Complaining of low pay, cold rooms and air laden with paint fumes and charcoal dust, models who pose nude at a Philadelphia art school voted Wednesday to join a union.

"We were at a loss about how to get the schools to pay attention to us," said Claire Hankins, 39, who led the effort to organize artists' models at the Moore College of Art and Design.

The union vote came after the National Labor Relations Board rejected the school's argument that the models are independent contractors.

"We feel they are sporadic, occasional employees hired for a specific service, as opposed to employees that we can depend on," said Moore President Happy Craven Fernandez. She said Moore administrators had not gotten any complaints from models about working conditions.

Based on the NLRB ruling, only 13 models at the school had worked enough hours to vote on whether to join District Council 47 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Hankins said seven of the 13 attended Wednesday's meeting and all voted to unionize.

The local - which also represents white-collar city workers and zoo employees - wants to organize about 200 models who pose for art classes in the Philadelphia region, which is also home to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and several other art schools.