Faculty Unions Research Articles

The Impact of Unionization on University Performance

This study examines faculty unions’ impact on the organizational efficiency and effectiveness of public four-year institutions of higher learning. The article theorizes the causal connections between faculty unions to higher education performance. The study also presents results of a cross-sectional time series analysis and a cross-sectional analysis of higher education performance using data from the Department of Education’s Integrated Post Secondary Data System (IPEDS) spanning more than two decades and over 430 public universities and colleges. We find support for the view that unionization improves organizational efficiency and effectiveness. At the same time the research raises important methodological and substantive questions about how faculty unions influence the behavior of such complex public organizations as a university or college.

Post-Recession CBAs: A Study of Wage Increases in the Agreements of Four State-wide Faculty Unions

The article looks at the post-Recession (2011) agreements of four state-wide faculties: California State system, SUNY, Minnesota and Pennsylvania. Focusing on wages, the study starts with the context of state appropriations after the Recession and after ARRA. It finds that the agreements took longer, yet without job action, and each had a year with no salary increase, and some agreements include both no salary increase AND no seniority-based increase.

Colleges and the Courtroom

While popular focus in the field of academic litigation has been largely on the admissions process as a result of Regents of the Univ. of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265, 98 S.Ct. 2733, 57 L.Ed.2d 750 (1978) and desegregation, college administrators also have been involved in lawsuits involving such diverse issues as suspension and expulsion of students; search and seizure of dormitory rooms; censorship of student newspapers; student access to controversial outside speakers; campus security; rights of handicapped students; equal rights in athletic programs, facilities, scholarships and aid; grades; privacy rights; recognition of student groups; hiring and firing of faculty; collective bargaining and faculty unions; fund raising; copyright laws and collection of student loans. This article will survey these less publicized issues, many of which have led college administrators to believe that a J.D. was more essential to the adequate performance of their jobs than a Ph.D and have often resulted in a temporary relocation of the halls of academia to the nearest court house.A college community is comprised essentially of four major groups: the students, the faculty, the administration, and the trustees. Alumni participate primarily through these four other groups. The plethora of litigation in the collegiate sphere has resulted from the interaction of each of these components as well as from requirements imposed on colleges by state and federal governments.

Resisting the Exploitation of Contingent Faculty Labor in the Neoliberal University: The Challenge of Building Solidarity between Tenured and Non-Tenured Faculty

This article explores why tenured faculty, particularly at major public and private research universities, often have failed to engage in collective resistance to the rise of the neoliberal university and the exploitation of “casualized” academic labor. Thirty years of steady federal and state cuts in the funding of higher education have led to the quasi-privatization of public higher education, with both public and private universities viewing themselves as corporate entities that must maximize student tuition and corporate and philanthropic revenues while minimizing costs. This has led to a massive increase in the number of exploited contingent faculty whose precarious working conditions are akin to those of low-wage, temporary workers in the rest of the economy. This article explores various reasons behind the failure of most tenured faculty—particularly the eighty percent not in faculty unions—to engage in overt, sustained protest at the radical expansion in casualized faculty labor. The article also examines the rise of professional administrators as the new governing class of neoliberal universities which compete for “student customers” on the basis of amenities and “student life” rather than on the basis of educational quality. These administrators' drive for “measurable metrics” has contributed to an increase in self-interested behavior on the part of a tenured faculty who are increasingly rewarded on the basis of “research productivity.” While in the short run such a retreat from public life by tenured faculty may be rational, in the long run such behavior threatens the future existence of tenure, except in the most prestigious and well-endowed of private and public institutions. Thus those remaining tenured faculty committed to higher education providing a quality intellectual experience for all students must work politically to ensure that all faculty have humane and secure working conditions and manageable teaching loads. In short, tenured faculty committed to a future for democratic public education must take up the challenge of building solidarity across faculty rank and status.

Impacts of MOOCs on Intellectual Property Rights and Collective Bargaining

Massive Open Online Courses (“MOOCs”) are free, online courses offered by institutions of higher education to individual users across the world, and in the vast majority of cases, without any admissions criteria. MOOCs are popular with individuals because they offer unprecedented, free access to the best institutions in the world that were previously inaccessible to the vast majority of the population–all a user needs is a computer and Internet access. College and university administrators are excited about MOOCs because of the marketing reach and additional revenues available through this medium. Professors are excited to have their lectures seen by as many people as possible. Unions must be on board, right? Not so fast. Many faculty unions take the position that MOOCs undermine faculty intellectual property rights and existing collective bargaining agreements between the union and the institution.

Serving the Faculty Union in Fighting Austerity Policies

This article reports and analyzes a case of a university labor studies program providing a series of research reports to the faculty union on campus that analyzed the allocation of resources between faculty and administrative overhead. The research helped the union slow down and stop a trend toward ever more resources being diverted from faculty to administration. The decisive role of the research in winning major union victories is detailed, and the case is analyzed with a view to opportunities and dangers involved in such research, what factors make it uniquely effectove or ineffective, and what lessons can be drawn from the experience.

Becoming and Remaining an Independent Union: A Comparative Case Study of Two University Faculty Unions

Although workplace unions have many options when it comes to affiliating with a central labour body, some unions decide to remain independent or to disaffiliate after an experience of affiliation. To our knowledge, the literature has not widely examined the reasons behind the decision of some unions to remain independent. Based on a comparative case study of two university faculty unions in Quebec, this article aims to partly fill this gap in analysis. The results show that the particularities of the work of professors and the types of expertise needed to perform their duties influence their choice for union independence.

Collective Begging at Its Best: Labor-Management Relations in South Dakota

Public employee labor unions in South Dakota possess a feeble set of bargaining rights, so weak it should be considered “collective begging.” However, our recent contract contains significant victories despite decades of playing defense. What lessons can be learned from this experience that might help other similarly situated faculty unions? What does this case study teach us about the disparity of power, especially where labor has fewer legal and political tools than management? I apply DiGiovanni’s (2011) typology of “intangible influences” on collective bargaining to explain our success. As DiGiovanni predicts, history and timing played a large role in influencing the outcome to labor’s advantage. In particular, the state’s rapid transformation of higher education from primarily undergraduate education to invest in research probably brought new participants into the negotiations process. After management imposed a contract, it seems likely that these outsiders pushed for a signed contract. Management was forced to concede on two issues to gain the single tool labor possessed: its signature on a collective bargaining agreement. Contrary to DiGiovanni, unrealistic expectations may have led to a positive labor outcome and an overly-combative labor leader did not prove poisonous.

Reconsidering Union Activism and Its Meaning

AbstractMembership mobilization is widely regarded as critical for union revitalization. Estimates of the level of activism vary widely, and studies reveal puzzling inconsistencies between union members' beliefs and intentions. Drawing from Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour, we address both issues using a sample of faculty union members. Results show both consistency and discrepancy between summary self‐reports of activism and specific participation behaviours, helping account for the widely varying estimates of activism levels found in other studies. Results also indicate an important role for perceived control, a factor rarely examined in prior research on activism.

Why We “Profess” Rather than Teach: Implications of the Gendered Construction of Work for Academic Unions

Although connections between the gendered construction of work and institutional arrangements in higher education are seldom explored by researchers, the assumption that teaching is “women’s work” is a key to understanding the social stratification of higher education in the U.S.—and to organizing higher education faculty. I sketch the implications of my analysis for faculty unions after describing the international context in which faculty organizing in the U.S. should be understood, in particular neoliberalism’s project to make education a commodity and dismantle public education as “public good.”

Adjuncts Committed to Their Students, Not Employers

Adjuncts Committed to Their Students, Not Employers

The Causal Effect of Faculty Unions on Institutional Decision-Making

The author's goal in this article is to estimate the causal effect of unionization on institutional decision-making, using a national survey of presidents and faculty senate leaders to measure the level of shared governance at 341 public universities in 15 different areas. To handle the endogeneity of faculty unionization, an index of state employee collective bargaining rights is used as an instrument for unionization. Findings indicate that unionization greatly increases faculty influence over institutional decision-making, both in compensation and in areas outside of compensation.

Digital Higher Education: How We Have Gotten to Where We Are Tells Us A Lot about Where We’re Headed

This handout discusses four phenomena in online education—online for-profit institutions, Western Governors University, MOOCs, and for-profit “educational providers” such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill and their smaller imitators such as Academic Partnerships. Understanding the connections between these phenomena is as important, I think, as understanding them individually. I will talk about them in a sequence that will, I think, suggest where we are now and where we are going in terms of both online education and the core issues confronting our academic institutions, in particular public colleges and universities, and our faculty unions.

Labor and Employment Relations Association: Adjunct/Part-time Faculty Unions in Private Higher Education & Graduate Student Organizing following the NLRB Decision in the NYU Case

This handout packet includes "'Metro' Unionizing Strategy is Viewed as a Means to Empower Adjunct Faculty" by Peter Schmidt (originally published in the Chronicle of Higher Education), "NLRB to review whether graduate assistants can unionize at private universities" by Scott Jaschik (originally published in Inside Higher Ed) and "Brown University and International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, UAW AFL-CIO, Petitioner" from the NLRB No. 42.

Flexibility at the Core: What Determines Employment of Part-Time Faculty in Academia

In this study, we examine institutional predictors of part-time faculty employment in the higher education sector in the United States. We draw upon institutional and individual-level data to examine the variation in the intensity of part-time employment in faculty positions among a representative sample of higher education institutions. Institutional-level data are from Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and individual-level data are from National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF). These data allow us to examine the impact of both economic factors and social environment on employment practices of colleges and universities. This analysis adds to the emerging literature on non-standard work arrangements in core organizational functions. Our results suggest that the employment of part-time faculty is significantly associated with a set of organizational attributes and characteristics such as institutional type, sources of revenue, and part-time student enrolment. Private institutions, on average, have higher levels of part-time faculty than their public counterparts. The proportion of part-time students and the share of institutional revenues derived from tuition and fees are positively associated with part-time faculty employment. Faculty unions are positively related to the employment of part-time faculty. Finally, institutions that have limited resource slack and pay high salaries to their full-time faculty members tend to employ a high proportion of part-time faculty. These results support the arguments that higher educational institutions actively design and adopt contingent work arrangements to manage their resource dependence with constituencies and to reduce labour costs.

What’s Ahead in Faculty Collective Bargaining? The New and the Déjà Vu

As faculty collective bargaining reaches the half-century mark, the authors take a critical look at what has or has not worked at the bargaining table; how the early expectations of what faculty bargaining would bring to the academy have or have not been realized; and what the future holds, both in terms of process and the substantive issues that will be brought to the table. Dr. Julius has been a faculty member, administrator and employer representative in negotiations at many institutions; Mr. DiGiovanni has served a labor counsel and has negotiated with faculty unions at numerous institutions since the late 1970s. Both share their retrospective on what is new today and what has not changed over that time.

The horizontal and vertical fragmentation of academic work and the challenge for academic governance and leadership

Academic work has become increasingly fragmented. The horizontal fragmentation of the profession into disciplinary tribes has been accompanied by the increasing participation of student affairs and educational development professionals located outside the academic units but are actively engaged in academic work, such as supporting teaching and student learning. An increasing vertical fragmentation of academic work has recently occurred within academic units with the increasing employment of contract university teachers and research assistants. In Canada, horizontal and vertical fragmentations have occurred while universities and strong faculty unions have protected the “traditional” tenure-stream professoriate. Drawing on recent research, the author argues that these Canadian full-time faculties have high levels of job satisfaction and are well-remunerated, productive scholars. Maintaining the status and the supportive working conditions of the full-time, tenure-stream professoriate has largely been accomplished through labor cost efficiencies created by the increasing use of part-time, contractual university teachers, now frequently represented by labor unions that are distinct from their full-time peers. This article discusses the challenges for academic governance and leadership associated with this increasing fragmentation of academic work in the context of the “global” university.

Faculty Unions at the Crossroads

Faculty Unions at the Crossroads

Faculty Union and Faculty Senate Co-Existence

This paper examines the intersection between faculty unions and faculty senates along with the costs and benefits that each pays and receives relative to one another. More specifically, the authors examine the impact of academic collective bargaining on shared governance traditions, providing an analysis of whether the relationship of unions and governance systems has been symbiotic or non-symbiotic. The authors also explore the overall beneficial and negative outcomes of academic collective bargaining in higher education before developing and presenting a framework of four models of academic collective bargaining that offers historical descriptive value as well as prescriptions for academic collective bargaining in the future. The paper makes a significant contribution to the faculty governance and higher education collective bargaining literature by being among the first to provide a comprehensive review of the faculty governance literature over the last four decades and to present an integrative framework of the possible relationships between faculty unions, faculty senates, and institutions of higher education.

The Future of Faculty Unionization

The Future of Faculty Unionization