The College Fix

Contingent faculty at St. Mary’s College will vote on whether to unionize later this month, and the school’s administration has made clear it won’t try to talk them out of unionizing.

That’s despite the abortion-rights stance of the union that would represent the Catholic college’s contingent faculty, according to a legal group that fights “compulsory unionism.”

Adjunct Action Bay Area, a project of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, said that it gathered enough St. Mary’s contingents to submit a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) last month.

The union won adjunct votes at a handful of other California schools earlier this year, including Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute, as The College Fix has reported.

The push comes as SEIU highlights the wages of part-time faculty. Its recent report and survey found that 16 percent are paid less than minimum wage based on hours worked and 40 percent said they are still classified as part-time even when working 40 hours or more per week, according to Inside Higher Ed.

“Institutions of higher education can and do take advantage of contingent faculty’s precarious status under current employment laws and dedication to their profession to get long hours of teaching work for little – and at times delayed – payment in return,” said the SEIU report.

SEIU is trying to use St. Mary’s Catholic identity to argue that a contingent-faculty union, and the job protections it promises, fits the school’s mission to “probe deeply the mystery of existence and live authentically in response to the truths they discover.”

“Everyone who works has a right to negotiate health and retirement benefits,” said Jack Rasmus, St. Mary’s professor of politics, on the school’s Adjunct Action Bay Area page. “Only collective voices are listened to.”

The SEIU’s values, however, run counter to those of St. Mary’s, according to Bruce Cameron, an attorney with the National Right to Work Foundation.

St. Mary’s “exists because it wants to promote a Catholic worldview,” but with SEIU-represented faculty, it would find itself “having to make decisions in joint relationship with a union that does not share its views,” Cameron, a professor at the Regent School of Law, told The College Fix in a phone interview.

“The SEIU is in favor of abortion; the Catholic church – which St. Mary’s bases its views on – is not,” Cameron said.

SEIU’s abortion-rights stance has ruffled feathers at another Catholic school with unionized employees, Boston College, as The Fix has reported.

The Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment seemed to jump the gun in a Nov. 17 letter to St. Mary’s President James Donahue that looks like a form letter.

Campaign Director Amy Schur told Donahue that the school’s “adjunct faculty” – not the term used by either SEIU or the administration – “have decided to form a union,” which is not accurate.

Ignoring the administration’s genial tone toward organizers and its earlier promise not to interfere, Schur urged Donahue to “respect these workers’ rights … by remaining neutral and by refraining from using college resources to attempt to influence the organizing effort.”

Schur implied three times that the school might use intimidation, harassment, hostility or retaliation against contingent faculty as they considered whether to unionize.

But The Collegian reported Nov. 18 that the union mobilization efforts “have so far seemingly met little to no significant opposition inside the college community.”

The administration, in fact, seems intent on avoiding a brawl with contingents.

It has provided regular updates on the effort and handed over a list of 429 “eligible voters” to the NLRB last week. Ballots go out Monday and will be counted Dec. 29.

The administration skipped its planned Nov. 10 meeting with the NLRB in favor of meeting directly with SEIU, according to Donahue’s Nov. 12 update, his most recent. The parties agreed that all contingent faculty who were employed in 2013 and for at least one term in 2014, or received a contract for employment in 2015, should be allowed to vote, with some “geographical” exceptions.

“I’m not entirely sure why the meeting with the NLRB was cancelled, but it is easier for the union and employer to meet and come to an arrangement without having a hearing with the NLRB,” Jennifer Smith-Camejo, an SEIU spokeswoman, told The Fix in a phone interview.

“There is a lot of support on the campus – we feel confident that this will pass,” Smith-Camejo said.

It’s not clear that adjuncts get particularly involved after they unionize.

A Chronicle of Higher Education report Nov. 10 on George Washington University’s adjuncts, unionized since 2006, quoted a union leader who said that getting adjuncts “to commit” to spending time on union activities “is a big problem.”

Kip Lornell, adjunct professor of music, gets “tired of people complaining about the collective-bargaining agreement when they haven’t read it or been involved in it,” he told the Chronicle. “Getting people in a situation together for a meeting, even just five or six people, is just about impossible.”

At least one other Christian school in California has taken the opposite of St. Mary’s approach.

The University of La Verne, which is affiliated with the Church of the Brethren, has increased adjunct pay more than “what SEIU-negotiated contracts provide at some other Universities, and they were provided without our adjunct faculty having to pay union dues,” President Devorah Lieberman wrote to adjuncts in January, asking them to vote “no.”

Inside Higher Ed reported in August that La Verne adjunct ballots weren’t counted for several months because of SEIU “unfair labor practice claims” against the school at the NLRB, which eventually dismissed those claims.

Organizers canceled the ballot-counting, “saying that administrative interference in the election process could not have made for a fair election,” while the administration speculated that the union thought it would lose the vote, Inside Higher Ed said.

College Fix reporter Samantha Watkins is a student at Point Loma Nazarene University.

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IMAGE: SEIU-White, Flickr