Staff Editorial: Clear up the confusion

Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania's decision to cut the number of graduate students within its constituency is a troubling development.

In choosing to exclude professional students and those studying the natural sciences in their petition before the National Labor Relations Board, GET-UP, the group seeking to unionize Penn's graduate students, argues that it is following the precedents set in NLRB decisions at New York and Brown universities.

It is true that in those previous rulings, professional students were not included in the bargaining group. But at Penn, where professional school students account for well over 6,000 of Penn's approximately 10,000 graduate students, the decision is unfair and unfortunate.

Understandably, during the NLRB hearings, GET-UP will clarify and refine its petition to hold union elections. But Monday's action demonstrates that its leaders did not have a clear vision of whom it sought to represent when it brought that petition to the NLRB.

On its Web site, GET-UP claims that it seeks to be the "voice in deciding quality-of-life issues that affect you and all other Penn graduate student employees."

When deciding which students it will represent, GET-UP must be very careful that it both knows and acts in the interests of Penn's graduate student community as a whole. It is not clear that a majority of these students support unionization, and GET-UP must not change its mission simply to conform with precedent or to eliminate those sections of the community where they are likely to encounter the most opposition.

Whether there is to be a graduate student union here at Penn is for the graduate students to decide. But by dramatically decreasing the number of students it seeks to represent for reasons that are less than clear, GET-UP threatens its own legitimacy and could deprive the excluded groups of the possible benefits of unionization.

In light of the confusion resulting from Monday's hearing, GET-UP must redouble its efforts to make clear what its goals are and whom exactly it represents.

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