The Cambridge, Mass., City Council overwhelmingly approved a resolution this week expressing support for colleges’ contingent faculty members and their unionization, following in the tracks of the Los Angeles City Council, which passed a similar measure last month.
Both the Cambridge resolution, approved on Monday, and the Los Angeles council’s contain provisions calling for adjunct faculty members to be allowed to unionize without interference and to be “paid fair wages and benefits that allow them to support themselves and their families.”
Both measures also refer to the high tuition paid by students at local colleges, the substantial role adjunct instructors play in educating those students, and the difficulty adjunct instructors have in supporting themselves, given a local cost of living well above the national average.
The two councils acted as colleges within their municipal borders are the subject of efforts by the Service Employees International Union to organize adjunct faculty members throughout entire metropolitan areas into collective-bargaining units.
Adjunct faculty members at Lesley University, a private college in Cambridge, are expected to begin voting on unionization at the end of the month as part of the SEIU’s effort in the Boston area. Cambridge is also home to Cambridge College, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In Los Angeles adjunct faculty members at Loyola Marymount University filed a petition last month with the National Labor Relations Board to vote on forming a collective-bargaining unit affiliated with the SEIU.
Leland Chung, the Cambridge City Council member who proposed the adjunct resolution passed there, said on Tuesday that he had introduced the measure after being approached by the SEIU and told of its efforts to organize adjunct instructors in that area.
He said the resolution’s adoption reflected both the council’s longstanding support of the right of workers to unionize and its concern that many employees of the city’s higher-education institutions were not being paid enough to live there.
Mr. Chung, who holds advanced degrees from both Harvard and MIT, said many of his friends who became adjuncts “are living an hour and a half away and commuting in because they are not being paid anywhere close enough to live near campus.”
Broad Search for Allies
At a conference in Washington in November, leaders of various efforts to organize adjunct instructors around the nation spoke of a need to look well beyond college faculties for allies.
Maria C. Maisto, executive director of the New Faculty Majority Foundation, said on Tuesday that she expected to see more municipalities consider resolutions like those passed by the Cambridge and Los Angeles councils, “as adjuncts become more savvy about reaching out to community members for support.”
Even the introduction of resolutions that eventually fail is worthwhile, Ms. Maisto said, because “the more you do it, the more you educate people, and that is part of the process.”
Among other institutions swept up in the SEIU’s organizing efforts in Massachusetts, adjunct instructors at Tufts University, in Medford, overwhelmingly voted to form an SEIU-affiliated union in September, and those at Bentley University, in Waltham, narrowly rejected a proposal to form an SEIU-affiliated union in votes tallied in October. Adjunct instructors at Northeastern University, in Boston, have mounted their own SEIU-supported effort to hold a unionization vote.
In the Los Angeles area, adjunct faculty members at the University of La Verne, in the city’s eastern suburbs, have filed petitions with the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections. Adjunct faculty members at another suburban institution, Whittier College, voted last month to form a union affiliated with the SEIU.
