[Updated (12/30/2015, 12:49 p.m.) with comment from the university.]
A labor union seeking to organize adjunct faculty members at private colleges notched another victory on Friday as a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ordered union elections to be held in January among non-tenure-track faculty members in two divisions of the University of Southern California.
The regional director, whose ruling is subject to appeal to the NLRB’s national office, determined that the contingent faculty members at USC’s Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences and at its Roski School of Art and Design were not managers or supervisors and therefore were eligible to unionize under the Service Employees International Union, which has been seeking to organize faculty members in Los Angeles and other major metropolitan areas.
The ruling, dated Thursday but released Friday, was only the latest decision by a labor-board official in favor of contingent faculty members’ efforts to organize since the NLRB set new standards for union bids in a case last year involving adjuncts at Pacific Lutheran University. In that decision, the board held that it would no longer take private colleges at their word in asserting that their faculty members served managerial roles, and instead would conduct a detailed analysis of professors’ actual responsibilities. The ruling appeared to reflect a growing recognition of the increasingly important role of contingent faculty members on college campuses. According to Friday’s ruling, adjuncts “constitute a majority of the university’s faculty.”
Since the 2014 decision in the Pacific Lutheran case, contingent faculty members seeking to unionize have won support from the NLRB at such private institutions as Point Park University, Seattle University, Saint Xavier University, Duquesne University, and Manhattan College.
In Friday’s ruling, the regional official in Los Angeles, Mori Rubin, found that the University of Southern California had not proved that the non-tenure-track faculty members who were seeking to unionize had supervisory authority. “I conclude that the employer has failed to establish that the full-time and/or part-time non-tenure-track faculty at the Dornsife College and the Roski School actually or effectively exercise control over decision making pertaining to central policies of the university such that they are aligned with management,” Ms. Rubin wrote, in a decision that frequently cited the standards laid out in the Pacific Lutheran ruling.
In a written statement, the University of Southern California asserted that it has “vigorous shared governance that is actually led by non-tenure-track faculty both at the university level and at the two largest proposed bargaining units.” For that reason, the university said, Ms. Rubin’s ruling is inconsistent with the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, a 1980 decision that has essentially barred full-time faculty members at private colleges from forming unions. The USC statement did not mention plans for an appeal.
