Faculty unions outside Michigan have reason to be concerned with its passage last month of legislation barring unions from collecting fees from workers who do not join them. But the experiences of faculty unions in states that adopted such laws years ago suggest that while the measures can be a major hindrance to their work, they are not a death blow.
Proponents of such measures, who have succeeded in getting them widely known as “right to work” laws, and even many of the measures’ critics see their adoption by Michigan, a stronghold of organized labor, as portending support for them in statehouses elsewhere.
Among the states likely to seriously consider such legislation this year are Missouri, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. F. Vincent Vernuccio, director of labor policy for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, an advocacy group that promoted Michigan’s legislation, says he believes other states will feel pressure to adopt similar laws to remain economically competitive.
The measures generally hurt unions’ ability to recruit members and raise money, by creating situations where workers benefit from a union’s advocacy and services without joining it as a dues-paying member or otherwise supporting it financially. Because the unions are legally barred from denying services or contract coverage to nonmembers among those they represent, the laws typically leave the unions having to do the same with less.
Nevertheless, the laws’ impact on unions, for the most part, appear less severe than some labor organizers might fear.
Among the 24 states with right-to-work laws on the books, seven are home to faculty unions with the power to collectively bargain with college administrations. Most of the remaining 17 are Southern or Rocky Mountain states, many of which have conservative political climates that have broadly limited labor organizing, often through bans on collective bargaining in the public sector, where most faculty unions are found.
A few faculty unions in right-to-work states have had difficulty retaining enough dues-paying members to remain in operation. Generally, however, such unions are at small, rural colleges where any labor-organizing effort can be a challenge. Other faculty unions in those same states have healthy memberships and budgets nearly comparable to those of faculty unions in states without right-to-work laws.
Mark F. Smith, senior policy analyst for higher education for the National Education Association, says operating in the context of a right- to-work law actually can help faculty unions in some ways, leaving them with “a very strong, committed membership” because those who enlist in the union “are making an affirmative decision” to do so. “People don’t join unless they actually join,” he says.
Context Matters
Assessing the effect of right-to- work measures is difficult, partly because so many other factors affecting unions and workers come into play. Most states with such laws are politically conservative enough to have passed other laws hostile to organized labor, making it difficult to determine the economic effect of any one measure and suggesting that broader attitudes toward labor might, in themselves, play a role.
Research on such laws has generally concluded that they discourage unionization, at least temporarily, and produce modest declines in union membership, but most such studies have focused on the private sector, and they generally have devoted little if any attention to faculty unions at either public or private colleges.
Firsthand accounts of the laws’ effects vary in the six states with longstanding right-to-work laws where faculty unions have at least some collective-bargaining rights.
Among the faculty unions that have been hardest hit by such a law is Dodge City Community College Faculty Association, an NEA affiliate that represents about 60 faculty members at that small Kansas college. With the number of faculty members paying dues to that union now hovering at about 20, and at times dipping down to about 15, that union has had trouble finding people in its ranks willing to carry out its recruiting and bargaining work.
“What ends up happening is you have this very small pool of people who can actually take on leadership roles,” says Marg Yaroslaski, the union’s former president.
South Dakota’s Council of Higher Education, an NEA affiliate that represents about 1,200 faculty members at the state’s six public universities and special schools for the deaf or blind, counts just about 180 faculty members, or 15 percent of those it represents, as dues-paying members. It relies on financial support from the NEA to maintain its operations, and uses the results of surveys of all faculty members, whose views are consistent with its members’, to persuade administrators that it speaks for the faculty as a whole, says Gary Aguiar, its president.
A. Frank Thompson, a professor of finance at the University of Northern Iowa and former president of the American Association of University Professors’ Iowa conference, complains that his institution’s administration has been able to shrink the dues-paying ranks of the faculty’s collective-bargaining unit by denying the faculty substantial salary increases. “A lot of faculty, because of the raises being relatively low, have been saying they cannot afford to pay for bargaining,” Mr. Thompson says.
Elsewhere, however, right-to-work laws have not been nearly as damaging.
In Nebraska, for example, Larry Scherer, director of research for the Nebraska State Education Association, an NEA affiliate, says such a law has had “some impact, but not very much,” on faculty unions there. Dues-paying members, he says, account for more than 60 percent of the faculty members represented by unions at the state’s community colleges, and about 75 percent of the faculty members represented by the NEA bargaining unit for the three-college Nebraska State College system. Playing a far greater role there, he says, is the degree to which such unions are active on their campuses and well organized going into contract negotiations. It helps, he says, that the state’s collective-bargaining law gives such unions more power at the negotiating table than is wielded by many other unions elsewhere.
Tom Auxter, president of the United Faculty of Florida, which represents faculty members at that state’s public colleges, similarly credits the possession of strong collective-bargaining rights for much of the health of his statewide union and its campus chapters. He said that his organization’s dues-paying membership has spiked at times when it has come under attack by Republican governors, and that many of its members are so active that it can function so long as at least 20 percent of the faculty population is paying dues. “We are running a really lean staff operation,” he says, “and we can do that because we have all of these activists.”
Great Lakes Wave
State right-to-work laws came about as a result of the Taft-Hartley Act passed by Congress in 1947. Under that measure, unions and employers governed by the National Labor Relations Act, which covers the private sector, were barred from requiring workers to join unions as a condition for obtaining or keeping a job. Unions were left free to charge nonmembers fees roughly equal to union dues, but the act gave states the authority to adopt laws prohibiting such fee assessments.
As a general rule, the states that have passed such laws covering private-sector workers have adopted similar measures covering public employees, if they let public employees unionize at all. All of the public-college faculty unions found in states with private-sector right- to-work laws operate under similar laws applying to at least some public employees.
Most states with such laws adopted them in the 1940s or 1950s, well before the wave of labor organizing that began in higher education in the late 1960s—leaving the faculty unions that have cropped up in those states having to deal with the laws’ restrictions from the outset.
Among the few states where such laws have been imposed on existing faculty unions are Michigan and Wisconsin. Although Wisconsin does not have a right-to-work law covering the private sector, legislation passed there in early 2011 barred the unions representing instructors at the state’s 16 technical colleges from charging nonmembers fees and completely stripped faculty unions in the University of Wisconsin system of their collective-bargaining rights.
The Michigan legislation, which takes effect in late March, does not apply to any faculty union until its current contract expires. Most such unions there are not expected to feel the measure’s effects for at least a year.
Among them is Kalamazoo Valley Community College Faculty Association, which is affiliated with the AAUP and has a contract that expires in 2014. Jeffrey B. Shouldice, its president, says “the great unknown” there is how many members will choose to quit and stop paying its dues of about $700 per year. While he says he is confident most will stay, he acknowledges that a steep drop in membership could undermine perceptions that the union speaks for faculty members and “could weaken our ability to negotiate.”
At Oakland University, in Rochester, Mich., Karen A.J. Miller, president of the AAUP-affiliated faculty union, predicts that her union will lose some members when its contract expires in 2015.
Among them, she says, are some faculty members who think the union is either too radical or not radical enough, as well as part-time faculty members who earn relatively little money and for whom “that decision to hold onto their union dues might be very tempting.”
She is “reasonably certain,” she says, “that the majority of our faculty will stay.”
Map: Strong Faculty Unions Survive in Some ‘Right to Work’ States
Twenty-four states now have “right to work” laws, which prohibit labor unions from requiring the employees they represent to join them or pay dues or fees as a condition of employment. The laws make it harder for unions to finance their operations but have not precluded college faculty members from maintaining unions with collective-bargaining rights.
*Although Wisconsin does not have a “right to work” law, legislation passed there in 2011 prohibits faculty unions at public colleges from compelling membership or the payment of dues or fees.
Sources: The National Right to Work Committee; Chronicle reporting
