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.