Today the instructors and adjunct faculty at Western Michigan University overwhelmingly voted for the Professional Instructors Organization (PIO) to represent them.  The Michigan Employment Relations Commission counted the votes in Lansing this morning and announced that the final vote tally was 207 to 29. 

"We are delighted that our colleagues have strongly supported the PIO union, and we will work hard to improve wages and working conditions for all instructors at WMU," said Janet Heller, Instructor in the English Department and Gender & Women's Studies Program. 

"We are confident that our organizing will help university leaders to see that part-time faculty are an essential component (along with tenure-line faculty and graduate teaching assistants) in the educational enterprise at WMU," said Karl Schrock, who teaches in the School of Music. "We look forward to working with the administration to improve communication, faculty recognition, and long-term planning for the university's mission in ways that will benefit students and the university community as a whole." 

Those who voted were instructors at WMU who held appointments of at least 3 total credit hours during the spring 2009 semester although the PIO has been organizing for more than a year.  "I'm proud of our hard work over the last sixteen months to achieve this union," said Martha Faketty, instructor in the English department.

The PIO, which will represent a unit of 430 instructors and adjunct faculty members at WMU, will now begin discussions with the WMU administration about better recognition as members of the faculty and university community.  Many instructors at WMU have not received any salary increase for 12 years.  WMU instructors and adjuncts continue to be one of the lowest paid groups of state university faculty in Michigan.

The vote today follows several other votes in the Great Lakes State over the past two years.  During that time new unions representing contingent faculty and graduate employees have formed at Michigan State, Central Michigan University, Henry Ford Community College and Wayne State University all affiliated with AFT Michigan, the state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO.

After 40 long years of advocacy and a roller coaster ride of hopes raised, then dashed, academic employees in the University of Wisconsin system finally have the right to decide whether they will be represented by a union. On June 29, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle signed the 2009-2011 biennial budget, which includes a provision extending collective bargaining rights to more than 20,000 UW faculty, academic staff and research assistants.

The new right extends to 6,600 full-time, tenured and tenure-track faculty and 13,100 academic staff-defined to include part-time and full-time lecturers, adjuncts, advisors, IT technicians, and others. Another provision gives 3,200 research assistants the right to determine whether they want bargaining representation through the state's first card check-off process. That option would allow research assistants at UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee to be represented by the UW Teaching Assistants' Association (TAA) or the Milwaukee Graduate Assistants' Association (MGAA) when 50 percent plus one of the RAs in the unit have signed cards.

The UW academics are the only non-management class of public employees who have lacked bargaining rights in the state. It has been a very sore point on every campus, says Rep. Cory Mason (D-Racine), who was co-sponsor of a motion that passed within the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee supporting collective bargaining rights for UW faculty and staff. "This is all about fairness," he says.

In back-to-back elections this spring, part-time/adjunct faculty teaching at two private colleges, the Manhattan School of Music and Cooper Union, have voted to unionize. The new unions are affiliated with the New York State United Teachers/AFT/NEA.

While salaries are always a worry to people who make their living in the arts, as most of MSM and CU teachers do, of greater concern is having job security and some say in how the work is determined. At both colleges, the faculty say administrators haven't played fair with them.

Head over the jump to read about each union's story.

AFT Michigan has added another notch to its belt, as nontenure-track faculty at Michigan State University voted by a two-to-one margin for representation. The new union, the Union of Nontenure-Track Faculty (UNTF), will represent 650 part-time and full-time nontenure-track faculty on MSU's East Lansing campus. The mail-in ballot election was overseen by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission and the votes were counted May 29. The final tally was 240-113.

Job security, health insurance and wages are the top concerns of the UNTF members, who work on year-to-year contracts. "Although I have been treated well in my department," says sociologist Ralph Pyle who has been teaching at MSU for 12 years, "I feel that I would have more piece of mind if I knew that my job was secure."

"What matters to me most is having a voice," says Naoko Wake, a visiting assistant professor in MSU's Lyman Briggs college. "Now we will be real citizens of the university community."

The victory is part of a national trend of nontenure-track organizing. In Michigan, faculty have been on an exceptional roll, with AFT Michigan-affiliated unions recently organized at the University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Henry Ford Community College. Next month, the union hopes to pick up more when part-time faculty at Western Michigan University will also be voting for union representation.

Central Michigan University graduate assistants (GAs) have voted 152-21 to be represented by the Graduate Student Union. The unit of 450 teaching and administrative assistants is affiliated with AFT Michigan and the AFT and the AFL-CIO. They teach, grade, tutor, and perform administrative duties on the university's Mt. Pleasant campus. 

By the time they cast their ballots on May 4th and 5th in an election supervised by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, the GAs had heard from many across the campus and the state, including legislators and the governor. In the end, the strength of the vote was a repudiation of the strong-arm tactics of the administration, which raised the heat in the final days of the organizing drive by sending a letter urging the GAs to vote no on the question of union representation.

In that April 21 letter, CMU interim dean of the College of Graduate Studies Roger Coles wrote to all CMU graduate assistants telling them that the university was opposed to the GAs having a union. The opposition, he wrote, is "based on the firm belief that a union of GAs is contrary not only to the best interests of our students, but also to the best interests of our University as well."

As it happened, the Michigan AFL-CIO was holding its biannual meeting the following day. Delegates were appalled to hear of CMU's interference, says AFT Michigan president David Hecker. "That message, coming from a taxpayer-subsidized university that gets the rest of its money from tuition paid by working class families, is abhorrent," says Hecker.

Twice during the day-long event, he says, delegates went to their phones and called the CMU provost's office to say, ‘if this is the position of CMU, we can't see sending our kids and grandkids there.'

Hecker says the president also was urged to retract the letter but refused.

Then, on April 30, the CMU grad assistants heard words of encouragement from the state capital. Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm wrote to urge the GAs to vote and expressed her view of the integral role unions play in the nation, state and on university campuses. "No one can make this decision for you and no one should be allowed to intimidate you as you exercise this fundamental right," she said.

The same day, members of both the Michigan Senate and House Higher Education Appropriations Subcommittees sent a letter to thank the GAs "for all you do" and to "offer our support for your efforts to unionize." Alluding to their role in "determining state funding for Michigan's 15 public universities," they noted their belief that the AFT-affiliated graduate assistant unions at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, Wayne State University and Western Michigan University have enhanced "quality by working to not only improve pay and working conditions, but by giving graduate assistants a collective voice at the university."

In the end, however, it was how the grad assistants weighed in that counted. By voting for the union, they affirmed their right to negotiate health insurance, salary, tuition waivers, and other conditions of employment with the university administration. Overall, however, the central issue for the GSU was recognition: &...

When the ballots were counted this past Friday, it was clear that graduate employees at Florida State University wanted a union.  By an overwhelming vote of 448-140, FSU grads voted in favor of the United Faculty of Florida being their sole representative for the purposes of collective bargaining.  The new union, the FSU Graduate Assistants United, will represent 2,800 graduate employees.

Key issues during the campaign were concerns about increasing workloads; substandard, inadequate pay; expensive health insurance that employees had to purchase and a lack of input on any of those working conditions.

"We teach a majority of the classes at FSU," said FSU-GAU Co-President Danielle Holbrook. "We are the largest group of employees on campus but we have been working without job security or health insurance. Our workloads have been increasing while our salary remains the same, which means in this economy we're being paid less each year. Without our labor, the university could not function, but we've had no legal voice in how we are treated, so we organized a union and are ready to negotiate with the university." 

The graduate employees in the FSU-GAU will be joining graduate employees represented by United Faculty of Florida (UFF) at the University of Florida, University of South Florida, and Florida A&M and become the19^th graduate employee union affiliated with AFT.  UFF represents the faculty at 12 universities and nine colleges in Florida and is affiliated the Florida Education Association/NEA/AFT.

AFT President Randi Weingarten issued an urgent call this week for labor and management in the nation's colleges and universities to work together, on campus and in the public arena, to reverse the decades-long overreliance on and exploitation of contingent faculty members.

In terms of the investment in higher education, there is a real dilemma in higher ed when almost three-quarters of the instructional staff is made up of contingent faculty and more than half our classes are taught by contingent instructors," Weingarten said. "This is the time, despite the financial situation, to think about how we start to do things differently.

Speaking at the 36^th annual conference of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, Weingarten called on attendees to think innovatively to address the academic staffing crisis for the long-term health of our colleges and universities.  "What I'm asking on the issue of staffing is to start thinking of a better way we can staff our institutions in the future, so they can again become centers of excellent education and research."

Weingarten also called for better collaboration on both sides of the table to address the thorny challenges of budget battles and staffing dilemmas. "The budget battle is a problem common to labor and management," she said. "We have to walk in each other's shoes. Getting along, trusting one another, will lead us to engage in dialogue and find solutions."

Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress at the City University of New York and an AFT vice president commented that we will need this type of collaboration if we are going to achieve the goals of AFT's FACE program.  "The critical point about FACE is that it addresses the two sides of the staffing crisis at once," Bowen noted.

We call for equity in pay and benefits for part-time and contingent faculty at the same time as we seek to create more full-time positions.  As a labor union, the AFT could not do anything else: public higher education has survived twenty years of budget cuts largely because of the underpaid, exploited labor of contingent faculty.  We must fix their salary and benefits at the same time as we transform the system itself.

I suppose some might say that we didn't really need research to tell us that part-time faculty aren't as satisfied with their jobs as full-time faculty.  But in the world of public-policy, the more research the better, particularly when it adds a new perspective.

The latest study, as reported yesterday by Inside Higher Ed, comes from Paul D. Umbach of North Carolina State University and Ryan Wells of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.  It examines the attitudes of community college faculty, including part-time faculty.  According to IHE, the researchers concluded that:

Adjuncts are 8 percentage points less likely than full timers to say that they would pursue an academic career again and 9 percentage points less likely to say that they are satisfied with their jobs.

It will come as no surprise that adjuncts are less satisfied than are full-time faculty members with their pay and benefits. . . . But on benefits, the gap in satisfaction levels is greater.

And not surprisingly "when part-time faculty members receive some benefits, not only does the satisfaction gap on benefits grow smaller, but so does the satisfaction gap on salary."  That is probably why the study also finds that "[h]aving a union is positively associated with part-time faculty members' job satisfaction" since unions are most often focused with addressing these key issues and others.

While that all might seem pretty obvious and logical--improved working conditions lead to better job satisfaction--Prof. Umbach points out that it is a lesson that apparently more colleges need to learn.

Umbach said that, given the terrible economy, many colleges may hesitate about equalizing salaries for adjuncts, but adding some benefits may be a sound way to build part timers' sense that their institutions care about them. Umbach said that the tone of some discussions about adjuncts has a "blame the victim" feel, as college officials wonder why part-timers without offices or time to spend on campus don't spend more time with students. Shifting the discussion to looking at what adjuncts need to be more satisfied may be more productive and equitable, he said.

Indeed.

Update:  LEO has also started a site on its Web page to post comments of support for the union regarding the pay issue discussed below. Pop over and show some solidarity.

The Lecturers' Employee Union/AFT at the University of Michigan says the university is playing fast and loose with their contract and with their members' hard won-pay increases.

According to the current three-year agreement, which runs through 2010, lecturers' pay is supposed to increase by the same average rate as that of full-time tenured and tenure track faculty. For the 2008-2009 year, LEO members saw their pay increase 2 percent, while their counterparts got 4.1 percent increases.

LEO member Elizabeth Axelson took to the mike in Ann Arbor to protest UM’s bad faith in awarding negotiated raises. Photo by Beth Hay.)

The university says the additional 2.1 percent doesn't count for the lecturers because it comes from a pool dedicated to retention, promotion and equity. LEO's contract allows those increases to be excluded from the formula.

The problem is, after filing a Freedom of Information ACT request, the union found out that the university has been shifting money around from the faculty's basic salary fund to the excluded fund, thereby giving the full-time faculty higher average increases, but sheltering their obligation to give the 900 lecturers their comparable due.

LEO has filed a grievance, and on April 2, they held a rally to protest the university's lack of good faith. They were joined by other campus organizations, the Graduate Employees' Organization/AFT and Students Organizing for Labor and Economic Equality (SOLE).

"We really want the university to do what they said they would," says Bonnie Halloran, LEO's president who is on temporary leave. She spoke to a Detroit News reporter who covered LEO's protest rally on April 2. 

So, as Inside Higher Ed is reporting this morning, the D.C. Circuit Court has managed to give us another bad decision regarding unions and higher education in the case of Carroll College v. National Labor Relations Board. After years of litigation, faculty at Carroll, who had organized with the UAW, have been denied the right to bargain collectively as the college suddenly realized that the D.C. Court is willing to grant them an exemption based on the loosest of tests regarding religious affiliation. The decision is not really a surprise since the Court based its decision on its own bad precedent. 

Head over the jump for my simple, non-lawyerly (and admittedly biased) explanation.