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Rally for Graduate Assistants
By Gwendolyn Bradley
AAUP past president Jane Buck was a featured speaker at a February rally in support of the graduate-employee union at the University of Pennsylvania. Buck noted that the AAUP is a strong supporter of the right of graduate employees to engage in collective bargaining if they choose—so strong that both Buck and current AAUP president Cary Nelson were arrested for the cause last spring. She urged Penn president Amy Gutmann to meet with representatives of the union, noting that graduate employees, according to figures gathered from the Penn Web site by the graduate-employee union, now teach more course sections in the School of Arts and Sciences than do tenured and tenure-track faculty. “The only ethically responsible route for the Penn administration,” Buck said, “is to count the ballots cast by its graduate employees in 2003 and, if the majority voted for unionization, to come to the table and engage in good-faith bargaining.”
Regarding the frequent claim of university administrations that graduate students are not employees because they are students whose teaching duties are part of their professional preparation, Buck commented, “A person can simultaneously occupy more than one role. . . . It is both disingenuous and risible to assert that the mentoring relationship is harmed by good faith negotiations about salaries, benefits, and access to fair grievance procedures.”
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