Would Someone Tell Me Why Adjuncts & TAs Don’t Unionize Together?
by P.D. Lesko
In the September/October 1995 issue, we published a feature called, “Who’s Going to Organize the New Proletariat?” In that piece, I looked at the American Federation of Teachers’, American Association of University Professors’ and the National Education Association’s efforts to organize part-time faculty. Only the AFT officials whom I interviewed back then indicated they had “no plans to significantly increase its efforts to unionize part-time faculty in the next five years.” True to form, both the NEA and AFT have continued to focus on the organization of graduate students and full-time faculty.
The AAUP’s membership has risen from 40,000 members in 1995 (I incorrectly reported it as 400,000 members, in the 1995 piece) to a current membership of about 45,000, still about 10 percent of whom are part-time or full-time temporary faculty. In the meantime, the NEA has gone from 2.2 million members in 1995, to a current membership of 2.7 million. Almost 400 faculty members at the College of the Canyons in California recently won a court battle to get out of the NEA. The AFT now has over 1.1 million members, up from 880,000 in 1995. Of those 1.1 million members, about 50,000 are part-time faculty. This means that, in the past eight years, the AFT has increased the number of its part-time faculty members about one percent.
And then we come to the UAW. Last summer, the UAW went head-to-head with the AFT for the 4,000 adjuncts at NYU and won. The UAW ended up with the largest single adjunct faculty union in the United States.
Now, let me jump to Canada where (if you’ve been reading the “desk drawer” pieces) sessional faculty and TAs have recently voted to strike at two universities. What is interesting to note is that the sessional faculty and Teaching Assistants belong to the same locals; they were organized together. The proposed strikes at these Canadian Universities will cripple the institutions’ abilities to staff classes because the part-time faculty and graduate students are agitating together.
Back to the UAW, AFT and NEA. All three unions, in their efforts to expand their representation within higher education have focused on the organization of graduate students. The UAW, for instance, currently represents 16,000 graduate students and has organizing drives aimed at graduate students going on four other campuses. This has always bothered me. Why have the academic labor unions not sought to organize the TAs and adjuncts together, as is the case in Canada?
During a recent “Live Colloquy” sponsored by The Chronicle of Higher Education, I had the opportunity to ask that question of Mr. James A.W. Shaw, an official of the UAW. I wrote to Mr. Shaw:
In Canada, it is common for sessionals (part-time faculty) to be unionized along with the Teaching Assistants. Up until now, neither the AFT nor NEA has taken advantage of this organizing strategy. Does the UAW have any plans to organize TAs and part-time faculty together? If not, why?
In part, Mr. Shaw replied:
“In the U.S., there are real constraints imposed by the National Labor Relations Board when it comes to determining which workers can be in the same bargaining unit. To be in the same unit, workers must have a ’community of interest,’ meaning that their interests reasonably coincide. There have not been any national cases that have tried to merge grads with part-time faculty members, but I suspect that the NLRB might rule that they don’t belong in the same unit….”
Perhaps I am naïve, or just hard-headed, but if the AFT, AAUP or NEA had challenged this presumption in court 10 years ago and won, today, tens of thousands more temporary faculty would have the protection and benefits these union fellows are always touting when fishing for votes. Mr. Shaw “suspects” that the NLRB would rule against a local which represented both TAs and adjuncts. With all due respect, Mr. Shaw’s suspicions and opinions are his own, and until an U.S. court rules against it, temporary faculty and TAs should be organized together by the AFT, AAUP, NEA and UAW. Further, temporary faculty who agree should be immediately accreted into existing GSTA locals nation-wide. The lawsuits would certainly fly fast and furious, but at least then we’d have answer one way or another to a very important legal question which should have been answered a decade ago.
