ACT-UAW Local 7902: Golden Egg or San Andreas Fault?

by Andrew Brownstein

In April of last year, Solo Dowuona-Hammond raised his hand and made the motion for thousands of adjuncts at New York University to accept their first-ever contract with the administration. Though far from perfect, the contract brought immediate benefits: Some professor’s salaries jumped from $20 to $50 an hour; adjunct faculty could take sabbaticals knowing that they would have a job when they returned; and most importantly, the university could no longer fire adjuncts without cause.

At the time, Mr. Dowuona-Hammond, an adjunct lecturer in the McGhee School of Liberal Arts, born in Ghana, believed in the effort and the organization that made it all happen, the United Auto Workers. The adjuncts unionized under the UAW banner and the labor giant, in turn, brought NYU to the negotiating table.

But even as he made the historic motion, he and other union organizers kept a potentially explosive secret: In February of 2003, three UAW employees who helped the unionization effort had filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor charging the union with fairly un-unionlike behavior. They allege that the UAW failed to pay them for thousands of dollars in overtime.

“We decided to cautiously put this on the back-burner until the contract was decided with NYU,” Mr. Dowuona-Hammond said in a recent interview.

So much can change in a year. In the fall, Mr. Dowuona-Hammond dropped out of the union and assumed “agency-fee” status—meaning he still pays dues, as required by law, but is not a union member. He is among a sizeable group of adjuncts that now views the two-year-old complaint against the UAW as a harbinger of problems with the union.

“I brought a lot of people into the union and changed a lot of minds,” said Mr. Dowuona-Hammond. “I said a lot of things to adjuncts that turned out not to be true, about how democratic the UAW is. I thought the UAW would seek, protect and advance the cause of adjuncts. In fact, the UAW seeks, protects and advances the cause of the UAW.”

The Detroit office of the labor department is still investigating the case, according to a spokesman. The controversy made it into NYU’s school newspaper, the Washington Square News, in November 2004 amid the first signs of fissures in the nascent union.

In the fall, NYU adjuncts voted 128 to 16 to join forces with their counterparts at New York’s New School for Social Research. Some faculty objected to the move, noting differences between the two schools and the fact that adjuncts at the New School did not yet— and might not ever—have a contract. Others objected to the way it was done, by e-mail. In addition, only a fraction of NYU’s 3,000-plus adjuncts participated in the vote.

Another sore point is the fate of the Adjunct Voice. The publication was started by adjuncts in the journalism department, but hasn’t published since 2003 amid complaints that the UAW subregional office in New York City was exercising too much control over the publication.

“The UAW totally took it over,” said Steven Smith, an adjunct professor of the humanities. “They wouldn’t let anything that hadn’t been approved by the UAW out of the office.”

To some adjuncts, these are signs that ACT-UAW 7902 (The ACT stands for “Adjuncts Coming Together”) is not what the UAW had promised them it would be: their own local. With elections expected in the spring, the adjuncts are led by an interim president appointed by the UAW and many departments have failed to appoint shop stewards.

“You’ve heard of the phrase ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea?’” asked Daniel Meltzer, an adjunct journalism professor. “At NYU, we’re between the Devil and the Devil.”

Meltzer is the founding editor of the Local’s now-defunct newsletter, Adjunct Voice. This spring, the union held an election of executive officers, and Daniel Meltzer ran for the presidency. He was defeated by less than 30 votes. In his candidate statement, posted to the Local’s Web site, he wrote that “[he would] revive, and resume regular publication of the Adjunct Voice newsletter, to keep all members up-to-date and fully informed of the union’s activities.”

J. Ward Regan also ran for president of ACT-UAW Local 7902 in the spring elections. Regan is an adjunct humanities professor and scholar of U.S. labor history. UAW officials appointed him interim president of Local 7902 in September 2004.

In a recent interview, Regan dismissed complaints, such as Daniel Meltzer’s, as sour grapes from a minority of professors. He rattles off recent e-mails from adjuncts thanking the union for intervening on their behalf. One came from a professor who recently won a grievance and was awarded back pay. Another called it “amazing” that an administrator was forced to give reasons for a recent hiring decision—something that seldom happened in the days before unionization.
Of the recent complaints, Regan quipped: “The Democratic process is great as long as it goes your way.”

He said the vote on amalgamating with the New School was done by e-mail to cut costs, and that no one questioned the legitimacy of the process until after the results came in. He chalked up the current controversies to the usual growing pains associated with organizing, negotiating, and ultimately, running a local.

“Any new organization has to go through a period of settlement to get into a groove,” he said. As for his current status as interim president, the UAW’s regional office has the power to make interim appointments prior to elections. “We had to do that, so we could start function as a local. We needed someone to take fiscal and legal responsibility, and I was the lucky victim.”
Still, even as he downplays the criticisms, Mr. Regan is savvy enough to know that the defection of Mr. Dowuona-Hammond—the professor who made the motion to ratify the contract with the NYU administration—offers the union’s detractors a powerful piece of symbolism.

“I was personally hurt when he acted like that,” Regan said.

To Deborah Schutt, the current tempest was predictable. “You could see this coming a mile away,” she said.

Schutt, Peter Frank and Vito Distephano are there three former UAW employees who made the complaint to the labor department about unfair employment practices. The trio each earned $1,135 a week to push the unionization effort on NYU’s urban campus. They came for what the union called “blitzes,” intense drives that required them to put in what the say was 80-100 hours a week for three weeks at a time.

However, according to the claim, the blitzes never ended, and the intense hours kept up for several months. When they complained, the trio said they met with responses like, “If you don’t like it, quit.”

Julie Kushner, director of the UAW’s subregional office in New York City, did not return phone calls seeking comment. In previous interviews, she has stated that the organizers were “well compensated” and has suggested they were motivated by greed.

The dispute hinges on whether the organizers are entitled to overtime pay under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act. To the UAW, the workers were high-paid administrators exempt from overtime pay. The organizers said they were essentially doing low-level grunt work, prowling for signatures and manning the phones.

Mr. Dowuona-Hammond and Mr. Smith also worked as organizers at the UAW and said they were asked to work many hours of uncompensated overtime, as well.

With a note of irony, some organizers recalled how they joined rallies pushing for adjuncts to get better health benefits as they clocked in numerous hours of unpaid overtime.

Said Mr. Distephano: “What I thought was hypocritical was that if a unionized shop was treating its employees the way the UAW was treating us, the union would be screaming bloody murder and demanding overtime.”

Despite their complaints, Schutt and Distephano said their experiences had not soured them on labor unions.

Still, Schutt said episodes like the one at NYU show how unions are struggling to adapt. She says: “Historically, the UAW has done great things in terms of worker’s rights, but their membership has been declining, which is why they’re moving into universities. Still, they’re very top-down and maintain their old philosophy. At NYU, you’re not talking about people in a plant. You’re talking about very individualistic people who have their own voices and want to put out their own newspaper.”

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