Bargaining Unit Research Articles

College Athlete Unionization

The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston has opened the door to serious consideration of the potential for college athlete unionization and collective bargaining. The ruling, highlighted by Justice Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion, suggests collective bargaining as a potential solution to the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (“NCAA’s”) antitrust vulnerabilities. This Article delves into the initial legal and strategic questions surrounding the prospect of unionization, focusing particularly on NCAA Division I football and basketball, due to their significant revenue generation making them prime candidates for unionization efforts. The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB” or “Board”) is positioned to play a central role in the unionization attempts at private universities and potentially influence public university efforts. A recent NLRB complaint against the University of Southern California (“USC”) accusing the institution of misclassifying student athletes as non-employees will answer some important labor law questions that will likely guide future unionization efforts. Moreover, the Service Employees International Union’s (“SEIU’s”) successful union election bid involving the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team represents a significant step forward, marking the potential beginning of college athlete unionization. This Article provides a comprehensive examination of the issue, starting with the NLRB’s involvement and its pivotal decision regarding the Northwestern University case. It proceeds to dissect the Supreme Court’s Alston decision’s implications for unionization and collective bargaining. It further explores the complex labor and employment law intricacies, such as the definitions of employee and employer, appropriate bargaining units, and the NLRB’s jurisdiction over public universities. Finally, it theorizes on how unionization may unfold, outlining possible challenges, pitfalls, and the expected advantages for college athletes through collective bargaining.

Nursing peer feedback: Optimizing our relationships with human resources and collective bargaining organizations

Nursing leaders have recognized the need for consistent mechanisms to promote and sustain nursing professionalism. Peer-to-peer feedback and peer review are widely effective for nurse professionalism and self-regulation, patient care outcomes, and retention. Unprofessional behavior has been noted as widespread in health care and the effects on patients, clinicians, and organizations have been well-documented. Approximately 10% of the registered nurses in the United States belong to a collective bargaining unit (CBU) or union. This article will describe how a peer feedback program to address unprofessional behavior was implemented in a Magnet nursing practice with CBU representation.

Protecting Guard Status

Generally, nonsupervisory employees are entitled to seek union representation. However, certain rules apply when it comes to the interest of “guards” in union organizing. Under Section 9(b)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, a union shall be certified “as the representative of employees in a bargaining unit of guards if such organization admits to membership or is affiliated directly or indirectly with an organization which admits to membership, employees other than guards.”

Reassessing the Economic and Schematic Role of Running Backs in the National Football League: Abolishing the Franchise Tag and Advocating for a Separate Bargaining Unit

Reassessing the Economic and Schematic Role of Running Backs in the National Football League: Abolishing the Franchise Tag and Advocating for a Separate Bargaining Unit

Nurses' Perceptions of Licensure Compact Legislation to Facilitate Interstate Practice: Results From the 2022 Michigan Nurses' Study.

States are struggling to assure an adequate number of registered nurses are active in the clinical workforce to serve patients and communities. Nurse compact legislation-enacted in 39 states-facilitates interstate recognition of nurse licensure. We used a cross-sectional email survey of registered nurses in Michigan to measure their opinions on compact licensure legislation and examined differences in compact licensure opinions by nurses' personal characteristics. Primary analyses reported herein are from 7,098 Michigan nurses with complete data. Most respondents felt that the compact would make it easier to redeploy nurses in an emergency (76.6%), improve access to nursing care (66.6%), and boost their personal career options (55.1%). Most nurses disagreed that compact legislation would weaken patient protections (60.7%). The majority expressed neutral feelings on whether compact licensure would make disciplinary actions more difficult to enforce (50.9%) and a plurality that current licensure policies were satisfactory (44.0%). The majority were supportive of Michigan joining the compact (72.3%). In multivariable analysis, stronger support for joining the compact was associated with advanced degrees, male sex, and younger age. Less support was associated with membership in a collective bargaining unit. Policymakers who wish to ease acute nurse vacancies should consider enacting nurse licensure compact legislation. Careful attention to patient protections and disciplinary review would address potential safety concerns.

Collective Bargaining Agreement Restrictiveness in Unionized Charter Schools

Although charter schools are frequently afforded flexibility from many state laws that govern traditional public schools, a growing number of charter school teachers have now unionized and introduced collective bargaining to the charter sector. Using data from a detailed content analysis of teacher CBAs from California, we compare the restrictiveness of CBAs in 75 unionized charter bargaining units to the restrictiveness of CBAs in 31 nearest neighbor traditional public school district bargaining units. We find that independent charter CBAs are much more flexible than the CBAs of traditional public school districts, but charter school CBAs of bargaining units combined with traditional public school districts are comparably restrictive.

The Impact of Neutrality Agreements

Organized labor won its first technical “win” in the video game industry when approximately 300 employees of ZeniMax Studios, a subsidiary of Microsoft, voted to be represented by ZeniMax Workers United, affiliated with the Communication Workers of America. The interesting point of the story is not that this victory represents the first union at Microsoft, nor that it is the largest bargaining unit in the video game industry. Rather, the circumstances of the election are relevant to all union‐free employers because it was not a formal NLRB election. Rather, it was conducted pursuant to a neutrality agreement.

A Seat at the Table

This paper reports on research into librarian participation on faculty association executive and collective bargaining teams at 46 Canadian universities at which librarians are in the same bargaining unit as professors. The goal of this study is to determine the extent of such participation on these key committees, whether such participation is mandated by governing documents or a matter of custom (or neither), and what barriers librarians face to such participation. The authors analyzed these associations’ constitutions and bylaws and then conducted interviews with faculty association leaders and librarian activists. Findings indicate that nearly half of the surveyed associations either have a mandated seat for librarians or make every effort to include librarians on their executive committees, and more than a third do the same for their collective bargaining teams. Many associations have had a librarian as faculty association president and a handful have had a librarian as chief negotiator. The most-cited barriers to taking on these leadership roles in the association are workload and the lack of or unsuitability of course release for librarians. The level of librarian participation in faculty associations across Canada is very encouraging, but many issues need to be addressed if librarians are to have a full seat at the table.

What Does the Growth of Media Unions Mean for the Broader Labor Movement?

What Does the Growth of Media Unions Mean for the Broader Labor Movement?

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

Are bargaining concessions inevitable in recessions? An empirical investigation into union bargaining priorities and trade-offs of pay rises for job security

PurposeThis paper examines the extent of bargaining concessions in recession through investigating the effects of union bargaining on pay, job security and workforce composition.Design/methodology/approachDrawing on an original survey (n = 400) of workplace level trade union bargaining units in England, the authors employed latent class analysis to establish three groups of bargaining units on the basis of pay outcomes achieved. Linear regression analysis with moderation effects investigated whether pay rises at or above inflation in conjunction with shifts in bargaining priorities was associated with decreases in perceived job security and changes in the composition of the workforce.FindingsAround a quarter of sampled units, concentrated mostly in decentralised bargaining units in the private sector, achieved pay rises at or above the inflation rate during an economic downturn. Pay rises at or above inflation in workplaces severely affected by recession triggered changes in bargaining priorities requiring some concessions, notably in terms of employees' job security. That said, across the sample, achieving pay rises was associated with improved perception of job security and lesser use of contingent labour.Originality/valueThe findings uncover a subset of bargaining units able to secure positive outcomes for workers against a hostile economic tide, whilst demonstrating that concession bargaining is not inevitable but rather contingent on the micro-environments in which union bargaining takes place.

Department chairs’ perceptions of union membership on academic human resource decision-making

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to explore unionization’s impact on university department chairs for academic human resource decision-making in terms of faculty hiring; re-employment, promotion and tenure; other faculty evaluation decisions; and discipline and discharge.Design/methodology/approachThe subjects were department chairs with more than one year of experience in institutions with faculty bargaining units in the USA. Half of the department chairs were members of the bargaining unit and half were not members of the bargaining unit. T-test and Chi square statistics were used to examine and compare 136 chair responses.FindingsWhile there were significant differences between the groups when making all academic human resource decisions based on role affiliation, there was a weak identification as a bargaining unit member. There was no difference between groups when determining how the participants perceived the process rules, and the majority of the responses indicated membership in the union does not complicate making academic human resource decisions.Originality/valueBased on these findings, this study provides the first empirical evidence against a long-held administrative belief department chairs should not be unionized as they will side with union colleagues in difficult academic human resource cases. The findings of this study also produce three key recommendations for practice and faculty development.

The Good-Faith Doubt Test and the Revival of Joy Silk Bargaining Orders

The last fifty-two years have borne witness to the swift degradation and virtual irrelevance of the bargaining order. By the end of the twentieth century even pro-enforcement officials in the NLRB were acknowledging the difficulty of obtaining an enforceable bargaining order, and the remedy rarely appears these days in the agency’s published decisions. This is not the product of the usual economic or political factors cited as reasons for the labor movement’s and its attendant regulating schema’s diminishment. Rather, the decline of the bargaining order can be explained almost entirely by the disappearance of the so-called Joy Silk doctrine from the labor law landscape in 1969. Under Joy Silk, the NLRB would order an employer to recognize and bargain with a labor union if the union represented a majority of the employees in an appropriate bargaining unit at the time it requested recognition, and the employer denied the request while lacking a good faith doubt as to the union’s majority status and took action calculated to dissipate that majority status. Under closer examination, it has become clear that the NLRB’s abandonment of the good-faith doubt test in favor of the misconduct-centric analysis enunciated in Gissel Packing is intimately connected to the agency’s inability to enforce the law and, as a result, fulfill its statutory mission of encouraging collective bargaining. This Article addresses the primary objections to the NLRB’s use of the good-faith doubt test in the realm of union requests for recognition that were raised in its heyday and elucidates their lack of historical, legal, and practical foundations. The NLRB’s inquiry into motive in the pre-recognition context was statutorily permissible, logically consistent, and effectively deterrent. Reviving the good-faith doubt test of Joy Silk and enforcing Section 8(a)(5) of the NLRA as written would better encapsulate the bargaining orders envisioned in past Supreme Court precedent and equip the NLRB with a tool historically proven to prevent misconduct in elections.

Literary Theorist to Union Organizer: An Interview with Robin Sowards

Literary Theorist to Union Organizer:An Interview with Robin Sowards Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Robin Sowards is an organizer and researcher for the United Steelworkers (USW), focusing on higher education. Founded in 1942, USW is a quintessential American labor union, first centering on the steel industry, with headquarters in Pittsburgh. But it has also organized in other workplaces, including healthcare and education, especially after the decline of US industry. Sowards has had a hand in the successful organization efforts at Point Park University and Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, a thwarted attempt at Duquesne University, and the recent successful vote to form a faculty union at the University of Pittsburgh. Himself an adjunct, Sowards was a spokesperson for adjuncts at Duquesne in 2012, and from 2013 to 2021 he served as vice-president of the New Faculty Majority, the leading organization of contingent faculty, established in 2010. Sowards started out on an academic path, doing graduate work in English, linguistics, and German at Cornell University, with a dissertation on "The Metaphysics of Syntax in Nineteenth-Century Lyric" (PhD, 2006). He has published several scholarly articles, including one on John Keats in Stylistics (2007) and one on Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market" in Modern Philology (2012). He also published review essays on theorists such as Walter Benn Michaels and Stanley Fish in Minnesota Review, as well as "Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics" (Minnesota Review 68 [2007]), taking to task the lack of knowledge about current linguistics among literary critics and arguing for his syntactic approach. Despite his qualifications, he experienced roadblocks in attaining a tenure-track position. After engaging in the union effort at Duquesne, he went to work for USW in 2012, first as a part-time researcher, moving up to a full-time position as organizer and researcher. Born in 1976, Sowards grew up in Oregon, moving east for college at NYU (BA, 1998). After college he worked as a legal assistant in New York for two years before returning to school at Cornell. Upon receiving his PhD, he taught as a non-tenure-track assistant professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges until 2010, when he moved to Pittsburgh to be [End Page 453] with his partner. He taught at Duquesne until 2015, and teaches linguistics as a part-time adjunct at Chatham University. This interview took place on February 24, 2022, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Skyllarr Trusty, an MA student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. jeffrey j. williams: While you were trained as a literary critic, you've been an organizer and researcher for USW for a decade now. Why do we need unions? robin sowards: The purpose of forming a union is for you and your colleagues to negotiate with your employer as an equal. Fundamentally, if you are an employee, you are always in the position of negotiating your terms and conditions of employment—how much you get paid, what working conditions are like, benefits, all that. But we aren't usually active participants in the process, because we're negotiating as an individual with our employer. For example, all by yourself, you, Jeff Williams, are negotiating with the entire institution, Carnegie Mellon. That puts you in a fundamentally unequal bargaining situation. But if you join together with your colleagues and negotiate collectively, then you meet as equals across the negotiating table, and as a result, you can get better terms and conditions of employment for everybody. It's a difference between being in the position of pleading as a subordinate for improvements to your work life versus being able to negotiate as an equal. jjw: You recently worked on the Pitt campaign, which was very successful, with a large majority voting to unionize this past fall. One thing that I thought was striking was that the union encompasses faculty as well as adjuncts and graduate students. rs: Faculty and grads are in separate bargaining units, and some of the campaigns are still in process, but the one that we won in late 2021 was the main faculty bargaining unit. It didn't include faculty in the School of Medicine...

Employees' Location as a Factor for Determining Community of Interest

Once a representation petition is filed, an employer should look at the petitioned‐for unit (generally defined in a manner most advantageous to the union's interest in seeing an election win) to see if it is consistent with existing law governing the appropriateness of voting units based on whether the employees in that unit have a community of interest that distinguishes them from other groups of workers. Factors for determining whether there is a community of interest among the unit workers include whether they have similar wages, benefits, hours of work and supervision. Also, as recently addressed in AT&T Mobility Services, LLC, 371 NLRB No. 14 (2021), the appropriateness of a bargaining unit can be challenged based on the inclusion or exclusion of multiple locations.

Rebuilding worker power in Australia through multi-employer bargaining

ABSTRACT The Australian Council of Trade Union’s Change the Rules campaign from 2017 to 2019 demanded enterprise bargaining be redesigned to fit the modern world of work. Unions argued collective bargaining should not be limited to the outdated framework of the ‘enterprise’. Workers should be able to bargain with the host business in labour hire; with franchisors; with lead businesses in supply chains; and across industries. In this article, we undertake a preliminary analysis of the key issues for consideration in designing multi-employer bargaining in the Australian context. We review the United Workers Union’s experience in whole-of-supply-chain bargaining through its Fresh Food Campaign, and draw upon recent proposals for multi-employer bargaining from the UK Institute of Employment Rights, and the Harvard ‘Clean Slate’ Project in the USA. We examine the shape of worker bargaining units for purposes of multi-employer bargaining; employee support thresholds; the permitted scope of bargaining; and the legal effect of multi-employer agreements. While its precise shape requires much further consideration, the case for implementing this change in Australian labour law is even stronger in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic: not only to boost workers’ economic power, but to ensure they have control over the safety of their work.

The Good-Faith Doubt Test and the Revival of Joy Silk Bargaining Orders

The last fifty-two years have borne witness to the swift degradation and virtual irrelevance of the bargaining order. By the end of the twentieth century even pro-enforcement officials in the NLRB were acknowledging the difficulty of obtaining an enforceable bargaining order, and the remedy rarely appears these days in the agency's published decisions. This is not the product of the usual economic or political factors cited as reasons for the labor movement’s and its attendant regulating schema’s diminishment. Rather, the decline of the bargaining order can be explained almost entirely by the disappearance of the so-called Joy Silk doctrine from the labor law landscape in 1969. Under Joy Silk, the NLRB would order an employer to recognize and bargain with a labor union if the union represented a majority of the employees in an appropriate bargaining unit at the time it requested recognition, and the employer denied the request while lacking a good faith doubt as to the union’s majority status and took action calculated to dissipate that majority status. Under closer examination, it has become clear that the NLRB’s abandonment of the good-faith doubt test in favor of the misconduct-centric analysis enunciated in Gissel Packing Co. is intimately connected to the agency’s inability to enforce the law and, as a result, fulfill its statutory mission of encouraging collective bargaining. This Article addresses the primary objections to the NLRB’s use of the good-faith doubt test in the realm of union requests for recognition that were raised in its heyday and elucidates their lack of historical, legal, and practical foundations. The NLRB’s inquiry into motive in the pre-recognition context was statutorily permissible, logically consistent, and effectively deterrent. Reviving the good-faith doubt test of Joy Silk and enforcing Section 8(a)(5) of the NLRA as written would better encapsulate the bargaining orders envisioned in past Supreme Court precedent and equip the NLRB with a tool historically proven to prevent misconduct in elections. Few initiatives in General Counsel Abruzzo’s agenda could prove more effective in carrying forth the Board’s statutory mission.

Appropriate Digital Bargaining Unit. Forthcoming Reforms of the Workers’ Statute

Appropriate Digital Bargaining Unit. Forthcoming Reforms of the Workers’ Statute

Academic Freedom, Canadian Labour Law and the Scope of Intra-Mural Expression

The Murray Library is the central library at the University of Saskatchewan. In January 2013, the Library Dean announced that ten support staff in the University’s library system, including several working at the Murray Library, were to be laid off. All were women. After each staff member had been individually informed by the Dean that she was being laid off, she was told to collect her possessions and was then immediately escorted off the campus property. The layoffs were part of a University-wide cost cutting measure, which would ultimately result in 40 layoffs among the support staff across the campus. The support staff were unionized, in a bargaining unit represented by the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
 The University librarians were also unionized, in a separate bargaining unit represented by the University of Saskatchewan Faculty Association. In the librarians’ collective agreement was a broadly drafted provision protecting academic freedom. Among other things, the provision guaranteed the right of the unionized librarians “…to criticize the University and the Association without suffering censorship or discipline.” This provision did not contain any language which would restrict the scope of its protection to reasonable or responsible comments. This right of faculty and librarians to criticize the university leadership is known, among the various features that make up academic freedom, as the freedom of intra-mural expression.1
 
 * Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, Western University, London, Ontario, where he teaches labour law, human rights law, and constitutional law.1 See generally Matthew Finkin & Robert Post, For the Common Good: Principles of American Academic Freedom (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009), ch 5.

What Should Physicians Consider Prior to Unionizing?

Physicians considering unionization face many practical, emotional, and moral obstacles. Even some who feel that a collective bargaining unit is necessary remain concerned that patient care could suffer if physicians unionize. This article discusses unionized physicians' moral obligations to patient populations and health care systems' share in this responsibility. It argues that unionization can be done ethically as long as union actions are focused on improving patient care.