Our Pledge Not to be Strikebreakers

If you are a Penn employee, join hundreds of colleagues across the university in signing a pledge not to be a strikebreaker.

For over a year, Penn graduate employees (GETUP members) have been bargaining with the Penn administration to win support for international students and fair pay and benefits—proposals that would make Penn a better place to research, teach, and learn. As their strike deadline approaches, administrators can avert a strike by bargaining in good faith and settling a contract. Instead, they are employing a costly anti-union law firm, and they are pressuring faculty to participate in their anti-union campaign by asking us to serve as strikebreakers. You can read more about unionization at Penn from AAUP-Penn’s perspective here.

In asking employeees to break a strike and interfere in the collective bargaining process, the administration is asking us to compromise our integrity and relationships with graduate workers. We must simply say no, standing together with hundreds of colleagues.

Some colleagues have signed this pledge because they do not wish to take sides and intend to remain neutral. Others have signed because they support GETUP.  For all of us, this pledge allows us to protect our own integrity, preserve our relationships with each other and with graduate workers, and respect the collective bargaining process as it unfolds between GETUP and Penn’s central administration.

The pledge is short and simple:

We affirm the value of the work done by graduate research and teaching assistants, unionized as GETUP-UAW, and we affirm their federally protected right to bargain collectively for a fair contract. After bargaining with Penn’s central administration for over a year, seeking support for international graduate workers and fair pay and benefits, Penn graduate workers voted by 92% to authorize a strike, as is their right under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. We hope that the Penn administration will come to a fair agreement to avert a strike.

We pledge that if GETUP-UAW calls a strike, we will not serve as strikebreakers; that is, we will not take sides against graduate teaching and research assistants. If we are asked to break their strike by (a) doing strikers’ teaching or research, (b) doing strikers’ grading, (c) assigning strikers’ work to others, or (d) reporting the names of strikers for possible retaliation, we will simply decline to do so.

If you are a Penn employee, click here to sign, and please share this pledge with two colleagues. Your participation will make a difference in building strength in numbers.