Petition Delivered: Over 2,000 graduate workers demand rights

Today, graduate workers delivered to the Provost’s office our petition demanding Penn admin agree to enshrine strong protections against harassment, discrimination, and abuse in our contract. The petition has been signed by 2,042 graduate workers—the majority of grad workers at Penn—demonstrating our collective power. The list of thousands of our names stretched to almost 50 feet.

Our message is loud and clear: where current policies are failing to meet grad workers’ needs, they must be improved. And where they are working, they must be enshrined in our contract so that the university cannot unilaterally take them away. Penn admin’s most recent counterproposal on this issue does neither of these things; it simply affirms Penn’s existing policies and their unilateral right to change them.

As the university faces political pressure to renege on its commitments to international workers, workers of color, and queer and trans workers, grad workers know that we have to stand together to secure our rights.

What we win in the bargaining room is proportional to the power that we are able to demonstrate outside of it. The petition delivered today is another escalation towards securing a transformative contract that improves our compensation and benefits and upholds our rights. Grad workers have been bargaining for over six months, and yet we are still waiting on initial responses from Penn admin to ten of our article proposals. We look forward to admin’s response to this petition.

The next bargaining session is on Friday, May 2, from 10:30 AM – 4:30 PM in the Sheraton University City. RSVP here and drop by for an hour or two. The more of us who are in the room, the more we can encourage Penn admin to agree to a contract that makes this university a better place to research, teach, and learn.