Inside Higher Ed
January 21, 2016
By Colleen Flaherty
Those awaiting the National Labor Relations Board’s decision regarding an adjunct union bid at Pacific Lutheran University knew that it would have significant implications for those trying to form collective bargaining units at religiously affiliated colleges and universities; such institutions often successfully challenge union bids based on religious grounds.
But when the pro-union Pacific Lutheran decision finally arrived in late 2014, it came with a twist that appeared to possibly pave the way toward full-time faculty and even tenure-line faculty unions at private colleges and universities, against which there is also a long-standing legal precedent. In addition to new guidelines to determine whether or not a college is sufficiently religious in nature to exempt it from NLRB oversight, the decision also included new guidelines to determine whether faculty jobs are managerial enough to preclude full-time or even tenure-line faculty members from unionizing. It was something of a shock to many private colleges that assumed they could reject collective bargaining.
In short, the NLRB said colleges and universities couldn’t block faculty unions just because they were religious in nature -- colleges seeking to block unions had to prove their missions conflicted with collective bargaining. And the colleges and universities couldn’t just say tenure-line faculty members were managers and therefore precluded from collective bargaining -- they had to show it.
But the Pacific Lutheran decision may not be as promising to union-minded faculty members as it first appeared. In the first major test of the new managerial guidelines regarding full-time faculty members, a regional NLRB office denied a bid by tenure-line faculty members at Carroll College, in Montana, to form a union affiliated with the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. And in contrast to a recent string of regional NLRB approvals of adjunct union bids at religious institutions, the Carroll decision backed the college’s claim that its Roman Catholic identity put it outside NLRB jurisdiction.
“We are disappointed,” said Kay Satre, a professor of English at Carroll and a spokeswoman for the proposed bargaining unit. Noting that the Pacific Lutheran decision was a major factor behind the drive, she added, “We were hopeful that the NLRB was going to rule in our favor, but we also knew that it was going to be challenging.”