Inside Higher Ed: The Union Impact and Non-Impact
One of the major growth areas for academic unions in recent years has been among adjunct professors. More of them are forming unions – either in their own units or with their tenure-track counterparts. In recent weeks, adjunct unions have won recognition at Henry Ford Community College. As this movement has grown, all three major faculty unions in the United States have adopted a goal of seeing colleges create more tenure-track lines and of reversing the “casualization” of the faculty.
The trends together raise an obvious question, especially since the union movement in higher education is far more successful in some areas than others: Does the presence of unions minimize or even prevent the erosion of tenure-track faculty?
The answer of two University of Michigan social scientists — who are themselves active in the labor movement — is No. An article they have published in the new issue of Labor Studies Journal (abstract available here) compared the faculty make-up in Canada and the United States (the former being far more unionized) and among unionized and non-unionized colleges in the United States. The scholars found “to our surprise and disappointment” that unionization doesn’t seem to protect the tenure track.
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