State of the Profession: Academic Unionism
By Michael Mauer
Faced with divvying up the tasks involved in co-editing Academic Collective Bargaining, former AAUP general secretary Ernst Benjamin made me an offer: he’d write the introduction, and I’d do an afterword. I thought I’d gotten the better end of the bargain. How difficult could it be to assess the state of academic unionism? I discovered, though, that I’d undertaken no simple task; there’s ample ammunition both for those who see substantial grounds for optimism and those whose vision is unremittingly bleak.
“Glass half empty” proponents point to both the legal landscape and political realities. In the public sector, the stark reality is that a substantial number of states simply have no legislative framework within which faculty or other professionals in the academy can unionize. (Never mind that this right is considered fundamental in the rest of the developed world.)
Legal obstacles to organizing in private institutions are even more notable. Since 1980, when the Supreme Court ruled that the faculty at Yeshiva University were “managers” and therefore not entitled to collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Act’s nominal coverage of full-time faculty in private colleges and universities has become almost invisible. Legal barriers to unionizing were raised even higher by decisions that drew on the precedent set by the 1979 Supreme Court decision in National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Catholic Bishop of Chicago, which said that the act does not apply to large numbers of employees at religiously affiliated institutions. Also lurking are legal threats to define “supervisor” in ways that will further restrict faculty organizing. And always present is the employer’s practical ability to delay for many years the day of reckoning on the right to unionize and to force union proponents to spend many tens of thousands of dollars on legal proceedings.
Even those who succeed in organizing face legal obstacles that impede their union’s effectiveness. Many bargaining laws, for example, set forth overly restrictive limits on what issues unions may address at the bargaining table, and many fail to provide meaningful dispute resolution procedures when the parties have difficulty reaching a contract settlement.
To this grim mix, pessimists add significant political impediments to campus organizing. These include the creation of more and more contingent faculty positions, thus adding the most vulnerable faculty to the pool of the unorganized. Furthermore, the escalation in corporate funding and control over the academy goes hand in hand with increasingly authoritarian management practices. And—to pile the negatives on—decreasing union density among American workers generally surely contributes to the weak position of academic unions.
But, the “glass half full” folks reply, there are grounds for optimism. For starters, the legal landscape is not unremittingly bleak. Contingent faculty generally are not enmeshed by Yeshiva, nor have public sector administrations had much success in trying to apply the Yeshiva holding to full-time faculty.
In fact, although there has been some movement to impose greater restrictions, the public sector momentum is towards new enabling legislation. Graduate student employees are not abandoning their efforts to unionize, despite a setback dealt by the NLRB’s 2004 finding that graduate employees at Brown University were not employees for the purposes of collective bargaining. On a broader scale, we see hopeful shifts outside the academy, including a revived political push to expand the right to unionize, and a dramatic increase in political engagement by unions and workers.
Whither the future for academic organizing? Key to assessing the prospects for academic organizing is the powerful hold that the culture of “shop floor control” by workers still has in the academy. In workplaces outside college campuses, the generally accepted compact is that the boss makes decisions about production, and the workers agitate to improve their working conditions. In sharp contrast stand bedrock assumptions about faculty participation in shared governance. Indeed, perhaps the greatest ground for optimism is that the assumptions of faculty control over colleges and universities will continue to serve as a powerful springboard for academic workers when they decide to forge ahead and pursue formal unionization.
Michael Mauer is AAUP director of organizing and services. Academic Collective Bargaining, jointly published by the AAUP and the Modern Language Association, is available for purchase.
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