Strikes at Colleges Are at a 7-Year High as Unions Rebound

Noeleen McIlvenna

Last week, after months of bargaining and two final opposing offers, staff-union leaders in Oregon said negotiations with the state’s public universities had stalled. And they said they’re ready to strike.

It would be the union’s first such strike in more than 20 years, meaning that as soon as September 23, thousands of nonacademic staff members, including groundskeepers, plumbers, and technicians, could disrupt operations at all seven of the state’s public universities.

If they do, they’d join a growing wave of strikes in higher education. Last year saw the most strikes at colleges since 2012, more than double the number in 2017, a new study found.

Strikes at colleges happen less frequently than they did in the past century, but they’ve climbed in recent years, according to the study, published last week by researchers with the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, an institution at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.

Faculty members, graduate assistants, and nonacademic workers led 42 strikes from 2012 to 2018, the study found. Thirteen of them took place last year.

Jacob Apkarian, an assistant professor of behavioral sciences at CUNY’s York College and a research fellow at the center who co-wrote a report on the study, thought that the spike could be an anomaly. It’s too early to say for sure, but momentum appears to have carried into this year, he said.

Apkarian has counted nine strikes in higher education this year, as of June 3.

The center collected data about the strikes from government sources, news reports, and databases like LexisNexis. The study added to data collected on strikes by the Bureau of Labor Statistics because it said the bureau’s database of the country’s largest strikes does not include most strikes in academe.

The study, forthcoming in the Employee Rights and Employment Policy Journal, didn’t explore what had caused the strikes. But “there’s really a new generation of scholars that are entering the work force, and many of them are placed in positions of precarious work,” said William A. Herbert, a distinguished lecturer at Hunter and executive director of the center, another co-author of the paper. It would make sense that disparate working conditions among non-tenure-track faculty members would lead to more strikes, he said.

Nonacademic workers led half of the strikes. The workers at Oregon, for instance, represented by SEIU Local 503, say they will probably vote to start their own strike next month, after heading into another negotiating session starting September 11. (The universities told The Chronicle they are optimistic they will reach an agreement before a strike vote.)

Faculty members led a third of the strikes, and graduate assistants one-sixth. In February, for instance, a faculty strike at Wright State University spun on for 20 days, prompting the university to post job openings for “long term” adjuncts across more than 80 fields. Weeks later, graduate students led a three-week strike at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Just as it ended, the university’s faculty union voted to start its own.

To Herbert the spike is reminiscent of similar trends in elementary and secondary education, as teachers went on strike in states like Arizona, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Those strikes helped make the number of “major work stoppages” in the country last year the highest since 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The center has collected data on strikes since the 1970s, but originally focused on strikes among faculty members. Those strikes have plummeted since the last century, from about six per year to two, following a more-general decline in strikes nationwide through the 1980s and ’90s, Herbert said. They also last much shorter, on average, than they did from 1966 to 1994.

Ninety-three percent of faculty strikes since 2012 have involved non-tenure-track instructors, the study found.

And there has been a “large spike” in union activity, especially at private colleges, Herbert said.

He and Apkarian have begun researching growth in bargaining units as part of another study, and according to preliminary data, unionization has risen over the same period — especially among graduate students and non-tenure-track instructors at private institutions, Herbert said.

He pointed to graduate-student unions formed in recent years at institutions like Brandeis University. A decision by the National Labor Relations Board limited such unions at private colleges in 2004, but it was overturned in 2016.

Organizers with the American Association of University Professors last year also cited an increasing reliance on short-term labor while reviving local advocacy chapters.

Union leaders say they don’t take lightly the ultimate step to strike. At Oregon, both the union and the administration say their priority is serving students.

“We can’t do that if we’re striking,” said Rob Fullmer, an IT specialist at Portland State University and the union’s bargaining chair in the negotiations. “So striking is, for us, a very last resort.”

Follow Steven Johnson on Twitter at @stetyjohn, or email him at steve.johnson@chronicle.com.