FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From:
Michael Zweig/CAS and
Gary Zabel, Co-Chair, Boston Chapter of the
Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor
To:
Workplace
Date:
April 19, 2001
Posted:
April 24, 2001
Subject:
Part-Time Faculty Union Landslide at Emerson College!
Part-Time Faculty
Union Landslide at Emerson College!
History has been
made in Boston once again! In the first
faculty unionization
victory on a private campus in
Massachusetts
since the Supreme Court's 1980 Yeshiva
Decision, part-time
faculty members at Emerson College
have voted by
a margin of 3 to 1 to unionize as a chapter
of the American
Association of University Professors.
Despite a vigorous
campaign by the Emerson administration
to defeat the
union drive, when ballots were counted
today, 117 part-timers
had voted for the union and only
37 against, with
6 ballots challenged by the
administration's
lawyers, all likely union votes.
With 243 members,
the new Emerson chapter of the AAUP is
the only stand-alone
part-time faculty union in Greater
Boston.
Barbara Gottfried,
co-chair of the Boston branch of the
Coalition of Contingent
Academic Labor (COCAL), led the
Emerson drive.
Working as a consultant for the AAUP,
Barbara pulled
together an organizing committee which has
worked very hard
over the past ten months compiling
lists, flyering,
phoning colleagues, speaking to them
face to face,
and countering the administration's anti-
union propaganda
through mailings and opinion pieces in
the campus newspaper.
The union drive also benefited by
the support of
Emerson students, AAUP national staff, and
COCAL activists
from several campuses.
The private sector
is resistant to unionization
throughout the
US economy, but especially in academia,
since the Supreme
Court ruled in the Yeshiva Decision
that full-time
faculty at many institutions perform
managerial functions
and so are not eligible to form
bargaining units
under the National Labor Relations Act.
But Yeshiva does
not apply to part-time faculty, who now
comprise 50% of
the teaching workforce im higher ed.
The Emerson victory
is the first step in a campaign to
unionize all of
the part-time faculty members on Boston's
54 private campuses.
Congratulations to our sisters and
brothers at Emerson
College who have taken this historic
step.
|