The National Labor Relations Board’s first application of new standards for determining whether private-college professors may unionize suggests that many such organizing efforts still face major hurdles.
Despite applying standards widely regarded as more union-friendly than those used by the board before, a regional NLRB official ruled on Tuesday that tenured and tenure-track faculty members at Carroll College, a Roman Catholic institution in Montana, are too involved in that institution’s management to be allowed to organize as employees.
Advocates of academic labor had expressed hope that forming faculty unions at private colleges would become much easier under new standards set forth by the NLRB in a December 2014 decision involving Pacific Lutheran University. As part of that ruling, the NLRB held that it would no longer accept at face value colleges’ assertions that faculty members have managerial roles, but instead would examine what work was actually performed by the faculty members in question.
Faculty members who hold supervisory roles at private colleges are ineligible for unionization under a 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision, National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, and the NLRB had rendered the organization of private-college professors nearly impossible under its old standard, letting colleges themselves make the call on whether their faculty members had managerial roles.
The NLRB decision in the Pacific Lutheran case also gave contingent faculty members at several religious colleges the go-ahead to unionize, as the ruling set forth new standards for determining whether instructors play religious roles that preclude their involvement in federally supervised unions on First Amendment grounds.
Tuesday’s Carroll College decision is the first in which an NLRB official applied the new standards articulated in the Pacific Lutheran case to a proposed union involving tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Ronald K. Hooks, director of the NLRB’s regional office in Seattle, held that, regardless of what religious roles they play, the faculty members had enough involvement in decisions related to academic programs, academic policy, and personnel to be regarded as having managerial status.
Eric Feaver, president of the MEA-MFT, an affiliate of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers that had been seeking to represent professors at Carroll, on Wednesday said he had not decided whether to appeal the regional official’s ruling.
