What is GET-UP?

GET-UP is the campaign to secure collective bargaining rights for the graduate employees at the University of Pennsylvania.

Collective what now?

Graduate employees are paid a wage and perform important work for the university, but many graduate employees are unhappy with some aspect of their positions. GET-UP is working to give graduate employees a voice in their working conditions.

But I'm not an employee, I'm a student.

If you cash a paycheck, you're an employee. Try staying home when you're supposed to be grading papers, and see how long you're a "student."

Don't we have it pretty good here?

Compared to what? Here are a few things that could be better:

Stipends

Penn has the lowest minimum stipend in the Ivy League. Among local colleges, Temple and Rutgers both have higher minimum stipends. Students receiving the minimum stipend, who live in Philadelphia, spend (on average) $869.75/month on housing, or 57% of their incomes. According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, affordable housing is generally defined as no more than 30% of income.

Health Care

The Penn Student Insurance Plan (PSIP) is has high co-payments and high yearly fees, but doesn't include dental care, vision or affordable dependent coverage. Aetna, who provides services for the PSIP, charges more to cover a single male Penn student than it would cost to insure that student on Blue Cross as an individual. As of the fall of 2007, Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, is not covered by the PSIP, despite evidence that it can reduce a woman's risk of cervical cancer. The PSIP is expensive and doesn't provide services that students need, and it's the graduate employees who suffer.

Grievance Procedures

Graduate employees at Penn, like other employees, sometimes face discrimination or harassment at work. Graduate employees at Penn, however, don't have the legal protection that other employees do. There is no uniform grievance procedure in place for graduate students who have been mistreated by their professors. Often, the policy is for department chairs to handle these issues, even if the department chair is the accused party. Conflicts of interest like this shouldn't exist. Graduate students need all the academic and labor protections that are afforded to faculty and administrators.

How do you tie a Windsor knot?

It's not really the domain of GET-UP, but this is how you tie a Windsor knot: