Today GET-UP is on strike: "This is simply a withdrawal of TA ... labor," said GET-UP Mass Action Committee Chairman Joe Drury. "We're saying that if you don't think we do work on this campus, you'll notice when we're not doing it," Drury said. U Penn has apparently tried to intimidate graduate students out of striking by threatening disciplinary repercussions, prompting the AFT to file Unfair Labor Practice Charges against the University: Penn Law professor Clyde Summers, who has been referred to as "Mr. Labor Law," said that he believes that what the University did was "flat out illegal." Summers called the University's stance "an unfair labor practice. Any employee who wants to observe the strike is legally protected -- they cannot be disciplined or penalized for observing the strike," he said The Daily Pennsylvanian, which yesterday devoted a story to undergraduates who don't want to miss lectures and exams because of the strike without mentioning that GET-UP isn't asking them to, expects labor tension to pass after the strike, and in arguing its case, seriously misrepresents the state of graduate student organizing here at Yale: Despite subsequent strikes by Yale's graduate students, they still have not won the right to unionize and have given up any intention to vote. "The Yale administration has said that it would never recognize the results of the [National Labor Relations Board] decision," Reynolds said. GESO hasn't given up on a vote. What GESO is demanding is a fair process that would avert the legal limbo Levin convinced Bollinger, Simmons, and Rodin to visit on graduate students at Columbia, Brown, and Penn by having the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded for indefinite appeals. GESO rightly refuses to engage in a process without an agreement from both sides to honor the results. The rising labor tension at Penn, as at Yale, is borne out of the administration's refusal to agree to a vote whose results can be counted and followed by both sides. Until that changes, that tension will only heighten - in Philadelphia, here in New Haven, and on campuses across the country.