Orange County adjuncts answer union call

Part-time, adjunct faculty at Orange County Community College (Calif.) voted overwhelmingly in February to be represented by the AFT. Before the vote, the organizing committee of the Adjunct Faculty United had to withstand a sudden challenge from the National Education Association, which represents full-time faculty at the college. On a bizarre note, the AFU also had to deal with the somewhat demeaning charge on the part of the college administration that adjuncts didn't understand what they were doing when they signed cards to petition the California Public Employment Relations Board for the election. The vote to unionize in the unit of 1,253, was 785-to-75. "You can't say people didn't figure it out," notes Linda Cushing, gleefully. She is president of the interim executive council of the union.

The part-timers, who earn 32 cents for every dollar the college pays to full-time faculty, have put pay scales on pro-rata par with full-timers at the top of their list of bargaining topics. The adjuncts also would like hospitalization and health benefits. Currently, they cannot even buy into the California public employee health plan. With some faculty who have been teaching on a temporary basis every semester for more than 27 years, the union places a big premium on securing seniority rights. Pay for office hours would be a plus, adds Cushing, as would having offices for the adjuncts, who mostly work out of their cars.

E-mail played a significant role in this campaign, says John Berg, a national representative with the AFT. When the faculty were signing their cards last fall, the organizers also collected their e-mail addresses. Being able to send messages quickly to people who are unusually hard to track down allowed the AFU to respond to misinformation quickly. When the election was held, the union sent out a message asking people to let the committee know when they had voted so they wouldn't be inundated with unnecessary get-out-the-vote messages. Cushing says that half the voters responded. These supporters will hear from the union again as it works to build membership.

Restless grad students turn up the heat

Stymied in their bid for unionization by unfavorable legal rulings and administrative stonewalling, graduate students at Temple University in Pennsylvania and at the University of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana are telling their administrations not to write them off quite yet.

More than 150 graduate students set up makeshift offices in a main building of Temple University for two days last month in order to publicly demonstrate the work they contribute to the university. Dubbing the job action a "work-in," the graduate employees graded papers and exams, met with their students, analyzed data from laboratories, developed lesson plans and attended to administrative work. It was but a sample, says Rob Callahan, a Ph.D. candidate who teaches in the English department, of the myriad functions teaching assistants, graduate assistants and research assistants perform every day.

The work-in was sponsored by the Temple University Graduate Student Association (TUGSA), which has been working for more than two years toward winning collective bargaining rights for the university's 1,100 graduate students. In February 1999, TUGSA filed cards with the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board seeking an election and asked the university to voluntarily recognize the union. The administration answered with a full-barrel legal barrage to make a case that the workers were students, not employees, notwithstanding the fact that the graduate employees teach more than half of the courses in the university's core curriculum. This January, a PLRB hearing examiner sided with the Temple administration in a decision that TUGSA is appealing to the full labor board.

Despite the legal challenge, "we've realized that it's not within the courts that we're going to win or lose this battle," says Callahan. "It's within the court of public opinion and within the university community."

At the end of February, the Temple Association of University Professionals/AFT (TAUP) passed a resolution in support of the graduate students. At least one trustee on Temple's board also supports the administration voluntarily recognizing the union and has written to fellow trustees that it is the university's "moral responsibility" to do this.

Penn State grad students eye a union

One group that has been heartened by the TUGSA battle is a cohort of 3,300 graduate assistants at Pennsylvania State University. Just as they were beginning to organize, a group of graduate student leaders voted in February to affiliate with the AFT. That decision generated a lot of media attention and headlines, and now the grad students are at the beginning of bringing all their colleagues on board for the union. The PLRB decision on Temple's appeal will bear on this effort as well.