There are a couple reasons.  

First, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has defined bargaining units as groups of employees that “share a sufficient community of interest.” Having a well-defined bargaining unit is a first step toward getting union recognition, but this language is pretty vague. To try to see what the NLRB had already approved, a few members of the organizing committee researched how other schools had defined their bargaining units and found that full-time faculty, part-time faculty, and staff that had unionized were in different bargaining units at Point Park, Robert Morris, and Pitt. We followed those examples in hopes of having the best chance at success. However, the organizing committee is well aware that staff have had to bear the brunt of the ongoing budget crisis, and we would like to support the staff’s efforts to get more job security and more humane treatment. In fact, staff would likely have a more straight-forward path to collective bargaining rights than faculty. If staff decided to unionize, they could choose to organize with the same union as the faculty (AFT) or not. Ultimately, staff and faculty at other universities have found that they have the most power to bargain strong contracts when everyone is represented by a union. Even if there are multiple unions representing groups of faculty and staff at an institution, there is power in solidarity.

We have heard from the administration that they cannot comment on aspects of our union campaign because “we have to go through this legal process.”   

However, this process was requested by the administration and is not required. Instead, it was their choice. First, when the union asked for voluntary recognition in January 2024, they could have agreed to our request. Second, we offered to have the cards counted (and names kept confidential) by a neutral third party like a priest or a rabbi, but they refused to do this. Third, they could have agreed at that time to a secret ballot union election supervised by the Labor Relations Board, a government agency. Fourth, in June the union offered to come to the table to discuss a possible bargaining unit, but the administration refused. Instead, the Board of Trustees and administration continue to challenge our eligibility to belong to a union, and in fact have argued that not a single faculty member is eligible to be a union member because we are all managers that have the ability to hire, fire, discipline and a whole range of other managerial authorities. Beyond that, the administration’s attorneys from the Duane Morris law firm have chosen the most time-consuming and laborious strategy: treating every one of the roughly 135 members of the bargaining unit as unique positions that are all managerial, which has necessitated that the VPAA and deans provide testimony on every single faculty member. In addition to leading to perhaps the longest hearing in this regional office’s history, at the August 2024 campus update President Phillips indicated that the administration plans to appeal the NLRB’s ruling, likely in hopes of trying to drag this out even further.This is one of the most common union-busting tactics: delay, delay, delay. And it is all to prevent the 80+ percent of us who have signed union cards from having a greater voice in our workplace and a seat at the table for critical decisions that affect our employment and our university. We need to recognize the delay tactics for what they are and to resist efforts to wear us down. Instead, we can continue to build community and solidarity among faculty by coming to social events and CFU meetings, supporting each other, and equipping ourselves with the facts so that you can share with others what is really going on.

The members of the full-time faculty.

We, the full-time faculty at Chatham University, would be the union. We would elect officers from among ourselves, we would elect committee members–a contract committee and a grievance committee–from among ourselves. We would be the union.

Unions are about workplace democracy, collective bargaining, and legally enforceable contracts–none of which we currently have.

Perhaps most importantly, at Chatham, we are currently at-will employees, as it says on page 1 of the employee handbook. We can be fired at any time, for any reason. The conditions of our employment can be changed unilaterally by our employer at any time. If we had a union contract, changes would have to be negotiated. We would have a say in the conditions of our employment.

The benefits extend beyond collective bargaining.

A voice in employment conditions, having workplace democracy, and having the protections of a contract are pretty important, but some of the other benefits could include: having processes that are fair and in writing, no more verbal agreements, having representation in important meetings, knowing your rights, having a voice in matters affecting the quality of our students’ education like class size and not getting spread too thin with service duties, rebuilding a sense of community among faculty and at Chatham in general, improving faculty morale (which might improve faculty retention), demanding greater transparency with the school’s finances or decision-making, and improving life at Chatham not just for us but for those who come after us.

All full-time faculty, including instructors.

We intend to include these faculty members in the bargaining unit since their primary responsibility is as a faculty member.

The determination of whether an employee–whether they are a tenure-track faculty member or a program director–can belong to the union is based on their managerial status, which is based on what decisions they can make as a supervisor. 

• Do they make final decisions about hiring and firing?
• Do they make final decisions about promotions?
• Do they make final decisions about schedules?
• Do they make final decisions about who gets admitted to their programs?

Decisions are different from recommendations. Does someone above them in the organization make the final decision on these matters?

We expect it will be less than 1.5% of each member’s salary, or possibly even less if calculated as a flat rate (we faculty will choose how we manage dues). 

If we go with a flat rate, that could total $47.82 a month ($20.18 for the national AFT + $11.70 for AFT-PA + $15.94 for local CFU needs). We would not pay dues until we have a contract (it usually takes about a year to get a contract). It is common practice to incorporate this cost into the salary demands made in that initial contract so there is no net additional cost to union members. For more details, please see our handy sheet on “Understanding Union Dues.”

Yes. 

Yes, if the majority of faculty choose to become a union, that means that the union would be all full-time faculty members. All of us would have a say in elections, in votes taken within our union, and through our union, we would have a voice in contract negotiations with our employer. The better question here is what is the benefit of remaining nonunion, which means that we are at-will employees. As at-will employees the terms of our employment can be changed at anytime by our employer and any one of us can be terminated at any time for any reason. We can only bargain individually and often the results of those individual negotiations are verbal agreements that can (and have) changed without notice.

By consensus, following a recommendation from the organizing committee.

The organizing committee is made up of volunteers from each of the three schools. Some of the committee members further volunteered to research several unions. During this process, they asked questions about how much control our local would have, retaining Chatham’s culture, their thoughts on eligibility for our bargaining unit, and whether they were currently organizing in Pittsburgh or Pennsylvania higher education. Once we talked to all the potential unions, we compiled our notes into a table, and the organizing committee is making a recommendation to the larger Chatham Faculty United meeting to get consensus on which union to approach.

We research seven different possible unions.

The American Federation of Teachers (which has affiliated with the American Association of University Professors), AFT-Academics (another affiliate of AFT), the United Campus Workers (affiliated with the Communications Workers of America), the United Steelworkers (USW), the United Auto Workers, Service Employees International Union, and the Newspaper Guild (also affiliated with Communication Workers of America).

There has been a very well-funded anti-union propaganda campaign in the US since the 1940s. This campaign has very successfully planted several ideas about unions in the popular imagination. Hollywood movies and TV shows have perpetuated some of these messages as have the news media. Below are common myths and the realities.

• Myth: Unions are outsiders who “come in” and take control of a workplace. Reality: Unions are organizations of employees IN A WORKPLACE. We, the full-time faculty and instructors, would constitute the union. We would control our negotiations with our employer.
• Myth: Unions are controlled by mobsters. Reality: Thanks to Jimmy Hoffa, Congress passed the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, which has made unions the most transparent organizations in the country. Their finances are publicly available, and they are more transparent than corporations, nonprofits, and even colleges and universities.
• Myth: Unions are only about getting more, more, more. Reality: Unions are about getting a contract and no longer being at-will employees. Once we have a contract, we can set priorities, we can negotiate for better benefits or raises, or we can grant concessions or give-backs in tough times. But even in tough times, we would have a say in which concessions and we could demand more transparency to understand why such concessions were necessary.
• Myth: The way things are now, we can just talk things out because the administration has an open door policy and we are like a family. Reality: When it really mattered, we were not consulted about anything. Important things in our lives–our retirements, our healthcare–were changed, and we never found out who made those decisions, how much of the budget hole our sacrifices closed, or under what conditions our benefits will improve beyond “once we grow our enrollment.”

No.

This is perpetuated by the news media that only cover unions when they go on strike or threaten to go on strike. Reporters simply do not cover unions when they are able to negotiate new contracts with their employers. Furthermore, when reporters talk about “labor strife” or “labor troubles,” their language implies that the union was the problem and fails to mention employers refusing to bargain in good faith. Finally, we–the full-time faculty–would be the union. Only we could decide when to go on strike, and like most things, this would come down to a vote because unions are workplace democracy in action.

Embedded in this question is the assumption that unions are mainly about going on strike. In reality, they are mainly about us having the ability to collectively bargain with our employer. Also, healthcare providers say that the only time they would even consider a strike is when not going on strike puts patients in danger because of dangerously low staffing levels or mandatory overtime that leaves providers exhausted and mentally foggy. In fact, there is a rise in the number of healthcare workers that are organizing because they offer a way to improve patient care; see this recent NYT article. 

One potential problem is a low level of participation in the union. As a democratic organization, a union works best when more people are active participants. Another potential problem is an employer who decides to drag things out in court, bargain in bad faith, or refuse to bargain and wait until a judge forces them to the bargaining table. There have been some university administrators who have taken this tactic, which makes life difficult for everybody.

There is no union that can prevent someone from quitting their job. 

We control the rules that are in our contract.

Some people have heard anecdotes about how forming a union means having more rules and bureaucracy. First and foremost: be very careful of these anti-union anecdotes. These are the “but I’ve heard from a friend that” stories, and such stories are often incomplete if not entirely inaccurate. Our workplace would only have rules that were in our contract that our contract committee negotiated with our employer. If we did have a contract that became overly bureaucratic or had unnecessary rules, the membership would vote to make eliminating or revising the rules a top priority in the next contract negotiation. We might even elect new members to the contract committee.

Unions provide due process for actions that require disciplinary action.  

First, it isn’t always clear in our current system why some people’s promotions get overturned by the VPAA, why some people get fired, when someone gets disciplined, or when someone gets a special deal. It seems like a lot of decisions are made by a small number of administrators and that they can be somewhat arbitrary. If we were a union with a union contract, we could have more faith that a process was being followed and applied fairly. If there was a process that prevented people who committed egregious acts from being fired, that would be a very poor process indeed. Having said that, those people would still have whatever rights that system afforded to, for example, require evidence that they did commit an egregious act before being terminated.

No, that is not the idea of unionizing.  

If you’ve heard that all unions enforce a rigid payscale that could reduce top salaries, that is not the goal. Think about the salaries of the NFL and Major League Baseball–the players are union members and make a very wide range of salaries. Once we form a local, we’ll vote on contract priorities as well as the contract that our contract committee negotiates. Often, higher ed unions negotiate across-the-board percentage increases as well as market adjustments by comparing their salaries to peer institutions by discipline and increasing (never decreasing) salaries accordingly. In a worst case scenario if the institution was facing dire circumstances, we could accept a salary cut, but again, that is something we would get to vote on. If your question is about dues, please see our helpful sheet on “Understanding Union Dues.”