Jonathan Shazar: On the fringes of employment

It shouldn't be so hard for me to pick sides.

When it comes to unions, I rarely find myself torn between management and labor. I'm a die-hard union supporter. As far as I'm concerned, unions are absolutely necessary in order for workers to get a fair deal from their employers, and the protections that unions offer must be extended beyond the blue collar workers and public servants that now make up most units.

Yet, as Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania continues to fight in a National Labor Relations Board hearing in Center City for the opportunity to hold union elections, I find myself utterly perplexed by the matter.

Graduate student unionization is a polarizing and, to a great extent, intensely ideological issue. It is also far more complex than either GET-UP or the University will admit.

Whether or not a union is in the best interests of graduate students and the University is, and should be, the ultimate question graduate students ask themselves if and when an election happens. But there are a number of more fundamental disagreements bound up in the question of the propriety of a graduate student union.

Unions exist to further the interests of their members, who are wage earners in a certain profession working for a certain individual or company. The very nature of a union requires that its members be employed by a company or group. To put it simply, a union needs employees.

So are graduate students employees?

It's certainly not as cut-and-dry as either extreme presents it. But what's more confusing still is that when you look at it from a purely logical -- and according to the NLRB, a legal -- perspective, there's a troubling situation where a simple movement of words -- a trick of semantics, if you will -- seems to change everything and change nothing at the same time.

When a person is accepted for graduate study at Penn, he or she receives a multi-year aid package which covers tuition and awards a stipend, which the student receives as a direct payment. This is the fellowship.

A student on a fellowship must complete two sets of obligations: those of a student established by each graduate group and those which are specified in the fellowship agreement.

In certain cases, teaching is a part of the graduation requirements for the Ph.D. In others, it is not explicitly a graduation requirement, but is a part of a student's fellowship.

If indeed a teaching requirement is a part of that fellowship, and not explicitly a part of the graduation requirements for the Ph.D, is that not in some way the necessary connection between services rendered and payment that makes someone an employee? It is not clear that simply because a graduate student does some form of work for the University and also receives a check from the University that the two are necessarily connected. This structure, however, would suggest that in order for graduate students to be paid, in order for them to fulfill their fellowship, they must perform a service for the University -- they must teach.

If, however, the University were to make the teaching requirement an academic requirement, that is, to explicitly make it a prerequisite for receiving the Ph.D, it becomes much harder to construe the stipend as a salary. In a sense, the quid pro quo is lost; the division between grant and salary made absolutely explicit. And if there is no longer a direct link between the payment and the service, the relationship necessary in any employer-employee situation is lost.

But fundamentally, what changes here other than the wording of the coursebook and the fellowship agreement?

Effectively nothing. Moving the teaching requirement to the list of academic requirements, which include how many credits Ph.D candidates need and the doctoral dissertation, does not alter the way that the graduate students live and work at Penn.

So why does it matter?

In a strange twist of fate, there seems to be an agreement here between GET-UP and College Hall that it doesn't really matter where the teaching requirement resides.

The administration will argue that the change does not alter the fact that graduate students are students, first and foremost -- that it is their "primary identity," as Deputy Provost Peter Conn calls it.

GET-UP will say that moving a few words from one place to another does not change the fact that they are providing a service to the University that a paid employee, whether that person is a tenured faculty member or a part-time lecturer, would otherwise need to provide, and that they are receiving compensation for it.

There is something keenly uncomfortable about the idea that the definition of "employee" hinges on a legalistic argument about verbal minutiae that do not actually affect anything other than whether the mantle of "worker" can be bestowed upon a group of people. It's hard to accept that what should be so simple a decision is instead so difficult to make.

And it only further complicates the decision that counts -- the union election itself.

Jonathan Shazar is a junior History and Political Science major from Valley Stream, N.Y., amd editorial page editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian.

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