Ana M. Fores Tamayo has not heard back from the pope, but she remains hopeful he is on her side.
In a letter she mailed to the Vatican in October, Ms. Fores Tamayo recalled for Pope Francis how she had made just $15,000 per year as a part-time English instructor at a community college in Texas. She also described how 83-year-old Margaret Mary Vojtko had died recently, impoverished after working for 25 years as an adjunct instructor of French at Duquesne University, a Roman Catholic institution in Pittsburgh.
Her letter, written in Spanish, urged the pontiff—a vocal critic of growing economic inequality in the world—to speak out on behalf of college instructors who work on contracts offering little job security and who earn much less than their tenure-track colleagues do.
“Please help us during this difficult time,” implored Ms. Fores Tamayo, who writes the blog Adjunct Justice and is on the Board of Directors of the New Faculty Majority, which represents non-tenure-track faculty members.
Advocates for those instructors are not waiting for the pope’s blessing to make a faith-based argument that Catholic colleges ought to improve contingent faculty members’ working conditions. In petitions and newspaper opinion pieces, they have begun accusing such colleges of defying the church’s own teachings by exploiting instructors who work off the tenure track and by opposing their unionization.
“We are simply asking them to live up to their own personal ideals,” says Joseph J. Fahey, a professor of religious studies at Manhattan College and chair of Catholic Scholars for Worker Justice, which seeks to hold Catholic institutions to the church’s teachings that workers have a moral right to form labor unions.
Associations that represent Catholic colleges have argued, however, that the institutions should be allowed to decide for themselves, on the basis of economic and other considerations, whether to let their adjuncts unionize.
They also argue that adjunct unionization threatens the colleges’ religious freedom if it occurs through unwelcome involvement by the National Labor Relations Board in their union elections and labor affairs.
“Catholic teaching is generally supportive of unions. But the question of whether a higher-education union is appropriate in a given set of circumstances tends to vary from city to city,” the Rev. Michael J. Sheeran, president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, wrote in a statement for The Chronicle.
A Growing Debate
Faith-based appeals to support adjuncts’ unionization have focused mainly on three Catholic institutions—Duquesne; Manhattan College, in New York; and Saint Xavier University, in Illinois—involved in disputes before the National Labor Relations Board. All three colleges oppose NLRB-monitored adjunct-unionization elections on First Amendment grounds, arguing that they are too religious to fall under the board’s jurisdiction.
Mr. Fahey dismisses the colleges’ invocation of religious-freedom concerns as disingenuous because they could have avoided NLRB involvement in their affairs by allowing union elections overseen by an outside arbitrator. As of last week, his advocacy group had gotten about 100 Catholic theologians to sign a statement calling on the colleges to “stand for justice” and “immediately remove all legal impediments” to adjuncts’ unionization.
More than 17,000 people have signed an online petition urging Duquesne to “actually abide by Catholic social teaching” and stop refusing to recognize an adjunct union organized there by the United Steelworkers. The petition refers to Ms. Vojtko, who in death has emerged as a symbol for the adjunct-unionization cause.
The debate over how religious colleges should treat adjuncts appears likely to intensify as more of those institutions experience unionization drives. The Service Employees International Union, which this year organized Georgetown University’s adjuncts into a collective-bargaining unit, expects to mount similar efforts at two nearby Catholic colleges, Catholic University and Trinity Washington University, as part of a campaign to organize adjuncts throughout some metropolitan areas. Another of its regional targets, the Boston area, is home to more than a half-dozen Catholic colleges.
Lutheran Split
Catholic colleges are not alone as subjects of debate over faith and faculty unionization. A similar controversy has flared at Pacific Lutheran University, a Tacoma, Wash., institution affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the nation’s largest Lutheran denomination.
Pacific Lutheran is involved in its own battle with the NLRB over the unionization of its contingent faculty members. It has filed an appeal seeking to block the federal agency from counting ballots from an October union election that a regional NLRB office authorized. In addition to claiming exemption from NLRB oversight on First Amendment religious-freedom grounds, the university argues that the union being organized there is too broadly composed, including both part-time adjuncts and full-timers with management roles.
Steven P. Starkovich, the provost, said in a letter to alumni last month that contingent faculty members’ salaries already are competitive, and that their unionization threatens both educational quality and the faculty’s “culture of collaboration.”
Supporters of the unionization effort say the university’s stand contradicts the stated beliefs of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. They cite a 1999 statement, adopted by the denomination’s churchwide assembly, that supports “the right of employees to organize for the sake of better working conditions and to engage in collective bargaining.”
Jane L. Harty, a senior lecturer in Pacific Lutheran’s music department who helped lead its unionization drive, says the university’s leaders “are trying to have it both ways,” claiming to be religious to escape NLRB oversight while refusing to adhere to the denomination’s pro-union beliefs.
Finding Religion
Most of the religious colleges’ legal wrangling with the NLRB centers on the question of how the board should determine if they are too religious to fall under its jurisdiction without violating the First Amendment’s separation of church and state. Regional NLRB offices have based such decisions on their determinations of whether the institutions are of “a substantial religious character"—for example, requiring faculty members to adhere to certain religious values.
The colleges argue that the test should be whether a college is nonprofit, is religiously affiliated, and publicly holds itself up as religious, criteria that essentially call for the colleges to be taken at their word.
“This is simply, for us, a First Amendment issue,” says Michael Galligan-Stierle, president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, an umbrella group that has filed briefs opposing NLRB jurisdiction. “Catholic colleges are best positioned to determine Catholic identity.”
Other groups that signed onto the briefs were the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and the Lasallian Association of College and University Presidents, which represents the leaders of six colleges, including Manhattan, established by the De La Salle Christian Brothers.
The brief in the Manhattan case states at the outset that its arguments “are about the jurisdiction of the National Labor Relations Board, not the natural rights of employees.”
“It is awkward for a Catholic institution to appear to be fighting a union, but then there are other realities involved,” says the Rev. Charles L. Currie, a former president of the Jesuit-colleges association. He now works at Georgetown as executive director of an effort to link Jesuit higher education to marginalized populations.
Many advocates of adjunct unionization are calling on administrators at other Catholic colleges to follow the lead of Georgetown, which remained neutral when part-time faculty members there voted on unionizing. The move did not come as a big surprise; in 2005, Georgetown adopted a “just employment policy” calling for its service workers to be offered fair and competitive wages.
At Georgetown, Father Currie says, “a culture has developed where folks are more open to that kind of thing.”
