The attacks on Ohio’s and Wisconsin’s public-sector unions mounted by fiscally conservative lawmakers this year are forcing unions that represent public-college faculty in those states to rethink their strategies and basic missions.
On the defensive both at the bargaining table and in the political arena, many faculty unions in the two states have been concluding that their attempts to hold their ground on one front can bring disastrous, unintended consequences on the other. The tough bargaining tactics they have long used to prevail in labor negotiations can now lead to major political defeats, as their critics paint them as greedy or selfish to rally support behind legislation intended to curtail union power. And political setbacks like the passage of such legislation can leave faculty unions weakened in labor negotiations or, in some cases, wipe them out completely.
Nationally, the poor economy and the triumph of many Republicans in last year’s state elections have put faculty unions in the position of having to balance their desire to hold on to past collective-bargaining gains with their need to avoid alienating taxpayers, who pay a chunk of the resulting bill.
“The ongoing attack on unions in the private sector has now come to the public sector,” said Joe T. Berry, an independent labor educator and the author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower, an organizing handbook for contingent faculty members. As public colleges’ faculty unions around the nation find their powers challenged politically, he said in an interview, they must come to terms with the reality that it is difficult to “win a struggle against a public-sector employer without public support.”
Image Worries
In such a political climate, an Ohio law that has yet to take effect—and might never actually be carried out—is nonetheless having a major effect on how faculty unions conduct themselves.
Adopted by Ohio lawmakers in March but then placed on hold until November 8, pending a voter referendum on its possible repeal, Senate Bill 5 would curtail the collective-bargaining rights of all state employees, including those at public colleges. More significantly for higher education, the measure, widely known as SB 5, would hobble public colleges’ faculty unions by reclassifying most of their members as managers who are precluded from union representation.
Already, the measure has taken a toll on several public colleges’ faculty unions by putting them under pressure in recent months to accept concessions and temper their tactics in collective-bargaining talks. The unions’ leaders have been wary of how news coverage of their statements and strikes might play into the hands of supporters of SB 5. Moreover, they have had to keep in mind during their negotiations that they could end up without any contract at all if they fail to reach a labor agreement before the November elections and if the law survives the repeal referendum.
A Quinnipiac University poll of about 1,300 registered Ohio voters conducted late last month found that 51 percent wanted to repeal the law while 38 percent wanted to keep it in place. The repeal campaign appears to have lost ground since July, when a Quinnipiac poll of registered voters found that 56 percent favored repeal and 32 percent were against.
Strike That Strike
The leadership of Youngstown State University’s faculty union found its bargaining tactics at odds with its political interests in August, when its threat to stage a strike at the beginning of the fall semester was met by an announcement by university administrators that they would not be able to disburse federal financial-aid payments to students until classes actually started.
The development polarized Youngtown State students, many of whom rely on such aid to cover basic expenses. More than 1,400 joined a Facebook group called YSU Students Against a Faculty Strike, prompting about 900 students who supported the union to enlist in a rival Facebook group, YSU Students for Faculty.
The campaign organization seeking to keep SB 5 in place, Building a Better Ohio, seized upon the strike’s potential effect on students to rally support for its cause.
“The issue here is that these are public employees who are paid by the taxpayer to educate our kids at our universities. They are making good salaries and they get good benefits—often better benefits than those in the private sector,” Connie Wehrkamp, the press secretary for Building a Better Ohio, said in a recent interview. “Taking taxpayers’ dollars and threatening to strike—or actually striking, and putting kids in the middle of that and using them as bargaining chips—isn’t acceptable. Taxpayers deserve more.”
The faculty union, which is affiliated with the Ohio Education Association, ended up calling a strike and then, just hours later, calling it off so that classes could begin as scheduled.
“We have been very conscious, as we have gone through this entire process, of the ramifications of what we are doing in terms of how people see public employees,” said the union’s spokeswoman, Sherry Lee Linkon, professor of English and American studies at Youngstown State. She said her union’s representatives entered negotiations in February willing to make major concessions, such as sacrificing full pay for yearlong sabbaticals, to avoid giving ammunition to the lawmakers seeking to get SB 5 through the state legislature. The debate over the measure, she said, “has been part of the context for our union negotiations” ever since.
The union’s members last week narrowly approved a labor agreement in which they offered up concessions in areas such as their share of health-care premiums and their pay for teaching summer classes. The university’s board was expected to vote on the new contract this week.
Half a Loaf
The debate over SB 5 has also factored into labor negotiations at Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, where a faculty union affiliated with the American Association of University Professors has been at loggerheads with the administration over workload-related issues such as the college’s plans to make the transition next year from a five-term academic calendar to three semesters, necessitating changes in how faculty members’ teaching and service responsibilities are apportioned over time. Both sides of the SB 5 campaign have seized on the labor dispute to make their case. Building a Better Ohio has accused the union of being willing to hurt students by striking to pursue its members’ selfish interests; the campaign to repeal SB 5, We Are Ohio, has argued that the dispute shows why faculty members need unions to keep management from walking all over them.
Cincinnati State’s AAUP chapter went on strike last month but returned to work after a week in which it made little progress in its contract talks. Pamela S. Ecker, a professor of professional and technical writing who is the union’s spokeswoman, said it planned from the outset to limit its strike to a week to minimize the disruption for students. But college officials accused the union of returning to work only because its members would have had to pay their own health-insurance premiums if they had stayed out of work any longer.
Both Ms. Ecker and Sara Kilpatrick, the executive director of the AAUP of Ohio, have accused Cincinnati State’s administration of failing to bargain in good faith and using the prospect of SB 5 being upheld at the polls to extract concessions. “If SB 5 is not repealed there would be no need for them to negotiate with us,” Ms. Ecker said. “They are hoping we will settle for less than a good contract in order to have a contract.” Ms. Kilpatrick accused Gov. John R. Kasich, a Republican who championed SB 5, of encouraging Republican members of Cincinnati State’s Board of Trustees to take a hard line in contract talks.
Cathy Crain, the board’s chairwoman, said last week that she personally took affront to the allegation the college has not been bargaining in good faith. “We have a business to run,” she said, “and we have to do this in a reasonable way so that our students get the best possible education at affordable prices.”
Bowled Over
Allegations of bad faith also have complicated contract talks at Bowling Green State University, where administrators had strongly opposed the formation of the BGSU Faculty Association, a faculty union affiliated with the AAUP. The Toledo Blade last month published a story suggesting that Bowling Green administrators played a leading role in a decision by the Inter-University Council of Ohio, an association of the state’s public universities, to lobby lawmakers last winter to include in SB 5 the provision seen as most damaging to faculty unions. It reclassifies faculty members as managers if they take on any of the management-related tasks most college professors assume, such as being involved with administrative committees or faculty senates.
Bruce E. Johnson, the council’s president, has denied that Bowling Green played a leading role in promoting the measure. Mary Ellen Mazey, who left a position as provost at Auburn University to become president of Bowling Green in July, last week issued a statement that said she could not speak about the position of its administration before she got there. “We are moving forward under the current law,” she said, “and are negotiating in good faith.”
But David J. Jackson, an associate professor of political science who is president of Bowling Green’s faculty union, said the Toledo Blade article “had a real clarifying effect” for faculty members there. “Now we are pushing much harder for the administration to voluntarily recognize us as the bargaining agents for the faculty regardless of the outcome of SB 5,” he said. “That would go a long way toward repairing the obvious breach of trust that has occurred between us and the administration.”
Stuck Behind the Scenes
It is telling, from a political perspective, that the voters who decide the fate of SB 5 next month are likely to do so without ever hearing public-college professors make their case against it.
We Are Ohio, the organization behind the repeal campaign, has not featured college faculty members in its advertisements decrying SB 5’s effect on public employees. Instead, its campaign ads have featured police officers, firefighters, and schoolteachers—people who, Ms. Kilpatrick of the state AAUP said, “tug at the heartstrings a little bit more.”
Some faculty-union leaders frankly acknowledge that they do not see the state’s voters as likely to feel much sympathy for the faculty members affected by the law, especially considering that those who are tenured earn, on average, well over $70,000 annually, significantly more than the state’s median household income of about $46,000.
“You are not going to talk about the people who are paid more” in the campaign to repeal the law, said Ms. Linkon of the Youngstown State union. She noted that because the salaries paid to public colleges’ faculty members help inflate the average salary for the state’s public servants—a statistic that proponents of SB 5 often put forward to support their cause—"You are going to talk about the people who are paid less.”
The campaign against SB 5 has made little mention, except in the talking points it distributes to campus organizers, of SB 5’s provision precluding most faculty members from joining unions. “A vociferous defense of faculty rights to unionize or strike would play very badly,” said Paul A. Beck, a professor of political science at Ohio State University who monitors state politics and studies voting behavior. “The people who are trying to repeal Senate Bill 5 would want to prevent that from happening prior to November.”
Many public-college faculty members and students helped gather signatures to get the repeal referendum on the ballot, and are now involved in campaign phone banks and other efforts to get out the vote.
Nevertheless, some campaign efforts in college towns are playing down faculty members’ self interests. John T. McNay, a professor of history who is president of the AAUP chapter at the University of Cincinnati, said its members are trying “to pound home the message” that SB 5 “is not just bad for us, it is bad for the university.” It will have the effect, he said, of discouraging faculty members from taking on service work that could be seen as managerial.
Cowed in Wisconsin
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, it is too late for public colleges’ faculty unions to do anything but try to adapt to a new state law that drastically alters their labor rights and their political landscape.
The measure, which Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican, pushed through that state’s legislature in March, stripped the faculty and academic-staff unions in the University of Wisconsin system of their collective-bargaining rights. It left the unions at technical colleges intact for now, but stipulated that their collective-bargaining negotiations can cover only base wages, and the unions cannot negotiate raises beyond any growth in the Consumer Price Index without the approval of voters. Worse yet for those unions, they must win recertification every year by having at least 51 percent of the workers they wish to represent vote to be part of them.
Bryan L. Kennedy, president of the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin affiliate and of the Association of UW Professionals, said he is not counting on a turn in the political tide leading to the restoration of collective-bargaining rights for University of Wisconsin faculty any time soon. Instead, he said, his unions’ chief strategy now is to forge ahead with organizing efforts and have its campus affiliates seek a key role in advising their institutions on workplace policy. “If [faculty unions] are able to achieve majority status on the campus, there is no way the administration can refuse to talk to them,” he said.
Half of the state’s 16 technical colleges have faculty unions affiliated with the AFT; faculty unions at the other half are affiliated with the National Education Association.
Mr. Kennedy said the 51 percent threshold for union recertification “is a very high hurdle, especially if you are talking large bargaining units.” He expects many locals to fail to win that number of votes, and others not to bother trying.
