Part-time professors at Emerson College, in Boston, have voted overwhelmingly to unionize -- one of the first such moves by part-timers at private colleges in the Northeast.
Part-timers have formed unions at only a few other private institutions in the country, including Columbia College Chicago and Roosevelt University, in Illinois.
Organizers at Emerson sent out ballots to all 245 part-time professors on the campus, and 150 were returned. Of those, 75 percent voted to establish a union. Part-timers at Emerson outnumber full-time professors two to one.
The vote at Emerson follows a yearlong effort by a group of activists who are hoping to organize part-timers at all 50 private colleges and universities in the Boston area. Gary Zabel is co-chairman of the group, the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, and teaches philosophy part time at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
He said the vote at Emerson, which was counted on Monday, had “historical” significance. “It’s a breakthrough in the resistant private sector in a city that’s dominated by private colleges,” he said. Mr. Zabel said the vote might even be a first step in organizing full-time, private-college professors, who have been prohibited from forming unions since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against a faculty union at Yeshiva University 20 years ago.
The Yeshiva decision affects organizing only by full-time faculty members at private colleges. At many public institutions -- including Mr. Zabel’s university -- part-time faculty members are part of the union that represents full-timers.
In a letter to the faculty in February, Emerson’s president, Jacqueline W. Liebergott, said the college opposed unionization of part-timers because it was not “in the best interests of these individuals or of the college as a whole.” But after the ballots were counted Monday, Dorothy M. Aram, vice president for academic affairs at Emerson, issued a statement saying that college officials “stand ready to bargain in good faith.”
David Daniel has taught part time in Emerson’s writing, literature, and publishing department for 12 years. He teaches six courses a year and earns $21,000 annually. On average, part-timers at Emerson make $3,000 per course. Like part-timers at many other colleges, those at Emerson have no health benefits, and Mr. Daniel said he hoped that the union would make changing that one of its first orders of business. He also said he hoped that the new union would “help individual part-timers feel more secure and more confident in expressing their views.”
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