[Updated (2/3/2016, 1:31 p.m.) with response from the university’s provost.]
A campaign to unionize non-tenure-track faculty members at the University of Southern California succeeded in two out of three divisions of the private institution, the Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday.
The campaign, led by the Service Employees International Union Local 721, drew overwhelming support from adjunct faculty members at two small units of the university, the Roski School of Art and Design and the International Academy. But adjuncts in the much larger Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences narrowly rebuffed the union drive, by a vote of 127 to 113.
The voting, held in January, followed an order in December by a regional official of the National Labor Relations Board. The university had sought to block the union drive by asserting that the non-tenure-track faculty members shared governance of the institution and therefore should be considered managers ineligible for union representation under a 1980 Supreme Court ruling. But the NLRB official said the university had failed to show that the faculty members had supervisory authority.
Southern California thus becomes one of the largest private universities with a faculty union since a 2014 decision by the NLRB put the onus on colleges to demonstrate that faculty members seeking to organize actually share in governance. Before that decision, the NLRB deferred to colleges’ assertions about the faculty role in running the institution — an approach that amounted to a ban on faculty unions at private colleges.
The SEIU has been seeking to organize faculty members in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas as a way of increasing their leverage.
Adjunct faculty members who supported the union drive told the Times they had done so in hopes that a union would help allay their heavy course loads, their poor pay and benefits, and their difficult job prospects.
In a letter this week to the faculty, the university’s provost, Michael W. Quick, wrote that he did not “take lightly the fact that the Dornsife vote was close and that a substantial number of faculty expressed their dissatisfaction by their votes.” He said he would “work collaboratively within the university community on the issues that are important to faculty.”
The Roski School’s vote is “personally disappointing to me, though I hear the message you have sent,” wrote Mr. Quick, who is also senior vice president for academic affairs. But he reiterated the university’s view that Roski adjuncts should be deemed ineligible for union representation, and he vowed to pursue an appeal to the NLRB’s national office and, failing that, a federal appeals court.
Adjuncts at the International Academy, however, are eligible to unionize, Mr. Quick wrote, and the university “will begin bargaining in good faith” on a contract.
