The Faculty Lounges by Riley Naomi Schaefer

Author:Riley, Naomi Schaefer. [Riley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee Publisher
Published: 2011-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

5

The Unions Are Coming

James Turk, the tall, dapper-looking executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, stepped to the podium and began to describe the strength of labor unions on his country’s college campuses. The audience of a few hundred American professors and administrators at Hunter College in New York in April 2010 sat rapt as he explained that more than 90 percent of Canadian faculty were unionized, and all but ten of the country’s campuses engaged in collective bargaining. Votes on unionization in Canada are “expeditious,” in Turk’s words, often held within five days of certification. Legislation prevents the universities from hiring “scabs” in case of “work stoppage.” Although Canadian schools experienced no strikes in 2009, in 2008 there were five. They typically last two to three weeks, but the longest, a number of years ago, lasted four months. Not only are there no classes during such periods, but the university must also completely shut down. Since the teamsters won’t pass picket lines, no deliveries of any sort can be made to campus.

Turk ended his presentation with what was intended, presumably, as a lighthearted story about a strike in eastern Canada, where local mine workers worried that their academic brethren weren’t being tough enough on the administration. “We’re going to show you how to strike,” the mineworkers said. According to Turk, “they put large pipes across the road to block the entrance to the university.” Local police then proceeded to shut down the road because of “unsafe conditions.”

The audience laughed heartily as Turk’s speech, a highlight of the thirty-seventh annual conference of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, drew to a close. When he was done, the panel’s moderator got up and asked how many members of the audience would like to move to Canada. Almost every hand in the room went up.

American academics aren’t emigrating yet, but when it comes to collective bargaining plenty of university campuses are moving northward. Over the past ten years or so, unions have become an increasingly common presence at colleges and universities in the United States. More than 375,000 faculty and graduate students belong to a collective bargaining unit, according to the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. That’s about a third of the total, and a 24 percent increase in the past decade.

Interestingly, this shift has largely gone unnoticed because it has occurred gradually and in disparate locations. Also, when compared to, say, K–12 teachers or the auto workers, college faculty unions have a relatively small political and economic impact. But their effects are growing. Unionization for college faculty may soon be the order of the day. In a world in which tenure is less common, or if someday it is abolished completely, many professors might turn to the protection of unions for job security.

So now is the time to consider Turk’s picture of what union domination of higher education looks like.

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