From Joe Berry, Delegate to HELU from AFT 2121, City College of San Francisco; Member, Outreach Committee
The new 2024 Directory of Bargaining Agents and Contracts in Institutions in Higher Education by William A Herbert, Jacob Apkarian, and Joseph van der Naald is an excellent update of the last 2012 comprehensive directory issued by the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining for Higher Education and the Professions, a labor-management center at Hunter College, CUNY.
The Center has issued this Directory periodically since it was founded 50 years ago. This edition is free and has an online portal for readers to update directory data. It is both more complete and more accurate than any of its predecessors with only minor errors observable (full disclosure, I was the co-editor of the 2012 edition). Anyone doing organizing or bargaining should download it and keep it handy so they can refer to it frequently.
The Directory includes a good summary of changes that have taken place in collective bargaining (mostly growth) since the last Directory in 2012. In general, there has been growth, especially among grad and undergrad student employees, non-tenure track contingent faculty, and post-docs. This growth has taken place especially in the private sector, but also in the public sector. The most unionized faculty are in New York, California, and New Jersey – no surprise there. Their figures indicate that approximately 27% faculty nationally are represented, and 38% of graduate student employees.
The Directory lists collective bargaining units categorized into job categories (faculty and chairs, administrators, graduate student employees, undergraduate student employees). It lists each bargaining unit’s state, affiliated colleges or universities, bargaining agent union, unit size and type, as well as dates the unit was first recognized, first ratified a contract, and when their current contract expires (including a link to the contract).
The data was gathered through surveys, public documents, individual conversations, and phone calls. It does not include for-profit institutions or any unit that did not have a fully enforceable collective bargaining contract. Examples of this would be pre-majority unions like United Campus Workers and others.
For HELU’s purposes, the biggest weakness of the Directory is that it does not include staff or healthcare workers. HELU’s “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” vision incorporates all higher ed workers, not just faculty, into one organizing project. For this purpose, easily accessible information about all the other unions on campuses is critical. That is a need that others should pursue in the future and one might also hope that the National Center would expand to that. Also, the lack of clarity on how local institutions define full-time and part-time makes those indications more ambiguous but still useful.
From this research and data, the National Center has re-started its pattern of doing some degree of contract extraction and analysis. Their first example is about anti-discrimination clauses, which came out in November. While it does not cover all 800-900 contracts, it represents a good range of these contracts, including the largest ones in California and NY and many from community colleges and private institutions. They also carefully used at least one contract from each national union.