“Welcome to the city of collective bargaining” is how American Association of University Professors president Cary Nelson opened his remarks at an AAUP meeting at the Crowne Plaza Chicago Metro last Saturday. The response from the audience was celebratory: the University of Illinois at Chicago faculty had made history the day before by handing the Labor Relations Board enough signed authorization cards to establish a union there. UIC is the first large public research university in the state to unionize its faculty, and the first of its size and stature in the country to do so in the last decade.
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The AAUP—part venerable professional association, part “lunch-bucket” union—is seizing upon this victory as a major achievement and a possible turning point in the effort to organize faculty elsewhere. And it happened at a pace that might be the academic world equivalent of warp speed. UIC was one of a number of tier-one research institutions across the country targeted for a combined organizing effort by AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers. AFT organizer Troy Brazell says the campaign was launched two years ago, but the card signatures were gathered in a mere two months. Nelson credited “a little help from Wisconsin and Ohio” with turning “this collective bargaining drive into something that felt like the cause of the century.”
UIC’s nascent union, tentatively named UIC United Faculty, will include any teacher working at least 51 percent of full-time, whether tenured or not. Giamila Fantuzzi, associate professor in the College of Applied Health Sciences and one of the organizers, says there’s not yet any official union agenda, but a primary issue will be job security for non-tenure-track faculty, the contract workers that are replacing tenured faculty at institutions across the country and now make up more than 70 percent of faculty nationally. Fantuzzi says other issues will include salaries and shared governance. In a policy statement on its website, UICUF says it will demand competitive salaries, noting that UIC has lagged behind its peer institutions by about 11 percent over the last four years, not counting what was lost through mandatory furlough days.
