Category Archives: Organizing

Liberty Tree Foundation: Campus Organizer’s Guide to Democratizing Education

Liberty Tree’s Democratizing Education Program is pleased to release the Campus Organizer’s Guide to Democratizing Education, authored by our Associate, Eric Prindle, a recent graduate of NYU Law. Prindle wrote the guide for students, faculty, staff, and community members interested in promoting democracy in higher education, and a higher education system in service to a democratic, inclusive, society.

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St Louis Post-Dispatch: Missouri government workers win right to bargain

The Missouri Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that public employees have a constitutional right to engage in collective bargaining with their government employers, overturning a precedent set 60 years ago.

The court voted 5-2 to throw out a 1947 state Supreme Court decision that granted collective bargaining only to workers in the private sector. And it voted unanimously to overturn a 1982 decision that allowed public employers, such as school districts and police departments, to discard written agreements with employees.

Until Tuesday’s ruling, governments were required only to “meet and confer” with certain employee groups, but agreements made in those sessions were not binding.

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The Athens News: Does campus strife make OU faculty look tempting to union organizers?

With all the controversy over shared governance, budget cuts and related issues at Ohio University, is the faculty ripe for unionization?

Apparently some parties are at least edging toward that question. Last night, the OU chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) was scheduled to hold a meeting for faculty, to hear accounts from other universities where profs have chosen to unionize under the AAUP banner.

One of the scheduled panelists was Stephen Aby, a professor of bibliography at the University of Akron, and a past president of the AAUP chapter there.

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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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The Chronicle: Federal Court Criticizes Labor Board’s Handling of Case Involving Union Drive at Private University

A federal appeals court sent a case back to the National Labor Relations Board on Monday, saying the board had insufficiently explained its reasoning when it decided, in 2004, that professors at a private institution in Pittsburgh were not managers and therefore could form a union.

Inside Higher Ed: Professors: Managers or Employees?

Ever since 1980, professors at private colleges and have had a difficult time forming unions. That’s the year that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that faculty members at Yeshiva University couldn’t unionize because they had so much power that they were managerial employees.

A federal appeals court ruling Tuesday is the latest to consider attempts by faculty unions (or would-be unions) to win the legal right to collective bargaining. The ruling — involving the faculty union at Point Park University — didn’t offer a definitive opinion on whether faculty members at the Pittsburgh institution could unionize.

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NYSUT: Marymount Manhattan College adjuncts choose NYSUT as potential bargaining agent

Adjuncts at Marymount Manhattan College have voted to affiliate with New York State United Teachers and its national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, as part of their efforts to win respect and have a meaningful voice in workplace issues, NYSUT announced today. Marymount Manhattan College is located on East 71 st Street in Manhattan.

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Inside Higher Ed: Suffolk Part-Timers Unionize

Adjuncts at Suffolk University, in Massachusetts, have voted to unionize, joining a growing coalition of their counterparts at other private institutions. This week, the National Labor Relations Board announced that Suffolk part-timers voted 194 to 89 in favor of having the American Association of University Professors represent them in collective bargaining. Organizers with the AAUP say this action is the next step in their plans to make colleges in the Boston area more adjunct-friendly.

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Vermont College staff move to unionize

Citing an erosion of “consensus-based decision making” since Union Institute and University acquired the college in 2001, Vermont College academic and administrative staff members have taken steps to unionize, they announced Friday at a press conference at the Statehouse.

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New Book Offers Guide to Organizing Adjuncts

Part-time faculty members continue to be frustrated by their salaries, working conditions and general lack of job security. At the same time, some adjuncts have recently won victories on a variety of issues — largely as a result of either unions or other organizations working on adjuncts’ behalf.

A new book — Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education (Monthly Review Press) — offers a step-by-step guide on how adjuncts can organize and develop strategies to improve their working lives. The author of the book is Joe Berry, who teaches labor education and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Roosevelt University. He is also the head of the Chicago Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor. In an interview, Berry responded to questions about the themes of his book.

Q: What do you see as the key to organizing adjunct faculty members? Why do adjuncts come together on some campuses and not others?

A: First a word about naming: Adjunct is the most commonly used word, but precarious, or contingent, or non tenure track, who are now the faculty majority, also include a rapidly increasing number of full-time non tenure track (FTNTT) folks. When I use the word adjunct below, please know I mean to include them too, unless I specifically say part-time. What unites us is our casualized status. In answer to your question, I list some lessons in the book, but to boil it down, I would say persistence. Contingent faculty are organizable everywhere, eventually, whether they are part-timers, full-time non tenure track faculty, grad employees, or any of the other permutations and names they have hung on us. Everyone wants more respect for ourselves and our work. We must create a context where hope and courage outweigh fear and fatalism.Q: On some campuses, adjuncts are represented by the same locals that represent full-time faculty members, while on other campuses, the two groups have separate units. Is one approach preferable for adjuncts?

A: First, it should be a decision by the adjuncts, not the full-time tenure track faculty alone, the administration, or the labor board or law. In the best of all possible worlds, people who work in higher education, no matter what their classification, should be together in the same democratic, participatory, union and even in the same bargaining unit. Most of the best contracts nationally for contingent faculty are in places where there are combined unions and contracts. However, for particular legal, political and historical reasons in many places this is not possible and, in those cases, organizing independently is the realistic choice. Even in those cases, we should strive for maximum cooperation with other campus workers, unionized or not, while protecting our essential interests.
Q: Some adjuncts fear that making working conditions better for part-time faculty members will discourage adjuncts (and full-timers) from pushing for the creation of more tenure-track jobs. Do you think these fears are valid?

A: Not in my experience. Tenure-track jobs are declining as a percentage overall, but not because adjunct conditions improve. Gaining full-time tenure track slots should be a uniting issue for tenured and tenure-track faculty. It’s not the overriding uniting issue for contingents. Adjuncts are, however, concerned with who gets the tenure track jobs and how they are chosen. Discrimination against long-time contingents is widespread and well documented, though unfortunately not illegal unless combined with demonstrable age, race or sex discrimination.

Q: There have been some notable contract successes recently for adjuncts, with many people talking about the deal at the New School. What do you see as the key demands adjuncts should be raising in contract talks?

A: Key demands are dependent on local conditions and should come from democratic processes among those affected. That said, we need to raise demands both for economic (pay, benefits, etc.) equity and for increasing job security (seniority rights, due process, “just cause” for discipline and non-reemployment, preference for full-time tenure track jobs). We also need to fight for better conditions for our work, such as issues of class size, offices, paid office hours, etc. Our teaching conditions are really our students’ learning conditions and we need to be explicit about that. These are all manifestations of the central issue that unites us all: a desire for respect for ourselves and the work that we do, and, by extension, for our students’ rights to the best education possible.

Q: Tenure is considered by many to be vital for academic freedom. What impact do you think it has on academic freedom for a greater and greater share of professors to be working off the tenure track?

A: There is no true academic freedom without job security. It is an oxymoron, as recent cases have illustrated, though most are never publicized. The great majority of people teaching in post secondary education today have no tenure system and also no union contract job security (“just cause” and due process). No one really wants themselves or their children to be taught by people who are afraid to speak the truth as they see it, but that is the reality today. This casualization of the majority of college and adult teachers change over the past thirty years can only have a negative impact both on students’ education and upon the ability and power of faculty to play their proper role in democratically helping to govern their institutions themselves. In fact, I think freedom of speech and job security on the job should be enjoyed by all campus workers, not just professors.

Q: Are there colleges that you think are treating adjuncts well?

A: The best conditions are at those places with the best union contracts. Some non-union places may have some good conditions for some contingent faculty in some departments for some period of time, but this is never secure without a union to enforce these conditions. “Treating adjuncts well” under whimsical paternalism, whether at the department chair, dean or presidential level, is never really good treatment. We fight for equity and fairness because it is our right, and should be enforceable, not because a particular administrator has a conscience and some personal power for a time.

Q: What would you most like for administrators to know about the push for adjuncts to organize?

A: Don’t take it personally. There is a reason that in virtually every union certification election among part-time contingents, we vote to unionize. The problems are structural, not personal, and your personal opinions and behavior cannot change this fundamental need for us to have a collective voice through independent democratic organization. When it comes on your campus, let it happen in its own way. Organization of contingent faculty (and all campus workers for that matter) can be the best thing to happen for the true mission of mass, critical, democratic higher education in a generation. Administrators need to resolve that they are partners in that mission rather than corporate managers and CEO’s. Administrators can’t determine if we organize or not, but you can decide what role you will play.

— Scott Jaschik

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MRZine: Labor day poses hard questions

It’s impossible to celebrate Labor Day 2005 without asking some hard questions: How organized is “organized” labor? How much of a movement is the labor “movement”? The last six weeks have torn away whatever shreds of clothing the emperor might have been wearing. We can deny the crisis no longer.

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From Jon Flanders in MRZine:

The cold split that just occurred in the AFL-CIO has opened up a new page for US labor.

As Bill Fletcher has observed in several excellent articles on the issue, the “debate” leading up to the split took place far over the heads of the members of the unions who pay the salaries of the leaders.

Now those of of us on the ground of labor — the activists on the shop floor, the people who do the Jimmy Higgins work of unions, as officers of locals or active members, the people who show up on picket line rallies and labor events — are confronted with a bizarre scenario.

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Helping America Get the Labor Movement It Wants

By: Art Shostak

What do we want from Labor? And why? In the aftermath of the August breakup, the Gallup Organization asked us what we thought would happen next, and what we wished might happen. We expect the split will weaken Labor, but as 58% of us hold a positive opinion about the
nations’ largest social movement, we do not want any further loss in Labor’s strength. Quite the contrary! A plurality (38%) actually wish Labor’s influence in American life would soon increase.

Why? It is not rocket science. Average Americans understand that in the nation’s City Halls, State Capitals, and Congress it is Organized Labor that especially speaks for working class folk. When exploited workers (new immigrants, undocumented folk, high school dropouts) desperately need a defender, Organized Labor steps forward. When jobs are threatened with a wage-cut race to the bottom, Labor leads the response. When fierce competition tempts employers to cut corners in safety matters, Labor blows the whistle. When employers need the cooperation of knowledgeable experienced employees, Organized Labor can facilitate it. When something goes terribly wrong at work, a Shop Steward bests the Personnel Department every time in assuring a fair hearing for an accused worker. In short, when the nation’s non-union workers wonder what high-quality wages and fringes might really resemble, and what a written guarantee of adult treatment at work might help assure, the sagest of them look enviously at unionized workplaces.

Given the strategic value of Organized Labor, how might it avoid the weakening the public expects, and achieve instead the renewal the public prefers? Four changes would seem required. First, unions in both the AFL-CIO and the Coalition for Change must resist the temptation to maul and raid one another, as only anti-unionists finally profit from such retrograde and tasteless misbehavior.
Unorganized workers are put off by such antics, and dues-payers don’t think much better of it. The paltry gains possible in the transfer of one’s unions’ ex-members to another never covers (often hidden) expenses, and leaves wounds behind that fester for decades.

Second, considerable power must be allocated back from union headquarters to union locals. Across the spectrum of unions power has been increasingly concentrated at the top, a power grab abetted
by low morale in the trenches. Unless and until local unions are helped to remake themselves into vibrant and consequential organizations no substantial renewal of Labor is possible, since it is in the local that rank-and-filers “live” their unionism, or, slough it off. As the best organizers have always been the organized, no gains in numbers are likely without the emergence of grass-roots unionists newly energized by their empowered locals.

Third, there must be more value offered in exchange for dues dollars. In recent years past members could enjoy low-cost vacations at union-operated resorts (as in the Poconos), live in outstanding
subsidized city apartments (downtown Philadelphia), expect first-rate care at union-operated health facilities, and retire to first-class projects in the Golden South. For a variety of reasons (only some of
which pass muster), these and other like benefits are now only memories (or nearly so). Along with new timely options, such as subsidizing the purchase and use of computers, many of these benefits
should be renewed. Likewise, storefront centers devoted to teaching English to newcomers, and others set aside for senior citizens, belong in an array of new goods and services for the rank-and-file.

Finally, every possible creative effort should be made to build an “electronic community” out of a local. Members should be asked to share their e-mail addresses with the local’s web master (a volunteer), and the local should create a web site so inviting, so rewarding, as to earn almost daily visits from an appreciative membership. Labor must brand itself as modern, progressive, and technologically adept. Working class men and women increasingly use the Internet at home, and one of their regular surfing way stations should be their local union, which, in turn, diplomatically pushes out to the members material likely to strengthen their attachment to the Labor Movement.

These four changes are affordable, doable, and available for initiation later today, if not sooner. They beckon both to unions that remain within the AFL-CIO and those now aligned in the Coalition for Change. Indeed, the American Labor Movement would be better off if the two rival organizations competed to outdo the other in advancing on these fronts. Let them try and outdo one another at avoiding raids, empowering locals, expanding services, and upgrading their “electronic communities.” In this way Labor might gain the influence many Americans tell Gallup they want it to have.

Art Shostak is a retired Drexel University sociologist and Labor Educator (shostaka@drexel.edu). He taught at the AFL-CIO George Meany Center for Labor Studies from 1975-2000. His books include
CyberUnion: Empowering Labor through Computer Technology (1999).

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