It’s only a matter of time before the National Labor Relations Board is faced with a challenge to a 2004 ruling that says graduate students at private institutions aren’t employees and therefore don’t have bargaining rights, its leader told attendees at a labor conference here on Monday.
“This is not an issue that we’ll bring up, but I have heard there are cases out there in the works,” said Wilma B. Liebman, the opening speaker at the conference, held at the City University of New York’s Baruch College.
Ms. Liebman, who became the labor board’s chairman in 2009, spoke to an audience of union leaders, university administrators, and faculty members who are intensely interested in how the board, under President Obama’s administration, might change the landscape for collective bargaining in higher education.
Mr. Obama recently used his recess-appointment authority to fill two vacancies on the five-member board (one position remains vacant). Many union supporters hope that his appointments to the labor board, along with others to the federal courts, mean that the ranks of professors and graduate teaching assistants in higher-education unions will have a chance to grow.
Ms. Liebman cautioned, however, that even though she expects the newly expanded board to take a “more dynamic approach to decision making,” it is “unrealistic to expect fundamental, wholesale change,” particularly when it comes to unionizing professors at private colleges.
A 30-Year-Old Decision
For the most part, they have been unable to form unions ever since 1980. That’s when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case involving Yeshiva University that professors at the private institution were managerial employees and therefore not entitled to bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act. Before the decision, professors at private institutions were generally considered professional employees, who do have full bargaining rights under the law.
The Yeshiva ruling focused specifically on the facts in that case, but it has proved a stumbling block for union drives at all but a handful of private colleges across the country.
“Every time we try to make it stretch to protect more faculty, it doesn’t work,” Ms. Liebman said of the labor law. “There seems to be some hostility in the courts.”
Still, Ms. Liebman said there were “modest but meaningful things the board can do,” including moving to shorten the time frame between filing a petition to hold a union election and actually voting, and pushing the labor board to decide cases that come before it much more quickly—a task that should become easier with a board that recently doubled in size, after having had only two members for the past two years.
‘Looking for a Change in the Law’
Ms. Liebman’s remarks struck a chord with faculty union advocates at the conference, which was organized by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions of CUNY’s Hunter College.
Phil Kugler, director of organization and membership services for the American Federation of Teachers, said the federation “really doesn’t bother to get into the private-sector faculty situation"—the barriers caused by the Yeshiva case make it too costly to do so, he said. “We’re looking for a change in the law as the only way out. We hope there can be some private-sector changes.”
James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, gave attendees a glance into a much different union environment. In Canada, he said, “union busting is rare,” and widespread union membership among professors is the norm. Even adjuncts in Canada are heavily unionized. Yet, despite having collective-bargaining rights, adjuncts in Canada—much like their counterparts in the United States—are “still exploited,” Mr. Turk said. “We can’t really negotiate the end to their exploitation.”
The recent recession’s effect on higher education is, of course, a common theme in sessions at this year’s conference. Other topics covered on Monday included postdoctoral researchers and collective-bargaining rights, negotiating effectively, and the future of public higher education in California.
Among the topics on tap for Tuesday, the conference’s final day, are graduate-student unionization, how budget crises have affected diversity and collective bargaining, and an inside look at adjunct advocacy through the eyes of some of the founding members of New Faculty Majority: the National Coalition for Adjunct and Contingent Equity.
