First came a push to get prospective members to sign cards indicating support, then a petition seeking a campus election and finally a hearing before state labor officials, who ultimately gave that vote the green light.
Now, more than two years after it began, a campaign to organize graduate assistants at the University of Pittsburgh into a labor union finally is in the hands of the students themselves. They will cast ballots over four days starting Monday.
The election covers approximately 2,000 graduate employees who work on the sprawling public research campus in Oakland, the region's largest. It comes amid a flurry of organizing efforts on campuses nationwide.
In February 2017, the effort at Pitt by a student organizing committee to align with the United Steelworkers gathered momentum with the push to secure card signatures from 30 percent or more of the potential bargaining unit, the share needed to petition for an election. They succeeded.
In March of this year, following a lengthy hearing on that petition, the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board ruled that a vote could go forward.
The PLRB decision, in effect, affirmed that the teaching assistants, teaching fellows, graduate assistants and graduate student researchers are employees, entitled to seek union representation. Lawyers for Pitt had argued unsuccessfully that those individuals were first and foremost students without the right to organize.
Issues in the campaign have ranged from economics and transparency in decision-making, to protections for students from harassment in the workplace. In recent days, student representatives have urged peers not to miss a chance to secure better working conditions.
“Your vote is confidential!” read a message in all capital letters posted to the graduate student organizing committee's Twitter feed.
Graduate students say they do vital, if sometimes menial, tasks for a well-heeled institution, yet earn barely enough to survive. They and their representatives also point to a power imbalance between student and supervisor that can impede or derail career pursuits.
Stipends paid at Pitt per semester this year range from $7,720 to $9,830 for graduate assistants, teaching assistants and teaching fellows, and from $7,720 to $10,810 for graduate student researchers, according to university data. Pitt officials have said that once health insurance, tuition and other support are considered, the value to students is well over $40,000.
But some students point to uncertainty in work assignments and in funding availability for their positions, year to year.
Caitlin Schroering, a graduate student researcher and doctoral candidate in sociology, said she belonged to a graduate student union at the University of Florida. Campus unions provide protection against abrupt changes or elimination of benefits as crucial as health coverage.
"I want to see that same security provided to us here at Pitt," she said.
“There is a strong desire to have a mechanism in place where the people who hear your complaints and grievances are not the same people who created them," Jeff Cech, a Steelworkers organizer, said as the card drive progressed on campus back in 2017.
Pitt sees it differently.
Nathan Urban, vice provost for graduate studies, says the university's stipends for graduate assistants are competitive and that raises of late have outpaced those offered to graduate students at some campuses with unions.
“The union would create a third party that would in many cases stand between the ability to work directly with students and the students' ability to work with the university,” he said.
Both sides say the vote has huge implications for the graduate student experience and for Pitt. Both say they want a strong turnout.
The graduate assistant organizing campaign is progressing nearly simultaneously with a Steelworkers' effort to unionize tenured, tenure-stream and adjunct faculty at Pitt.
In 2012, the Steelworkers announced their intent to align with campus workers across Pittsburgh. In the six or so years that followed, they secured the right to represent 300 adjunct faculty at Point Park University and 430 at Robert Morris University. About 80 adjunct faculty in liberal arts at Duquesne University approved a union too, though Duquesne is challenging the election.
The dates and polling locations for next week’s vote identified by Pitt and student organizers are:
Monday and Tuesday in Posvar Hall and Wednesday and Thursday in the O'Hara Student Center. Voting times each day are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @Bschacker
First Published: April 12, 2019, 6:54 p.m.
Updated: April 13, 2019, 12:24 a.m.
