June 15, 2017
Thom Carroll/PhillyVoice Staff
The Quadrangle at the University of Pennsylvania.
Graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania made several steps toward unionizing with the American Federation of Teachers in the last year, culminating in a hearing Wednesday between lawyers representing the students before the National Labor Relations Board.
In March, the university's student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported more than a thousand graduate students were members of GET-UP (Graduate Employees Together - University of Pennsylvania), a group dedicated to improving the working conditions and experience of graduate students. Their goal? To achieve union classification for wages and benefits they feel better reflects the research and teaching workload required in their programs.
GET-UP’s website notes that graduate student salaries at Penn are comparable to those at other Ivy League institutions but also brings to light the salary discrepancies between graduate students and leaders of the university.
"President Amy Gutmann is Penn's highest paid employee," the site reads, noting her salary in the 2014-15 academic year was $3,333,878. "In 2016, President Gutmann earned ninety times more than the most highly compensated graduate students; her salary increase alone between 2014 and 2015 would have paid the stipends of sixteen of the most highly compensated graduate students."
The site also points to other graduate students who have attempted to unionize, like at NYU in 2002. Under the first year of unionizing, minimum stipends increased by 38 percent.
Penn’s side of the unionization debate centers on the logic that as graduate students, they are enrolled at the university to learn, and teaching, grading papers and other work conducted outside of research and their own coursework is just a facet of their training. Other graduate students at the university share this thinking, and graduate students currently slated to vote don't include all of the university's schools. The Wharton School of Business and the School of Engineering and Applied Science are not represented in the GET-UP petition.
The Wednesday meeting didn’t mean an official decision from the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), though. Instead, the meeting was to see if the group was eligible for a unionization vote and, if so, when that vote would occur.
NewsWorks reported that some union supporters believe the administration is edging toward delay with the decision, which could ultimately result in Penn’s exclusion entirely from the NLRB. There are currently two vacant seats on the NLRB, and with President Donald Trump edging toward filling those slots with Republican officials and giving the NLRB the first Republican majority since 2008, graduate students worry the slow stride toward unionization could come to a halt if they don’t beat Trump to it.
At this point, according to NewsWorks, eligible Penn student workers must take a vote on unionization; first, however, the NLRB must decide who can vote and when that vote will occur. Penn lawyers are currently pushing for a fall vote.
