Campaign to unionize grad students gets hearing

Are the 2,000 University of Pittsburgh graduate assistants who teach, do research and perform other tasks simply students receiving a stipend to defray costs of their education?

Or are they academia’s grunt workers, hired as contract employees to fill classroom and lab jobs for low pay, thus enabling an enormous research university with a multibillion-dollar endowment to reduce operating costs?

The issue is front and center at week-long hearings before the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board that continued Wednesday at the Hilton Garden Inn in Oakland.

In the past, most recently a case involving Penn State graduate assistants, the labor board found that these assistants are in fact employees and thus have the right to seek

to organize as a union.

But Pitt sees it differently and has hired the law firm Ballard Spahr, which represented Penn State and now is arguing that assistants at Pitt do not qualify for union status.

“Our position is that they are students, not employees,” Pitt spokesman Joseph Miksch said Wednesday.

A union organizer, Jeff Cech, said student organizers at the hearing have so far offered a dozen witnesses “who spoke to their job duties, which go well outside the scope of their studies to the extent that some do (teaching assistant) work in other departments.”

He added, “The university’s high-paid lawyers are trying to take away the graduate employees’ right to organize under the Pennsylvania labor board.”

The Pitt Grad Union, affiliated with the United Steelworkers, petitioned the labor board in December for the right to hold an election. The union needed at least 30 percent of people who would be represented to sign union authorization cards, but they got authorization cards from more than 50 percent of the potential bargaining unit, according to Steelworkers officials.

That does not automatically translate into a “yes” vote for joining a union, but filled-out cards are considered a barometer of support for organizing.

Graduate students at Pitt as of last year received stipends per semester ranging from $7,530 to $10,545, not counting benefits, a Pitt spokesman said.

During a campaign stretching back nearly three years, students have said they want greater transparency in the decision-making process that impacts their working conditions, along with protections against discrimination and harassment.

Steelworkers organizers have said students, in resolving workplace disputes, want to be able to turn to those other than supervisors who may have created the workplace grievance.

“It’s our workplace and our future careers,” Beth Shaaban, a doctoral student in epidemiology, told the Post-Gazette as the union card drive progressed last year. “We would like a say in how it works.”

The labor board earlier this year sided with organizing students at Penn State, saying they had a right to hold an election.

But the Coalition of Graduate Employees at Penn State ultimately lost the election.

Its campaign to organize some 3,800 graduate assistants stretched nearly four years.

In campus votes during April, 1,438 graduate assistants at Penn State voted against the proposal and 950 voted for it. Organizers had planned to affiliate with the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the teachers’ union,