The Service Employees International Union has mounted an unusual effort to unionize adjunct faculty members at enough colleges in a metropolitan area to potentially gain leverage over pay and benefits throughout the local academic labor market.
SEIU Local 500 began a campaign to organize an adjunct union at Georgetown University in August, having previously unionized adjuncts at two other local private institutions, American University and George Washington University, and at Montgomery College, a public institution with campuses in three of Washington’s Maryland suburbs.
By organizing new adjunct unions at Georgetown and other colleges in and around the nation’s capital, the union hopes to gain enough of a presence in the area that all colleges in the region will feel a need to improve the pay, benefits, and job security of adjunct instructors to remain competitive for such workers, Kip Lornell, SEIU Local 500’s vice president for higher education, said on Monday.
If adjunct faculty members at Georgetown vote to form a collective-bargaining unit affiliated with it, Local 500 will represent a total of roughly two-thirds of adjuncts in the nation’s capital, Mr. Lornell estimated. That share, he said, should be enough to give Local 500 significant influence over pay and benefits of adjunct faculty members throughout the area, even if it falters in its planned efforts to also bring on board adjunct faculty members at Howard University and the Catholic University of America.
“It won’t be particularly easy, and will probably take us a year or two at each place to do this, but we clearly have a record of success,” said Mr. Lornell, who is an adjunct professor of Africana studies and music at George Washington University. Negotiations with colleges over adjunct pay and benefits “will be a very different conversation when all of the part-time faculty in Washington, D.C., are unionized,” he predicted.
‘Very Clever’
Because Virginia has a right-to-work law that precludes unions from compelling college employees to become dues-paying members, Local 500 plans to focus its organizing efforts on a “very discrete geographic area” encompassing the District of Columbia and nearby Maryland communities, Mr. Lornell said.
Richard J. Boris, who tracks faculty unionization as executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, on Monday called Local 500’s approach “very clever,” saying he was unaware of any other instance of a union’s strategically seeking to organize faculty members in a specific geographic area.
“There are obviously geographic areas where one union dominates, at least in regard to full-time faculty members, but that is not because of design, it just happened incrementally,” said Mr. Boris, whose center is based at the City University of New York’s Hunter College.
By expanding its membership to include a few thousand adjuncts, Mr. Lornell said, Local 500 also might be able to set up new benefits programs, like retirement funds, that cannot be offered affordably on a smaller scale.
Last week Georgetown’s provost, Robert M. Groves, sent the university’s faculty members an e-mail in which he acknowledged the presence of an adjunct-unionization drive on the campus and said that Georgetown “has a long history of working productively” with labor unions that represent other employees. “Because this is a process that is governed by the principle of majority rule, we encourage all adjunct faculty members to educate themselves about the process and their rights under federal labor law,” his e-mail said.
Pablo Eisenberg, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Public Policy Institute and a member of the Georgetown University Part-Time Faculty Organizing Committee, has sent other faculty members there an e-mail in which he wrote, “Many of us have been impressed by the gains made by our counterparts at the George Washington University and Montgomery College” through unionization, which he said include pay increases, improved job security, and more transparent evaluations. In joining Local 500, he said, faculty members there can “improve working conditions for part-time faculty here at Georgetown and in the Washington metropolitan area, while adding our voices to a new movement uniting contingent faculty across the country to address the challenges in higher education today.”
