The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy, 2020

This article presents data, precedent, and empirical evidence relevant to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) proposal to issue a new rule to exclude graduate assistants and other student employees from coverage under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). The analysis in three parts. First, the authors show through an analysis of information from other federal agencies that the adoption of the proposed NLRB rule would exclude over 81,000 graduate assistants on private campuses from the right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. Second, the article presents a legal history from the past half-century about unionization of student employees at private and public sector institutions of higher education, including the NLRB’s oscillation on the question of whether student employees are protected under the NLRA. The inconsistencies of the NLRB is in stark contrast to state and Canadian provincial precedent during the same period. Lastly, the authors analyze the terms of 42 current collective bargaining agreements covering student workers, including 10 at the private…

Previous single university studies of gender equity in faculty salaries conducted at both private and public universities in the U.S. have consistently found significant within-job gender gaps in pay. This study presents data from a less common labor context for faculty: a strongly unionized campus. Using data on all faculty at a large public university 2003-2015, three kinds of multivariate analyses are conducted: OLS multivariate regressions that include controls for race, field, and rank; Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition models to identify the explained and unexplained portions of the gender gap; and innovative longitudinal models for wage growth trajectories to examine the change in pay gaps over time. Significant initial gender pay gaps are erased overtime for faculty who remain in the university. In contrast to other recent salary equity studies, no within-job pay gaps for men and women faculty are found after controlling for rank and college. Yet an overall university-wide pay gap exists due to considerable underrepresentation of women in fields and ranks with the highest pay. We…

The effect of faculty strikes in higher education on student achievement is vastly understudied yet has broad implications for discerning potential consequences of labor disputes in academia. Research in this area is understandably difficult, however, as work stoppages in higher education are uncommon, unplanned, and typically brief, which precludes much of the comparative data needed to assess impacts on students. In the spring semester of 2019,WrightStateUniversityexperienced a nearly three-week faculty work stoppage as a result of failed contract negotiations. In this study, end-of-course grades for six undergraduate first-year courses taught prior to and during Spring 2019 by the same instructors using similar pedagogies were compared to assess the effect of the strike on student achievement. No differences in either mean class scores or variation among these scores could be attributed to the strike. Our data suggests that long-term faculty strikes do not affect course-level student achievement, but additional long term and multi-institutional research is needed to explore…

The last 40 years have seen a dramatic shift in the hiring, evaluation and promotional structures prevalent in higher education. While the model of a largely full time, tenure-track faculty continues to be the ideal of most academic institutions, economic, political and social changes have eroded that model. A substantial percentage, typically a majority, of college and university faculty are now hired on a contingent or part-time basis, with fiscal and other conditions determining job security, compensation, professional advancement, and an opportunity to participate in governance of departments and institutions. This paper examines the unseen impact that such hiring practices have on professionalism and academic freedoms, not only for contingent faculty themselves but for faculty as a whole. We conclude that the current, two-class faculty system not only erodes collegiality and cohesion, but inhibits the quest for knowledge, wisdom and social justice that are a core mission of higher education.

The focus of this study is an analysis of institutions, salary expenditures, employment categories (full-time professors by academic rank), and number and average pay of full-time faculty. Our new mission-driven classification system provides the framework for the analysis and specifically presents the data by both the presence or lack of a collective bargaining agreement. The goal of this paper is to illustrate differences in monetary compensation of full time faculty using the mission-driven classification system (as opposed to the Carnegie Classification) and to see the impact of the presence or lack of collective bargaining agreements. We argue that the Carnegie Classification is not how state officials--governors, legislators, and the general public view higher education in America. We argue that a public frame is needed to understand, support, and advance public higher education. We present data that shows difference by geographic type (rural, suburban, urban) for a much more precise understanding of how collective bargaining impacts faculty salaries.

Research on unions in academe began in the 1960s and 1970s. It continued in the 1980s as greater numbers of faculty organized but then declined in the 1990s, with the exception of a small group of scholars who continue to study and comment on labor management relations in post-secondary education. Many prognostications, originally put forward in the 1970s and 1980s, remain unexamined. The last two decades in particular, have seen less attention focused on unions in academe. Organizing efforts continue to be robust, and advocates from all vantage points continue to offer arguments both in favor or against collective bargaining. Yet we really know very little about the impact unions have on academic organizations. Much of what is said about the outcomes remain unsubstantiated in peer reviewed journals or other “non-advocate” scholarly work. In fact, there are few objective and defensible research studies to substantiate many claims made by those opposed to or supportive of collective bargaining, particularly when viewing the wider institutional landscape.

This paper considers a recent strike at York University in Toronto, Canada by three units of Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Local 3903, representing teaching assistants, contract or adjunct faculty and graduate assistants. The consideration of the strike has a two-fold purpose: The first is to situate it within the concept of social unionism, illustrating how this concept assists in understanding the strike beyond its strictly local and sector context. The second purpose is to consider how the strike reflects back on social unionism. In this regard, the paper considers challenges that can arise from the fusion of normative terms-and-conditions contract negotiations and the advancement of social justice issues. To lay the ground work for situating the negotiations within social unionism, the table issues advanced by the Union and the Union’s approach to the negotiation process, including practices developed to support the approach, are discussed. The picture that emerges is a practice of social unionism that can be characterized as a strong fusion of normative contract…

Bargaining regarding faculty evaluation is challenging in an environment in which administrators throughout higher education have successfully imposed corporate-style forms of evaluation and supervision that many have come to accept as normal, despite their incompatibility with principles of academic freedom and peer-review. Student surveys of teaching are increasingly central to this management strategy, despite the growing body of evidence indicating bias against historically marginalized groups in student survey results. This paper presents a case study of contract negotiations undertaken in 2016 at Dutchess Community College (SUNY) in Poughkeepsie, New York. During these negotiations the college administration sought to expand the use of “student evaluations of teaching” (SET) despite significant evidence that student feedback provides limited meaningful evaluative content concerning teaching and is shaped by gender, racial, and ethnic bias, as well as bias against academic rigor. We describe our effort to maintain a peer-based evaluation of student survey data, including the…