I walked my first picket line without my union-teacher parents when I was a college freshman at Cornell University. Cornell’s service and maintenance employees had won a NLRB-administered election the previous year that brought them a union, UAW Local 2300. They were fighting for their first contract. The workers won. Their lives improved (read an excellent first-person account here). In that same year, Cornell’s campus security officers organized an independent union and won a NLRB election. Soon thereafter, they had a good contract. It was a valuable real-world labor education that helped set the course for the rest of my career.
Now, more than 40 years later, higher education is fertile ground for union organizing. From undergraduate student employees at Dartmouth College, the University of Oregon and several smaller private colleges to adjunct faculty in Washington, DC-area colleges and universities to graduate student workers at far too many research universities to list here, a worker organizing wave is washing over colleges and universities. Graduate student employees of Northeastern University --- this blog’s home institution --- contributed to the wave when they filed a petition with the NLRB this year seeking an election that could allow the UAW to represent them.
It’s not just organizing. Academic worker activism is rising, as well. One of 2022’s largest and most successful strikes involved 48,000 University of California workers, including many graduate student employees. Strikes at the New School and the University of Illinois-Chicago resulted in union bargaining victories.
In many NLRB and state public-employee relations board elections on campus, unions are winning gaudy victories, sometimes with more than 90% of the vote. At the University of Southern California last week, the UAW won with 93% of the vote. The UAW is only one of several unions involved. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the American Federation of Teachers, the United Electrical Workers (UE), the Communication Workers of America, the American Association of University Professors (now an AFT-affiliate), and several other unions are organizing or already represent academic workers. The length of this list tells us there is a widespread perception in the labor movement that academia offers abundant opportunities to organize new members.
The rising momentum in academic union organizing at this moment in history has many causes. Here are five global factors affecting faculty, other academic workers, and students workers that are worth considering:
1. Stable Pro-Organizing Legal Precedent for Student Workers: In 2016, an Obama-appointed National Labor Relations Board majority held that graduate student teachers and researchers at Columbia University were “employees” covered by the National Labor Relations Act. This precedent matters immensely for private-sector academic workers. Coverage under the Act means student workers have legal recourse if they face retaliation, discrimination, coercion, interference, or a company union during a union organizing drive. Also, colleges and universities have a legal duty to bargain with units of student “employees.” To avoid the Trump-appointed NLRB majority reversing this precedent, unions and campus organizers strategically withheld petitions for representation elections from 2017 to 2020. The strategy worked. The precedent survived. Now, with a strongly pro-worker Biden-appointed general counsel and NLRB majority, the 2016 precedent will govern and student workers will remain protected for the next two, and perhaps six, years or even longer.
2. Today's Students and Younger Workers are Different: Any discussion of student worker organizing should quickly acknowledge that this generation of students (“Gen Z”) is more pro-union than any other group in American society, even when compared with other Americans’ attitudes when they were in their late teens and early 20s. The generation that immediately preceded Gen Z, the Millennials (ages 27ish-42ish), are only slightly less enthusiastically pro-union.
They arrived at these beliefs through hard experience. Within the last 14 years, their families suffered through a Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic recession. Many of their lives were radically disrupted. Too many families’ economic precarity was exposed. Within just the last four years, previously middle-class families were shocked and humiliated to find themselves waiting in food lines. Perhaps most important, these younger Americans watched as employers put profits over employees’ lives, health, and safety and sucked up billions in government loans and grants while failing their workers.
These painful times taught these young Americans the same lessons my parents’ generation learned during the Great Depression: workers must rely on one another, not employers or government, to protect and advance their common interests. The added ingredient for the current generation of young activists is a commitment to anti-racism and broadly inclusive organizations. Unions can (although admittedly don’t always) fit this bill. Workers organizing a union come together around what they have in common rather than allowing their superficial differences to keep them apart.
3. A Changed and More Exploitative Faculty Model: Faculty employment has shifted over the last 30 years to a more contingent, less reliable, and less engaged employment model. It’s all designed to save universities and colleges the short-term and long-term costs associated with granting tenure to faculty. In 1993, more than 3-in-5 U.S. instructional staff at four-year colleges and universities were tenured or tenure-track. By 2015, 2-in-5 were tenured or tenure-track at four-year institutions. Those numbers appear to have deteriorated further in recent years. The remaining faculty are adjuncts or full-time limited term or part-time faculty. Of course, these cost savings come at the expense of incumbent faculty and potential faculty (e.g., Ph.D candidates). The life of a contingent worker who cannot predict their economic future may not be worth the investment of time and money necessary to get the requisite credentials and training. Inflation-adjusted faculty salaries have risen only 9.5% at private institutions and only 3.1% at public institutions since 1971.
These contingent faculty appointments are also qualitatively different from full-time tenure/tenure-track employment, which includes teaching, research, and service. Contingent faculty are typically engaged in only one of these faculty roles, and thereby less engaged with students, research in their fields, and/or their institutions. In sum, long-term earnings, economic, personal, and professional stability, and quality of work life are all suffering under the new contingent model. The result: a group of workers primed for a successful union organizing campaign.
4. More Faculty Are Union-Eligible: In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court held that faculty members at private-sector institutions were “managers” unprotected by the National Labor Relations Act if they seek to organize a union. The centerpiece of the decision was faculty’s control or great influence over critical university decisions: determining curriculum, grading, admissions and matriculation standards, academic calendars, and course schedules and, most important, making usually-implemented recommendations on faculty hiring, tenure, sabbaticals, termination, and promotion. Yet, the contingent employment model described above reduces or eliminates faculty members’ voice in institutional decisionmaking. With a diminished voice in institutional decisions, faculty in private-sector institutions cannot be characterized as “managerial” and become protected “employees” who are able to organize. Later Board decisions have clarified how this assessment is made.
Most faculty who are currently organizing have little if any effective voice in their institutions’ decisions because they are adjuncts or contract employees. Others work in public institutions governed by labor relations laws that allow them to organize without overcoming a “managerial” designation. Equally important, as faculty members’ roles are deprofessionalized and narrowed, faculty members almost certainly become more willing to organize a union. If institutions take away faculty voice, unions can become faculty members’ channel for exercising voice in their workplaces.
5. Success Breeds Success: Most Americans have little experience with unions. During the lifetimes of most Gen Z and Millennial workers, only one-in-six Americans lives in a household with a union member. Like most Americans, these young Americans' limited exposure to unions has come from media coverage that emphasizes strikes and partisan politics rather than the value of unions in the workplace and community. Now, that’s changing. Students on campuses across the country are being taught, fed, helped, and protected by union members. As more and more academic workers organize, win elections, and improve their lives, the students in these institutions are learning about the value of unions.
They are also learning what is possible. For most American workers, unions have felt unattainable. The barriers and risks have seemed too great. In many cases, these perceptions have been all too real. But not on college and university campuses. Workers of many types have shown they can organize, win a union, and secure a contract on college and university campuses. This success will breed even more success.
Reducing the motivations for the individual decisions of tens of thousands of workers to a few global factors is always perilous and imprecise work. Workers join and organize unions for many reasons. Some are unique to the workers. Others arise out of the particulars of their workplaces. It is always worth hearing directly from the workers themselves regarding why they have chosen to organize and what they hope to achieve.
Nonetheless, there is plainly something big happening in academic worker organizing with some important macro trends contributing to workers’ understanding that they need and should want a union. While organizing at Starbucks, Amazon, and Apple may be grabbing the headlines, academia could be an even bigger building block for the future of unions in the United States.
