While Georgetown’s adjunct professors are in the midst of voting on unionization, the organization seeking to represent them, Service Employees International Union, is gearing up to target higher education workers in other metropolitan areas.
Following its success galvanizing adjuncts to unionize at Montgomery College in Rockville, Md., and American University and The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., the labor union is now extending its efforts to Boston.
SEIU’s modus operandi is to target colleges and universities in a specific urban area to induce a domino effect across the city by pressuring neighbors to follow suit in unionizing.
“The trends in higher education [are] now 70 percent of faculty are off the tenure track and over half are part-time,” SEIU Communications Director Avril Smith said. “These trends are happening across the country, but Boston is a leading market in higher education.”
At Georgetown, SEIU Local 500 filed for elections on March 23 and ballots were mailed out to eligible faculty members on April 12, according to SEIU Local 500 Communications Director Christopher Honey.
The National Labor Relations Board, which governs voting, will tally the votes May 3. Georgetown’s adjuncts will become unionized if the majority of adjuncts who vote approve. Provost Robert Groves stated in a letter March 26 that the university encouraged faculty members to vote and would remain neutral.
“I, for one, am hopeful about unionization,” Honey said.
To attract professors, Adjunct Action, a project of SEIU, held a symposium with over 100 adjunct faculty members from over 20 Boston campuses, including Boston College and the University of Massachusetts Lowell, on April 13. Due to the proliferation of colleges and universities in the area, Smith said that she believes Boston can serve as an example for other areas.
“[Conditions do not] really vary much from campus to campus or city to city,” Smith said.
According to The Chronicle for Higher Education, the majority of adjuncts in Boston’s public institutions of higher education are involved in collective bargaining units. Such efforts on private campuses, however, have previously failed to make an impact.
Smith described the Boston movement as being in its preliminary stages.
“The next step is forming organizing committees both on the campuses where adjunct faculty are most interested in moving forward and also across the metropolitan area,” Smith said.
SEIU Organizing Coordination and Adjunct Action Campaign Director Todd Ricker spoke of a “broad net” approach to this particular metropolitan campaign.
“There are several campuses where we are finding a lot of heat,” Ricker said. “We have been speaking with faculty members face-to-face since early this year. Campus-by-campus, the adjunct and non-tenure track faculty at each are deciding when the time is right to begin election campaigns for their own unions.”
SEIU is just one of several unions that focuses on labor rights in higher education. Adjuncts Come Together-United Auto Workers represents adjuncts at New York University and the New School in New York City. The American Association of University Professors, National Education Association and American Federation of Teachers also advocate for professors’ rights and include divisions for adjuncts.
“The issues in the U.S. higher-ed system are so deep and so pervasive that we recognize it will take more than just one organization to fix it,” Ricker said.
Los Angeles is also considered a potential target for SEIU, but efforts are in their infancy, and Ricker stressed that many cities across the country are eligible for SEIU’s focus in its next campaign.
