PrintNLRB calls for an election at Penn
Graduate employees who serve as research and teaching assistants at the University of Pennsylvania are employees and do have the right to hold an election for collective bargaining, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board has ruled. The director's Nov. 21 ruling came 11 months after Graduate Employees Together-University of Pennsylvania (GET-UP) had filed a petition for an election. GET-UP, which is affiliated with the AFT, and the university had participated in NLRB hearings on the question from Jan. 11 to March 13, 2002. The election will be held Feb. 26-27, 2003.
In her 103-page decision, NLRB regional director Dorothy Moore-Duncan relied on two precedents to determine whether graduate employees at the private university had the right to be represented by a union and who would be eligible to vote. The first was an NLRB decision in 2002 involving New York University teaching assistants. "Similar to NYU, the graduate students and the university mutually benefit from the students' service as TAs," Moore-Duncan found. But, "the university sets the terms of the compensation, including tuition payments, fee waivers, stipends, and health insurance coverage."
The other precedent Moore-Duncan relied upon addressed the question of whether graduate employees serving as research assistants in the university's science programs worked for the university if their tuition and stipends were funded by external research grants. Relying on a prior case involving Stanford University, Moore-Duncan excluded science graduate assistants from the unit eligible to vote.
GET-UP had filed cards for 55 percent of a unit of 950 on Dec. 27, 2001. A year later, the unit is closer to 1,000 eligible voters, says AFT national representative Rich Klimmer, and the organizing committee has 60 activists working on specific weekly tasks.
The university is appealing the NLRB decision. GET-UP supporters have inundated UP president Judith Rodin with postcards asking her to withdraw that appeal. Their campaign got a hefty boost from the community on Dec. 19, when the Philadelphia City Council unanimously passed a resolution in support of GET-UP. Penn graduate and council member David Cohen asked the university to recognize the graduate employees' fundamental civil right to choose union representation and resist the "moneyed interests" on the Penn board of trustees who are opposing GET-UP.
Michigan lecturers and adjuncts seek election
Nontenure-track faculty at the University of Michigan filed a petition with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission on Dec. 20, seeking to hold a collective bargaining election. The faculty group, known as the Lecturers' Employee Organization (LEO), is affiliated with the Michigan Federation of Teachers & School Related Personnel/AFT. It would like to be the union representing 1,300 full- and part-time nontenure-track faculty who teach at the three UM campuses in Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint.
The lecturers teach nearly half of all undergraduate courses at the university, LEO estimates. They work on a semester-to-semester basis and receive pay that is way below that of tenured and tenure-track faculty.
"Job security is a major issue for nontenure-track instructors," says Bonnie Halloran, an adjunct anthropology lecturer who has taught on the Dearborn campus for 12 years. "We commit ourselves 100 percent to our students, but the university won't commit to us beyond a single semester."
Halloran earns $820 per credit hour, which is the equivalent of a full-time rate of $19,000 per year. She receives no health insurance or retirement benefits. Like many of her fellow instructors, Halloran makes a living by teaching at several institutions. Last semester, she taught a total of seven classes at Michigan, Henry Ford Community College, Central Michigan University and Schoolcraft College.
Massachusetts revising bonus program for new teachers
Amid reports of the high attrition rate among noneducators who were given $20,000 "signing bonuses" to become teachers, Massachusetts education officials are changing the way participants in the program are prepared for their new careers.
Previously, the bonus recipients--trained through the Massachusetts Institute for New Teachers, or MINT--received eight weeks of preparation in the summer through classes and some summer school teaching experience. With the change, prospective teachers now will have to undergo a year of preparation at a college or university to be selected by state department of education officials. The higher education institutions that have one-year teacher training programs will be asked to nominate some of their applicants for one of the 50 bonuses. State officials say preference will go to candidates for jobs in urban systems or in shortage areas, such as math and science.
"By making this change in our program," says state education commissioner David Driscoll, "I am confident we will not only be able to support our colleges and universities but also be better equipped to truly find the most qualified recipients for our signing bonus."
A new analysis of the MINT-trained teachers who received bonuses since the program began three years ago shows mixed results. Of the 59 recipients in 1999, almost half (46 percent) are no longer teaching, according to Clarke Fowler, a Salem State College education professor. Attrition rates for the second class were 28 percent and 17 percent for the group that began teaching in 2001.
Fowler tracked down financial data that showed Massachusetts spent $934,750 on training and bonuses for the 74 teachers who have left the program. He also looked at where the MINT teachers ended up working. While more than 70 percent were hired to teach in low-achieving districts in 1999, that figure had fallen to 35 percent for the 2001 group.
Florida faculty renew their union vows
The United Faculty of Florida, the union that has represented faculty at the State University System since 1976, filed collective bargaining authorization cards with the Florida Public Employee Relations Commission (PERC) on Dec. 20. The union collected the cards from more than two-thirds of the 10,000 faculty it represents at 11 institutions. Those cards represent the faculty's affirmation that the UFF is the union they want negotiating for them at the bargaining table. UFF is affiliated with Florida Education United/AFT/NEA.
Such an avowal is necessary because of the peculiar politicization that has taken place in Florida since Gov. Jeb Bush undertook to reorganize higher education in the state. (See November 2002 AFT On Campus cover story.) Last year, the Legislature passed a law abolishing the state board of regents and putting into place 11 separate boards of trustees, all made up of gubernatorial appointees, to run the state universities.
Some of the centralization of power in the governor's hands was mitigated by the passage of a ballot initiative in November that reinstates an independent board of regents governance system. Yet the question of who the employer is for each campus remains up in the air.
On Jan. 7, the statewide contract under which UFF faculty work, expired. Last fall, the union asked PERC to amend UFF's certification as the agent for each individual campus unit, but each university's administration fought against it. Then UFF asked for an extension of the contract until issues of governance could be settled. Again, the union was rebuffed.
"These actions would have been the simplest and least disruptive for faculty and administration," says Tom Auxter, UFF president. Instead, the faculty have recognized the importance of mobilizing to protect themselves.
"One reason we have seen such an overwhelming response in the card signing is that faculty know Florida is a danger zone when it comes to faculty rights, as we were recently reminded when the [state] commissioner of education called academic freedom 'a wasteland,'" adds Auxter. "Faculty want a contract guaranteeing that the political agendas of board members and the personal agendas of ambitious administrators do not define the horizons of their professional lives."
