The Chronicle: Unionization Drive at Rutgers U. Succeeds, Using Controversial Voting Method That Labor Activists Favor
A group of about 2,000 midlevel administrative workers at Rutgers University has voted to form a union using a nontraditional method that is designed to make union-organizing campaigns less adversarial.The Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/daily/2007/04/2007042606n.htm
Today’s News
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Unionization Drive at Rutgers U. Succeeds, Using Controversial Voting Method That Labor Activists Favor
By JOHN GRAVOIS
Here’s a kind of labor story you rarely hear: A group of about 2,000 midlevel administrative workers at Rutgers University has voted to form a union, but the university’s leaders opted not to campaign against their organizing effort.
Moreover, the worker’s votes were gathered not in a traditional election, with polling places and voting days, but by using the “card check” method, a system in which workers sign union cards — anywhere, and over an indefinite period of time — as a show of support for unionization.
Most university administrations prefer elections because that method allows them to publicize their arguments against unionization in concerted campaigns that build toward the polling day.
But Rutgers did not have that option. That’s because New Jersey has had, since 2005, a law that requires public employers to recognize groups of employees that have opted for union representation using the card-check approach. And that statute is a model for proposed legislation that labor advocates have been pushing at the federal level, the Employee Free-Choice Act, which also tries to set the card-check method as the standard for union-certification votes.
Now that a majority of the 2,000 administrative workers have put their names down in favor of forming a union, in accordance with New Jersey law, their union cards and a “petition for representation” will go to the state’s Public Employment Relations Commission for certification. The university said on Wednesday that it would “cooperate fully in the processing of this petition.”
The new group is called the Union of Rutgers Administrators-American Federation of Teachers.
For months, the university has displayed a passive attitude toward the union’s organization drive. Last winter, said Lucye Millerand, an organizer with the union, the administration did send out a few e-mail messages arguing against unionization. But in January, after the governor intervened, the administration agreed to take a neutral position on the issue.
That month, the university’s president, Richard L. McCormick, wrote a letter to the institution’s administrative, professional, and supervisory staff. “Supervisors who speak on behalf of the university will be instructed to make no statements about the unionization effort,” he wrote. “Rutgers and the URA/AFT believe that by working together, and not engaging in needless confrontation, we can build a stronger and better university.”
The Employee Free-Choice Act, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in early March (HR 800) and is now before the Senate (S 1041), is designed to take some of the fight out of union-organizing campaigns by doing away with the adversarial theatrics of elections. Will more union drives in the future look like the one at Rutgers?
Not if another administration — that of President Bush — has anything to do with it. In February, Vice President Dick Cheney said that Mr. Bush would veto the bill if it ever reached his desk.
Copyright © 2007 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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