The Union Fight at Penn

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Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania and United RAs at Penn are uniting efforts to push for worker’s rights.
Credit: Sydney Curran

substantially updated from 2024, by Anonymous, 2025

Join Your Union Now!

From the start of the day, when the lights turn on, to the end, when everyone goes home, it is labor that keeps the University of Pennsylvania alive. The collective effort of thousands of different Penn employees is what creates the stellar education and undergraduate experience; it’s what creates the knowledge, innovations, and ideas Penn boasts about; and it’s what pays our president, Larry J. Jameson’s, six million dollar salary. Nevertheless, despite all Penn’s posturing as benevolent and its non-profit status, the administration pushes back against the workers who create our university at every turn. It’s only right, then, that the past few years have seen a wave of unionization and collective bargaining—people taking what they deserve and securing their livelihoods.

This wave has flooded across the entire University. Just this summer, postdoctoral students won their union, RAPUP-UAW, and the ability to bargain collectively while the Penn Museum’s staff authorized a strike, ultimately securing them a new contract. Our graduate students and librarians, on the other hand, are in the throes of protracted contract negotiations. And the Housekeepers, Resident Assistants, Dining Staff, and Penn Medicine’s Interns, Residents, and Fellows are reaping the rewards of their successful campaigns of years previous, although the RAs have had to fight some contract violations. 

The Disorientation Guide spoke to Penn Libraries United (PLU) and GETUP-UAW (Graduate Employees Together at the University of Pennsylvania – UAW), who are both in the midst of their contract negotiations, about their ongoing fight. GET-UP, some 4,000 student workers, who teach classes or work in labs, are fighting “to improve our compensation and benefits and uphold our rights—making Penn a better place to research, teach, and learn for everyone.” Towards this end, GET-UP, like all unions, must bargain with the employer. Bargaining fights over contracts, what every union member signs for their employment, and they’re fought article by article, word by word. All this fighting must then be ratified by the workers, union members. So far, since bargaining began on October 2024, administration and GET-UP have agreed on 11 of 35 articles as of July 2025. Of primary importance, is not only economic benefits but also protections for immigrant and international workers, who are critical for a healthy intellectual community. “While Penn caves to political pressure,” GET-UP wrote us, referring to Penn’s disappointing non-committal guarantees to international students and disgraceful apology about transgender athletes, “we stand up for ourselves and each other to defend against the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrant workers and higher education institutions.”

PLU, on the other hand, which is not just librarians but also “archivists, application developers, curators, communications workers, and more” is trying to win “a transparent promotion process, a fair pay scale, protected remote work, protections from AI, and generally a voice at the table!” For them, bargaining began in January 2025, and currently they are negotiating the “non-economic” parts of the contract. This includes “unjust discipline and firings, protection from unreasonable outsourcing to sub-contractors, and guardrails protecting bargaining unit work.”

Whether its job security, DEI, or threats from AI and ICE, the point is clear: if they are not forced, Penn will not protect anything but their bottom line. Worse, Penn does everything in its power to prevent its employees from exercising any power. For example, before a union can bargain with administration for wages or better conditions, it first has to be recognized by the employer. Recognition can come in two ways: either an employer can choose to voluntarily recognize the new labor union, or they can be forced to by the National Labor Relation Board, a federal agency that supervises union elections and investigates unfair labor practices. Refusal by an employer to recognize a union of their own volition makes the process far more difficult. In recent memory, The University of Pennsylvania has never voluntarily recognized a union, refusing to recognize PLU, the Medical Residents, GET-UP, RAPUP, or the RA union.

They spread myths and lies about unionization to workers through anti-union websites, and sowed dissent and tension within the faculty. They claimed that RAs aren’t actually employees despite old crystal clear contracts and altered their financial aid awards in retaliation for organizing. They stall, delay, and push back recognition votes and negotiations.

Penn effectively stifled GET-UP for over twenty years using these tactics. GET-UP’s first effort to unionize began in 2001, but fell apart after Penn refused to count the results of a 2003 vote to recognize the union for one and a half years before the NLRB ended the effort when it ruled that graduate workers at private universities do not have the right to unionize. In 2016, when the NLRB reversed that ruling, a new effort to unionize began. This effort withdrew their petition in 2018.  Finally, a new GET-UP went public with an organizing drive in 2023. Penn once again tried to delay this process by contesting exactly which graduate workers, at which school, in which year of the program, really counted as employees. While this delayed the process, with recent NLRB rule changes, Penn could not stop GET-UP from successfully filing for an election in May of 2023. Likewise they could not stop the RAs, Library, Medical, Museum, and now Postdoctoral workers.

With consistent, collective, and united effort, this wave of unionization has and continues to wash over Penn. Through protests, strikes, and mass petitions, it takes everyone to win. If you are an employee, fill out the Penn pay survey and join your union (see below) or if you don’t have one, start talking to your coworkers about organizing one. Otherwise, follow the unions on social media (GET-UP, PLU, Penn Museum, RAs, Medical), show up to their rallies, talk with employees, and voice your support wherever you can. To undergraduates, amid their negotiations and in twin voices, PLU and GET-UP emphasized the value of their work and what noticing and vocalizing that means: respectively, “visiting the library, getting to know library staff, and communicating to faculty and staff that you value our work empowers library staff” and “graduate workers are your TAs and mentors. Whether in seminar or in the lab, we love working with you and teaching you.” PLU continues, “It is harder for administrators to ignore the value of union labor when students, staff, and the community are vocally talking about how they benefit from our work.” And GET-UP finishes, “Our working conditions are your learning conditions; improving our compensation, benefits, and upholding our rights will improve your experience here at Penn.” Together, and only together, can we create a better Penn and a better world.

JOIN YOUR UNION

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  1. Pingback: On-Campus Organizations – Penn Disorientation Guide

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