments campuswide. The unit members, which might number up to 3,000, have a wide range of working conditions to confront, says Rich Klimmer, AFT national representative in charge of Pennsylvania graduate employee organizing.

"You go into departments where they are using boxes for desks, where there is one phone for 12 to 14 people. It's not what you expect to see at a comprehensive land-grant institution."

But while working conditions are a concern, the biggest issue for GFTEO is finding a means to participate in decision-making, many say. "The most important decisions in your employment life are made, and you're not in on the conversation," Klimmer notes. At Penn State, the issue of health insurance is a good example of this. The administration has said it will improve graduate employees' benefits on the model offered to faculty. But faculty, who are not unionized, are not happy with their health insurance either.

Another issue is compensation. The university is extremely protective of financial information. In October, however, the graduate employees scored a coup when they got access to top managers' salary data from a Web site of nonprofit organizations and through tax records. By releasing the data, the GFTEO forced the university to go public with information it had not shared since 1994. It showed that the Penn State president's salary had increased by 25 percent in just four years--to $312,504 plus benefits, making him one of the highest paid presidents in the country.

The data also showed that in a year when undergraduate tuition increased 8 percent, top managers got raises of 9 percent. Meanwhile, graduate employees, who teach a large percentage of undergraduate courses, were being forced to teach outside their primary disciplines with no preparation.

At the University of Pennsylvania, the Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) are in the midst of an active card collection drive. This fall, they experienced more anti-union pressure from the administration, which sent a letter to the university's 10,000 graduate students outlining the bad things that would happen if they signed union authorization cards. Like GFTEO, GET-UP is unionizing for better working conditions, pay and a voice in decision-making.

At research institutions, "everyplace you look you see the number of teaching assistants is increasing and the number of full-time, tenure-track faculty is decreasing," says Klimmer. The reason, he believes, is because universities are running "intellectual sweatshops," with scant regard for the prospects of those graduate students whose careers depend on the university work and study.

For the graduate employees in Pennsylvania who are fighting to build their unions, "this is the first step in the fight that will determine their whole career," Klimmer notes.

For the union, quality and accountability issues figure into graduate employees' desire for representation. Having a more open administration is one goal in addressing quality concerns.

The Professional Staff Congress/AFT, which represents faculty and academic staff at the City University of New York, is in the midst of rounding up adjunct faculty and renewing their say and role in the union. Since September, the PSC has added 1,200 new members to the 800 who already belonged to the union. (In any given semester, more than 6,000 adjunct faculty teach at the university.)

CUNY adjuncts have always been part of the bargaining unit, and their interests have been represented in the contract to some degree. Yet until this year, the union has chosen not to exercise its right to collect agency fee from the adjuncts, as it has from the full-time faculty. As a result, the adjuncts have tended not to be too involved in the union.

Last spring, after an election where part-timers played a major role in turning over the PSC leadership, the new leaders voted to implement agency fee. In the following months, the union notified adjuncts, talked to them about the meaning of the change, and began deducting the fee in September. Most adjuncts were excited by the change, especially when the members saw union bargaining proposals that had adjunct issues incorporated, says Mary Ann Carlese, PSC associate executive director.

Under the old contract, part-time faculty got pay increases, some health benefits, and a grievance and arbitration procedure; now the union is seeking better gains such as pay equity, some family coverage in the health plan and other benefits.

More important, the swell in membership is giving adjuncts a role in the structure of the union and a strong voice in its decision-making process. The union leadership let adjuncts know that the union had implemented agency fee with the goal of getting more adjuncts involved in the union--not to raise money.

Dealing with the issues raised by the university's increasing reliance on a contingent work force "is a fight for the survival of the profession," Barbara Bowen, PSC president, told the PSC newspaper, the Clarion. "Nothing has undermined salaries and conditions for full-time faculty more than the exploitation of part-timers. We must remove management's incentive to hire underpaid part-timers rather than investing in full-time faculty."

A bill signed in October by California Gov. Gray Davis gives community college classified-employee unions in the state--many of them AFT affiliates--the unquestioned role as the voice of their members in shared governance on campus.S.B. 235, which goes into effect in January, puts into law what has been common practice in many, but not all, California community colleges. It says that when a classified staff representative is to serve on a college or district "task force, committee or other governance group," the employees' exclusive representative appoints the member to serve. The problem on some campuses is the existence of "classified senates," advisory groups with no real representative power that some college administrators would rather deal with than the elected bargaining agent. The legislation permits local governing boards to consult with non-union organizations, but does not allow these organizations' members to get release time or formal representation on various campus committees.

The legislation makes clear that classified employee unions are "the most appropriate elected body to select classified representatives to governance bodies," the California Federation of Teachers wrote to Gov. Davis in urging him to sign the bill.

At Antelope Valley Community College, the AFT-affiliated classified union was already serving the role outlined in the new law. But, local president Sylvia Brown says, a group of non-union classified employees recently tried to establish a classified senate on campus. Brown welcomes the new law because it makes clear that any such senate would have limited power and end up being more of a social club than a representative group. "I told them to join the union and volunteer to help us," she says. Brown adds that there are about 10 committees or other bodies on her campus that include a classified representative.