Unions and nontenure-track faculty?

There's a stereotype of unions as creatures of heavy industry: steelworkers, miners, garment workers, construction workers—and it's certainly true that the historical roots of organized labor are the factories and foundries of the early twentieth century. Working-class men and women struggled to forge the basic concepts of fair employment: freedom from discrimination & arbitrary treatment, the 40-hour work-week, and paid heath insurance. Like most stereotypes, however, this characterization of unions falls short of the truth—especially now, in the early 21st century, when professional and technical workers are the fastest growing occupational groups in the country. Musicians, engineers, airline pilots, doctors, nurses, social workers, researchers, and teachers have all turned to unions to advocate for themselves in the new service-driven economy.

There's a stereotype of higher education, too: the ivory tower set aside from the getting and spending of the real world, a place where reason rules and rational argument wins the day! Even if many of us still want to hold onto this image as an ideal, it's hard to do as colleges and universities move increasingly to corporate models to maintain their bottom lines.

Unions of university and college faculty are nothing new; tenure-track faculty—especially at public institutions—began organizing in the 1960's following huge nationwide increases in undergraduate enrollment and the exponential growth of what University of California president Clark Kerr famously dubbed "the knowledge industry." Here in Michigan, tenure-track faculty unions won certification elections at a regular pace: 5 in 1965; 16 by 1975; and 37 by 1980.

The union movement among nontenure-track faculty is thus a second wave in higher education, one that follows an equally radical change in the structure of our industry. Between 1970 and 1995, the number of full-time faculty grew modestly—49%—while the number of part-time faculty grew an astonishing 266%. This surge (which does not even count the growth of full-time nontenure-track faculty) was partially an effect of declining state funding for higher education, but other factors—such as the overproduction of Ph.D.'s for the academic market—contributed as well.

In the Fall of 2007, there were more than 1.5 million people working in post-secondary instruction; of these, less than 430,000 were so-called regular faculty, tenured or tenure-track. 330,000 were graduate student employees—meaning that over half of the total number are full and part-time nontenure-track faculty.

Nontenure-track faculty earn less too; in 2003-2004, full-time nontenure-track faculty at public research institutions—such as Michigan State—earned on average half as much per class as their tenured and tenure-track counterparts. Part-timers earned less than half of that, making their per class salary less than 25% of that of tenure-stream professors.

Unionization is one of the clear ways in which nontenure-track have been able to improve their working conditions in the face of these trends. Lecturers of the University of California system organized early in the 1980’s, and in the 1988 the nontenure-track instructors at the State University of New Jersey at Rutgers voted to join a union. Other notable locals include the Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties (APSCUF), which represents nontenure-track faculty at many of the campuses of the State University System of Pennsylvania (though not PSU), United University Professions (UUP), which represents some part-time and full-time faculty as part of 34,000 unionized employees of the State University of New York system.

Here in Michigan, nontenure-track faculty unions have been successful as well; they are either currently represented or currently struggling to unionize at Eastern, Western, Wayne State, at all three campuses of the University of Michigan, as well as numerous community colleges. Locals at Michigan, Wayne, and Eastern, with support from the AFT, have made significant gains in the areas of greatest concern to nontenure-track faculty: job security, health care for low fraction employees, and in progress towards salary parity.