Lauren Silver and Elizabeth Williamson: GET-UP and its history

For almost three years now, we have struggled to build a union of graduate employees at Penn. It all began with small dinners and conversations among teaching and research assistants. We were energized as we learned about campaigns on other campuses and about the 30-year history of graduate employees organizing at such prestigious institutions as Michigan, Wisconsin and Berkeley. Each discussion reinforced our initial sense that collective bargaining held the greatest promise of attaining professional compensation, adequate and affordable healthcare, appropriate and sensible workloads and a voice at work. So we organized and picked a name -- Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) -- symbolizing our core belief: We could improve our lives and our university by working together. Armed with knowledge of the challenges faced by the campaigns that preceded us, we interviewed three national unions to see if one would give us an organizing grant. We chose to affiliate with the American Federation of Teachers because of AFT's long-standing dedication to opportunity, quality and accountability in higher education, its position as the largest organization of higher education professionals in the nation and its commitment to local autonomy. The latter was particularly important, since we are deeply committed to participatory democracy. Time and again, a resounding majority of our peers have supported the campaign. Moreover, hundreds of community members, faculty, undergraduates, religious leaders, labor leaders and politicians have rallied to our cause. We were thrilled in late November when the National Labor Relations Board affirmed once again its view that graduate students who perform teaching and some research tasks are indeed employees with the right to choose union representation. From our authorization card drive in fall 2001 through our Vote Yes petition campaign that ends this week, we have demonstrated unequivocal majority support for unionization at Penn. Sadly, but predictably, the University administration has conducted an anti-union campaign worthy of a multibillion-dollar corporation. We've been "thinking about it" for nearly three years, researching the results of unionization on 30 other research university campuses and talking to our friends and colleagues on these campuses, and we have concluded that collective bargaining can make Penn a better place for graduate employees and undergraduates. Our movement has grown stronger and deeper. We are poised to win the representation election with an absolute majority of eligible voters. We want to sit down with the administration soon thereafter and bargain a fair contract. In 1938, Albert Einstein, a charter member of the Princeton Federation of Teachers/AFT 552, called "for an organization of intellectual workers." "The intellectual worker, due to his lack of organization," Einstein observed, "is less well-protected against arbitrariness and exploitation." Unfortunately, Einstein's warning was prophetic, manifested in the exploding population of underpaid adjuncts and the increasing use of part-time, non-tenure track teachers and researchers. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, there were about 3.6 full-time faculty for every part-timer in 1970; in 1997, the ratio was 1.35 to 1 -- and this figure excludes teaching and research assistants, of which there were 125,000 in 1997. We believe, as Einstein did, that empowering scholars through collective bargaining is the best defense against homogenizing corporate practices that threaten the last vestiges of academic freedom. Last weekend, over two feet of snow fell in Philadelphia in the worst blizzard of recent memory. Dozens of our members were out there -- braving the wind and the cold -- to reach voters to get them voting information. What has driven us? A simple hope, made realistic given the outstanding success of graduate employee locals over the past three decades, that this university can be a better place to work and learn when the graduate employees are able to speak for themselves, given genuine respect, genuine collegiality and the opportunity to bargain collectively. Hundreds of people have given an enormous amount of time and energy to this campaign, and we are excited about what lies ahead. Turning out to the polls on Wednesday and Thursday to vote yes is the next step. Together, we will make Penn a better place. Lauren Silver and Elizabeth Williamson are the co-chairwomen of Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania.

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