Faculty At Private Universities Now Able To Unionize
What could possibly go wrong?
Alexandra Bradbury writes at Labor Notes:
At Last, Private Sector Faculty Get Green Light to Unionize
A new Labor Board ruling could finally unstick the unionization of professors in the private sector—a project that’s been stalled for 35 years.
“People for years have talked about when Obama’s NLRB finally gets stabilized and takes on the three big higher-ed issues,” says longtime contingent faculty activist Joe Berry. “And finally we’ve got a decision on two of them.”
About 1 in 3 higher-education instructors works at a private college or university. But unionization efforts there virtually halted after a 1980 ruling that, because of their role in campus governance, full-time faculty counted as managers.
If the reasoning in NLRB vs. Yeshiva seemed far-fetched then, it’s become even farther-fetched in the 35 years since—something the board acknowledged in its precedent-setting December ruling. It upheld union rights for the faculty at Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Seattle who’ve been organizing with Service Employees (SEIU) Local 925.
The decision notes the creeping “corporatization” that’s encroached on university decision-making. It observes that “colleges and universities are increasingly run by administrators, which has the effect of concentrating and centering authority away from the faculty.”
And it sets out new criteria for deciding when full-time faculty will be eligible for the board’s recognition, based on whether the administration really follows faculty recommendations on academics, enrollment, and finances.
Comments
What is new about this decision is not the general principle. Under the Yeshiva case, faculty organization rights in the private sector hinged on collegial faculty governance as opposed to the strong president and administration model. Collegial faculty, as at Cornell,are managers because they exercise real power. What has changed of course is that the
What is new about this decision is not the general principle. Under the Yeshiva case, faculty organization rights in the private sector hinged on their not having collegial faculty governance as opposed to their being employees subject to the strong president and administration model. Collegial faculty, as at Cornell,are managers because they exercise real power. What has changed of course is that the Obama NLRB is putting its fingers on the scale to favor unionization whenever and however they can. The Board has become a partisan organization, no longer a neutral.
Adjunct faculty are by and large outside the collegial management model. But, many adjuncts have other jobs and teach only a course or two. Consider that even if they organize and unionize, whatever the union may promise them, how much bargaining power would they really have? How difficult would it be to replace them if they went out on strike?
Also consider what happens if faculty unionizes and is successful in pumping up wages. There are no free lunches so the new costs must go somewhere. Where? Tuition? The costs of college are already high enough. All costs have to be passed through to somewhere. As for graduate student unions, if graduate assistant wages go up through bargaining, the college or university can just offer smaller financial aid packages to the same students. It is a study in futility. Graduate students at Cornell recognized this when they voted down a union decisively during a period when the NLRB allowed such votes.
Public sector unionization is different, state law controls. Blue states tend to have legislation favoring public sector unions, red ones less so. Public sector collective bargaining is not true bargaining. The “management side” are politicians who have no profit motive and no bottom lines to defend so they tend to give away the store to make unions and people happy.