Part-time faculty members that voted to unionize did so to increase their leverage in negotiations with the university administration. According to some adjunct faculty members, though, this move was unexpected until Service Employees International Union (SEIU) got involved and brought the national movement to unionize to light.
Rebecca Kaiser Gibson, a lecturer in the English department, is a member of Tufts' union-organizing committee. Lecturers in the Department of English Elizabeth Leavell, Carol Wilkinson and Nan Levinson and Lecturer in the Department of Romance Languages Andrew Klatt, all part-time faculty, are also on the committee.
Gibson, who has taught at Tufts since 1995, explained that, though Tufts adjunct faculty may have better benefits than they would at other schools, the faculty still have little say in their working lives.
"With a union, we can be a part of the decisions that affect our working lives. ... We're the happy recipients of some good decisions - but without being able to weigh in on what's important for us," she said. "I really think that the ideal outcome will be a sense that we can work together."
Gibson pointed out that the opportunity to join the union came at an auspicious time.
"We weren't looking for a union, but we slowly evolved on our own ... to a place where we were receptive to hearing about it," Gibson said. "The union perspective gave us a sense of context that was way bigger than we had been thinking - it was really a consciousness-raising thing. We realized, 'Oh, we fit inside a situation that's evolving and developing in the whole country.'"
According to Klatt, who is in his 17th year of teaching at Tufts, part-time faculty have been dissatisfied with the administration as a result of a salary freeze that began in 2008.
"There has been a lot of discontent and low morale ever since the salary freeze five years ago," Klatt said. "So, in a sense, the administration at Tufts is largely responsible for the unionization because they treated the part-time faculty poorly and disrespectfully, and so there was a strong inclination to form a union, to get a voice and to get a legally protected way to participate democratically in the conditions of employment."
Klatt emphasized that the situation for part-time faculty at Tufts is part of a larger problem.
"[For] more than 30 years, universities have been trying to reduce the cost of instruction as a part of their operating budget," he said. "The main way they have been doing this is to really change the model of faculty in the U.S. by hiring more and more people who don't have tenure or tenure track, who don't have rights to their jobs, who may or may not have benefits and who are very poorly paid. So this is an issue that has to do with a lot of people at a lot of universities."
Adjunct Action has held two symposia for part-time faculty in the Boston area. On April 13, adjunct professors met at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and on Nov. 1 at the Boston Central Library.
Both Klatt and Gibson attended the April symposium, along with other part-time lecturers at Tufts and faculty members from over 20 colleges in Massachusetts.
"I was inclined to be a supporter, and attending the symposium was a good experience," Klatt said. "It showed that SEIU had a good analysis of our problem and had the will and the capacity to lend a hand to a union for part time faculty at Tufts. In fact, the organizing committee came out of that symposium."
Gibson said the symposium showed her what kind of interest there was in forming a union across different departments at Tufts.
"One impression that was sort of striking was that when all the people from Tufts sat around a table, there were people from all sorts of different departments who I had never met," Gibson said. "To see other people were drawn to [unionizing], that there was this broad interest ... was quite inspiring."
Students have also supported the adjunct unionization efforts at Tufts, most prominently the Tufts Labor Coalition (TLC). Senior Julia Rodgers, a member of TLC, said that the group tried to get word out about the campaign to students through an op-ed in the Daily, tabling in the dining halls, social media and one-on-one interactions.
"As TLC, one of our biggest goals has been supporting the janitor's union, so when we heard that this was happening and that it was actually a nationwide campaign, I personally thought it would be really beneficial to the university, and the TLC decided that it really fit in with what our goals are," Rodgers said.
She said that it is important for students to pay attention to this issue.
"This is so much about the environment that we go to school in. Our faculty are amazing and could be even better if they had less stress to deal with, had an easier time planning their classes and felt like their jobs were secure," Rodgers said. "As students, we want to support what our professors are doing and their rights to self-determined jobs."
Bill Shimer, a part-timer lecturer in management and organization development at Northeastern, where unionization efforts are also underway, told the Daily that the union is currently in the process of gathering authorization cards at Northeastern. In order to hold an election, 30 percent of eligible voters must sign an authorization card, according to Shimer.
"Forming a union is not something that immediately comes to mind as a strategy for improving the lives of professors," Shimer said. "When you talk to professors about the fact that our working lives are really quite bad in terms of pay and stability and professional development - the things everybody's interested in - that's an easy sell; everybody agrees with that. The question is how [you] improve it."
Shimer expressed hope that the outcome at Tufts will be repeated at Northeastern and all across Boston.
"We at Northeastern are looking at Tufts. We're envious that they're so far ahead and want to congratulate the faculty on a successful vote," he said. "We hope that it is an impetus for us and the other colleges to organize in Boston."
Currently, part-time faculty at Tufts are determining what their priorities will be in bargaining sessions with the administration. There is a preliminary bargaining survey available on the Adjunct Action website, asking, for example, Tufts faculty to rank issues - like better compensation, continued access to affordable health benefits, guaranteed compensation for course preparation if a course is cancelled - in order of priority.
Once professors have determined what is important for them, there will be a negotiation with the administration to reach a collective bargaining agreement, which the administration notes might be too restrictive to fit all situations for adjunct professors.
Both Gibson and Shimer, however, said that the SEIU has emphasized that the outcome of negotiations will be representative.
"[SEIU] seems to be particularly empowering of its members," Gibson said. "We are constantly reminded that it is our union, and it's not them telling us what to do - and they don't ... so any sense of there being a third intervening power between us and the administration just has not experientially been the case."
As part-time professors at Tufts prepare for eventual negotiations with the administration, Klatt is confident that support for the union will continue to grow.
"I think that ... support will probably be increasing significantly as people begin to find ways that they can participate in what is, essentially, our lives," Klatt said. "To use a clich?©, democracy is not a spectator sport. That's a bumper sticker, but we're trying to put that into practice, and be active, democratically-minded participants."
