Union activity by Illinois students, ‘adjuncts’ increasing

Bill Knight column for Mon., Tues., or Wed., May 7, 8 or 9, 2018

K-12 teachers striking in West Virginia, Kentucky, Arizona and Oklahoma, and university employees organizing at Columbia, Harvard and Georgetown may be getting more national media attention, but Illinois seems to be Ground Zero for the explosion of union activity on campuses.

As pay and benefits have stagnated while costs of living went up in recent years, non-tenured faculty and graduate students have increasingly organized into unions.

Columbia College Chicago, Illinois State University, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign all have had an uptick in union activity. Unions approached have ranged from the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and even the United Auto Workers.

Much of the rank-and-file enthusiasm and effort has come from graduate students, teaching assistants, adjunct teachers and nontenured faculty who make up a huge part of educators nowadays.

In the 1960s, 80 percent of university faculty positions were tenured or tenure-track jobs, according to Timothy Reese Cain of the University of Georgia, where he’s an associate professor of higher education. Now it’s the other way around – some 80 percent of instructional jobs, including graduate students who teach, aren’t tenured.

Tenured faculty cannot be fired without just cause; non-tenured faculty have few job protections, little say in governance, and low salaries.

University management has resisted maintaining most faculty positions as middle-class jobs with decent job security, and has turned to higher numbers of non-tenured employees or graduate students to fill teaching slots. They argue that grad students who do research or teach are students, not workers.

“You can be both a student of the institution and an employee of an institution,” American Association of University Professors director Julie Schmid told the Chicago Tribune. “These things are not mutually exclusive.”

That perspective was strengthened in 2016, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that graduate students at Columbia University in New York fit the requirements for employees who could negotiate with their employer in collective bargaining. Encouraged by the NLRB decision, graduate students organized on campuses throughout the country, especially Illinois.

Illinois has seen budget crises in recent years that particularly hurt higher educations, and some administrators facing less government support have trimmed spending through pay freezes, unpaid furloughs and layoffs.

Some campuses have had work stoppages.

In November, part-time faculty members at Columbia College Chicago went on strike for two days over wages, job security and seniority in class assignments. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, graduate and teaching assistants had a nine-day walkout in February, and in March achieved a new contract.

Elsewhere, unionizing has been more cordial.

“Loyola’s goal from the start of these negotiations was to reach contracts that are consistent with our commitment to social justice and our Jesuit values,” Loyola University Chicago president Jo Ann Rooney said in a prepared statement. “The tentative agreements reflect not only Loyola’s appreciation for the many contributions of our non-tenure track faculty, but also our core mission of providing high-quality, affordable education to our students.”

It's heartening to see struggling teachers organize and get enough respect to achieve the right to negotiate and hopefully reach a level of decent treatment for workers exploited for too long.