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.

So much happens during legislative sessions in the states each year that it is easy to miss important developments if you don't know where to look.  That is the case with the recent legislative session in the Old Line State.

Despite its "blue state" image, Maryland does not have what we would consider very progressive laws when it comes to collective bargaining rights for higher education faculty.  Community college faculty can gain the right to organize, but only through a complicated process in which Senators and Representatives of a  particular county can petition the full legislature for collective bargaining rights for community college faculty within their county or district.  And in the University system there is currently no legislation that enables collective bargaining for faculty.

But AFT Maryland has been working to change that and in this last legislative session they were able to get the legislature to take the first step in that direction on behalf of contingent faculty and graduate employees.

Deep inside the "Joint Chairmen's Report on the State Operating Budget and the State Capital Budget and Related Recommendations" on pages 167-8, you will see that the University of Maryland system has been charged with forming a working group including various stakeholders to study and report on "the status of graduate assistants and adjunct faculty in Maryland's state public higher education institutions."

"Examining the growth and use of contingent faculty and graduate employees in Maryland is long overdue" said Lorretta Johnson, AFT Executive Vice President and former president of AFT Maryland under whose watch this process was started.   "We know that these employees have been growing in number and doing more and more of the teaching in Maryland and yet their compensation and treatment is simply not commensurate with their professional responsibilities."

Even before Barack Obama and John McCain started running for president, the adjunct faculty at PACE University got together and formed a union, the Union of Adjunct Faculty at Pace (UAFP). Unfortunately, as is often the case in the private sector, the administration didn't necessarily want to honor that overwhelming decision by its employees and began a long campaign of defer and delay designed to wear down the members of UAFP. 

But guess what?  UAFP formed a union to change how adjunct faculty were treated at Pace and they weren't backing down.  They were going to keep at it until they could establish an agreement that laid the foundation for the long-term improvement of adjunct faculty working conditions.  And finally, over four years later, they have a tentative agreement! 

John Palowski, President of UAFP, put it this way in a message to the membership:

Four and a half years ago an overwhelming majority of Pace adjunct faculty voted in favor of unionization. There were a myriad of reasons adjunct faculty formed a union including a desire for increased pay, hope for better job security, and a need for affordable health insurance.  [snip]

The UAFP Executive Council and the Bargaining Team believe this contract will make important inroads toward addressing many of the concerns that led us to form a union in the first place. As we all know, the work we do as adjunct faculty has been institutionally undervalued for decades. We hope that besides bringing us important improvements in wages and benefits and job security, this contract, in and of itself, will be the first step in increasing the professional respect that is so long overdue for adjunct faculty.

Obviously, the membership will be discussing the agreement as they move toward ratification, but for finally reaching this important step, we say congrats to the UAFP bargaining team and to all of those at Pace who held strong and worked through a very long and hard struggle to reach this first agreement. 

Health and leave benefits, professional development support, seniority, binding arbitration, a boost in pay: these are the high notes of the first contract part-time/adjunct faculty at Syracuse University ratified by a six-to-one margin in a vote counted June 23.

Adjuncts United (AU) represents more than 500 part-time faculty and some graduate students and is affiliated with New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and nationally with the AFT and the NEA. AU has been working towards this contract with the private university since it voted for representation in December 2005. Now, 81 bargaining sessions later--eight of them with a federal mediator at hand--AU has a contract that is a model for private universities in the state and the nation. "It has been a long and arduous process, but well worth the effort," says Jeanette Jeneault, AU president. "As a first contract both sides should be commended on the many best practices that will be memorialized here."

Head over the jump with us to see some of the features of the contract.

One of the country's oldest higher education unions, the United Federation of College Teachers at Pratt Institute in New York, recently ratified a new contract which builds on other provisions they have secured for part-time faculty. One provision that the Pratt faculty union has had in its contract for some time is known as a Certificate of Continuous Employment which is talked about over on the FACE Bargaining page on Job Security. What, you haven't visited the FACE bargaining pages to check out what protections local unions are bargaining for their members in a variety of areas?  Well, come on over! And, if you don't see a contract you know about that has strong provisions in certain areas, let us know!

Two developments we have been watching up in Canada have the potential to be very good news, but with some caveats.

The McGill TAs are preparing to vote tomorrow on a possible contract that will end a nine-week strike according to Maclean's (via Inside Higher Ed).  The potential issue is that several TAs were fired from non-union jobs during the strike, and the union, AGSEM, is seeking compensation.  The university is hoping the union is willing to forgive and forget.

Meanwhile over in Ontario, there is movement on the bill to recognize the 12,500 contingent faculty members in that province.  And while some are hailing this development as evidence that Canada truly is a paradise, it appears that the Ontario government is just as prone to mischief when it comes to labor law as our own government.  Apparently, in modifying the labor code to recognize contingent faculty, the bill also curbs the rights of other employees - namely full-time faculty.  Nothing like pitting one group against another to provide cover for doing nothing at all.

OPSEU (Ontario Public Service Employees Union), the union that has been organizing contingent faculty and working for the change in the law, issued a press release expressing its dismay with the move.

"It is pretty outrageous that this government thinks that recognizing the Charter rights of one group of workers means that another group of workers must give something up," said OPSEU president Warren (Smokey) Thomas. "Charter rights are not some kind of benefit to be paid for, they are rights, pure and simple. They cannot and must not be treated like just another bargaining chip."

So there is more work to be done.  We will keep watching how each of these situations develop.

Editor's Note:  We are pleased to welcome Mark James Miller, President of the Allan Hancock College Part-time Faculty Association to FACE Talk.  The following column first appeared in the local union's newsletter, The Voice. This is the first in a series Mark is working on.

Don't waste time mourning. Organize. 
                     --Joe Hill

The hangdog looks on their faces said it all.

A dean stood delivering a tongue-lashing to a group of part-time instructors, three or four people who had evidently committed some offense that caused her to come storming out of her office, her face red with rage, her demeanor boding ill for whoever happened to be the target of her wrath. She had a reputation as a bully and tyrant, and her fits of temper were well-known and feared; secretaries and student workers ran for cover when she approached. Bursting into the workroom where these teachers were preparing their classes (naturally, as part-timers, they had no offices to do this in) she proceeded to give them a fearful dressing-down. She shouted and gesticulated in a disrespectful, threatening manner that would have been thought abusive had it been meted out to a class of third graders. As this tirade went on I wondered why none of these people spoke up in their own defense. Why didn't one of them tell this woman that her behavior was unacceptable? But no one said anything. The instructors on the receiving end of this harangue simply hung their heads and took it, the way chastened children will.

Last week we reported on the great victory at Henry Ford Community College by the Adjunct Faculty Organization.  Fortunately, our guy Matt Jones was on the scene with his camera and caught some footage of AFO members and the ballot count.  Check it out!

Recently, we reported that the Wayne State University Union of Part-time Faculty (UPTF) had reached a tentative agreement with the University.  The highlights of that agreement are now online as members consider ratification.  Check them out here or hop over the jump with us for a quick summary.