COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
Why Extend Collective Bargaining Rights to Faculty, Staff and Graduate Workers in the University System of Maryland?
Maryland state law does not protect collective bargaining for public sector faculty, including part-time faculty (adjuncts), employed by the University System of Maryland, Morgan State University and St. Mary’s College. More than 40,000 faculty, staff and graduate workers are employed across these 14 public four-year higher education institutions. Maryland should follow the lead of other states and peer institutions and expand its collective bargaining law to cover these workers.
The evidence supporting collective bargaining in higher education is clear: It enhances cost-effectiveness, optimizes institutional efficiency, reduces inequality, boosts student achievement and improves university governance. And yet, Maryland’s outdated laws continue to prevent higher ed workers—tenured and tenure-track faculty, full-time nontenured faculty, research and clinical faculty, adjunct faculty, and graduate students—from having a voice in determining the conditions under which they engage in knowledge production, research and instruction.
Faculty Work Best with Union Protections
Faculty unions help institutions run more efficiently and fairly. For example, University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers found unionized public research universities have smaller differences in salary between women and men and improved hiring and retention practices for women faculty. A Kent State University study on unionization and university performance found that the presence of a faculty union is associated with a statistically significant reduction of $13,555 in core expenses per degree. Additionally, researchers found that “the longer a school has a faculty union, the more efficient it becomes.” For every year between 1987 and 2009 that a school had a faculty union, core expenses per completion declined by about 2.1 percent and core expenses per degree declined by 1.1 percent.
This research is no surprise to the AFT and its affiliates. By having both faculty and administration at the table as equal partners, collective bargaining allows for transparent workplace problem-solving. Both sides are able to keep the focus where it should be: on producing cutting-edge research and scholarship and improving student learning.
This partnership extends to shared governance. Collective bargaining agreements can strengthen the role of faculty in shared governance. Unions and administrators can bargain on best practices that fit their institution and formalize areas of focus relevant to the respective parties.
A Kent State University study on unionization and university performance found that the presence of a faculty union is associated with a statistically significant reduction of $13,555 in core expenses per degree. Additionally, researchers found that “the longer a school has a faculty union, the more efficient it becomes.”
Adjunct Faculty Deserve Respect on the Job
Nationwide, nearly 70 percent of academic workers who shoulder teaching loads—including full-time non-tenured faculty, lecturers, adjunct faculty and graduate employees—are contingent employees, and almost half are employed only on a part-time basis. These instructors have the same precarity as gig workers; unlike tenure-track faculty, their appointments expire every one or two semesters, with no commitment to future employment.
To make a living teaching, the academic market spans from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., and beyond for many of those who teach in the Maryland system. Unlike in the past, students may struggle with getting a recommendation for graduate school or a job because their professor from a past year, who they did not know wasn’t a “permanent” member of the faculty, was not reappointed.
Contingent academic workers replacing tenured faculty means that fewer academics are protected by principles of academic freedom. The ability to research and publish on controversial topics, including climate science, reproductive health and world affairs, is limited when faculty can be fired or not renewed without cause.
A nationwide survey by the AFT finds that contingent academic workers often don’t earn enough to allow them to meet basic expenses; have limited job security that lasts a few months at a time; are offered minimal or nonexistent benefits; and experience a pervasive lack of institutional support—beginning with lack of access to assigned office space or a computer, and extending to systematic exclusion from participation in the governance of their departments and institutions and from adequate training to assist students in crisis.
While students are paying more than ever to attend college, middle-class faculty positions with good benefits are being replaced with low-paid, temporary and part-time labor. Contingent faculty nationwide report indignities—which could be rectified at little or no cost—that interfere with students’ learning conditions, including: no designated office space to meet with students, interrupted communication with faculty when they lose email access between unpredictable appointments, and disruption of long-term mentoring relationships with students. But with a union, faculty of all ranks can refocus university spending on its core mission: high-quality teaching and learning.
Maryland Is Out of Step with Peer Institutions
Maryland’s law leaves the state university system not only woefully out of fashion, but also behind its peer institutions for competitive advantage. For instance, for Towson University’s 11 peer institutions, the only colleges that do not have faculty collective bargaining are those universities in Virginia and North Carolina, two states that do not have enabling legislation. For the University of Maryland, College Park, five of its peer institutions have long-standing collective bargaining agreements for faculty. Additionally, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and Minnesota have enabling legislation to allow faculty to form unions and collectively bargain. Maryland remains sadly behind by denying faculty the right to collectively bargain.
The 165,000-plus students enrolled at the 12 institutions in the University System of Maryland (with native Marylanders comprising 80 percent of the undergraduate student body), as well as the students at St. Mary’s and Morgan State, deserve access to an instructional workforce that is well-supported in their pursuit of educating a skilled workforce ready for the 21st-century demands of a global economy.
Maryland Is Out of Step with Other States
States have the authority to enact public sector bargaining laws that protect the right of state and local government workers to bargain over wages, benefits and working conditions.
At least some public employees, whether they’re employees of school districts, local governments or state governments, enjoy the right to organize and collectively bargain in 34 states and the District of Columbia. Faculty of higher education institutions have some collective bargaining rights in 30 states—including Florida, Kansas and Ohio—and the District of Columbia. Twenty-five of those states statutorily require employers to bargain with all their faculty at community colleges and four-year institutions, and they provide protections for faculty to act together to address wages, hours, and terms and conditions of employment. At least 19 states have recognized a public sector right to representation by a union representative at investigatory interviews by the employer where discipline may occur, including private sector “right-to-work” states such as Arizona and Florida.
In recent years, several states, including Nevada and Colorado, have introduced bills seeking to authorize collective bargaining for higher education workers under state law. In total, the AFT represents more than 400,000 faculty and staff across the country who collectively bargain in higher education.
These states reap benefits outlined above: institutional efficiency, as collective bargaining helps faculty achieve institutional goals; robust gains in governance, as meaningful faculty participation in shared decision-making increases; and gains in fairness and equity, especially when collective bargaining rules and rights are uniformly aligned and regulated for state employees systemwide and across all sectors.
Adjunct Faculty Deserve Respect on the Job
Maryland expanded collective bargaining to its community college faculty in 2021, leading to unionized faculty at 10 separate institutions in the state. The state also passed legislation that year to consolidate University System of Maryland collective bargaining for nonacademic workers, allowing for centralization and standardization of a previously fragmented labyrinth of contracts in a landmark agreement for University System workers across the state.
Last legislative session, Maryland streamlined the state’s public sector collective bargaining law through House Bill 984, the Public Employee Relations Act. That law consolidated all the state’s public employee collective bargaining laws, putting administration of public employee collective bargaining under a single board. The law provides important protections for union building and requires a union to be recognized once a majority of workers sign cards expressing support. The law specifically states that it is the public policy in Maryland to encourage collective bargaining among public sector employees and to protect employees who exercise that right. But Maryland higher education teaching and research faculty are still left out in the cold. State employees; public university, community college and local public school system employees; and independent home-care providers are now all covered under the same law. Yet public sector faculty, part-time faculty (adjuncts) and graduate student workers are not; they are some of the only state-level public employees in the state not protected.
The law specifically states that it is the public policy in Maryland to encourage collective bargaining among public sector employees and to protect employees who exercise that right. But Maryland higher education teaching and research faculty are still left out in the cold.
There is nothing in federal law that prohibits workers in higher education from organizing and collectively bargaining, particularly in public higher education. All that is needed is enabling legislation from the state. Recent legislation in Maryland—authorizing community college faculty to organize, allowing University System of Maryland non-academic workers to bargain systemwide, and declaring it is the state’s public policy to encourage collective bargaining—shows the solution is clear. Maryland needs to develop a model for enabling legislation that includes all Maryland academic workers—both full-time and part-time faculty—to collectively bargain a uniform and standardized contract centrally regulated and governed collectively.
ENDNOTES
1 University System of Maryland, “About the University System of Maryland,” https://www.usmd.edu/about_usm/.
2 M. Cassell and O. Halaseh, “The Impact of Unionization on University Performance,” Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy 6, no. 1 (2014): 3, https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1314&context=jcba.
3 R. Dominguez-Villegas et al., “Labor Unions and Equal Pay for Faculty: A Longitudinal Study of Gender Pay Gaps in a Unionized Institutional Context,” Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy 11, no. 2 (2020), https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1793&context=jcba.
4 The Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, “Selected Research on Connections between Non-Tenure-Track Faculty and Student Learning,” University of Southern California, Pullias Center for Higher Education (updated May 2020), https://pullias.usc.edu/download/selected-research-on-connections-between-non-tenure-track-faculty-and-student-learning-2020/.
5 Dionne M. Pohler and Andrew A. Luchak, “Balancing Efficiency, Equity, and Voice: The Impact of Unions and High-Involvement Work Practices on Work Outcomes,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 67, no. 4 (October 2014): 1063-1094, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793914546295; Tove Helland Hammer and Ariel Avgar, “The Impact of Unions on Job Satisfaction, Organizational Commitment, and Turnover,” Journal of Labor Research 26, no. 2 (June 2005): 241-266, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12122-005-1024-2; Carol Gill, “Union Impact on the Effective Adoption of High-Performance Work Practices,” Human Resource Management Review 19, no. 1 (March 2009): 39-50, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1053482208000648; and American Association of University Professors, “FAQS on Shared Governance,” https://www.aaup.org/programs/shared-governance/faqs-shared-governance.
6 Dominguez-Villegas et al., “Labor Unions and Equal Pay.”
7 Cassell and Halaseh, “The Impact of Unionization.”
8 Michael Mauer, “Protecting Shared Governance Through Collective Bargaining: Models Used by AAUP Chapters,” Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy 8, article 7 (2016), https://thekeep.eiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1653&context=jcba.
9 Glenn Colby, “Data Snapshot: Tenure and Contingency in US Higher Education,” American Association of University Professors, March 2023, https://www.aaup.org/article/data-snapshot-tenure-and-contingency-us-higher-education.
10 University System of Maryland, “USM Performance Peer Institutions,” https://www.usmd.edu/dashboard-indicators/usm-peers.
11 In fact, many of these institutions have had collective bargaining for over two decades, with mature contracts: e.g., California State University, Fullerton; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth; Minnesota State University, Mankato; Montclair State University (N.J.); Indiana University of Pennsylvania; and West Chester University (Pa.).
12 Collective bargaining for faculty exists at University of California, Los Angeles; University of California, Berkeley; Rutgers University (N.J.); University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana; and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. University System of Maryland, “USM Performance Peer Institutions.”
13 Jay A. Perman, “FY 2025 Operating Budget: Testimony & Response to Department of Legislative Services Analysis,” University System of Maryland, 2024, https://dbm.maryland.gov/budget/FY2025Testimony/R30B00.pdf.
14 Isabela Salas-Betsch and Karla Walter, “Workers Want Unions: How States Have Strengthened Worker Power in 2023,” Center for American Progress, Nov. 1, 2023, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-want-unions-how-states-have-strengthened-worker-power-in-2023/.
15 Maryland introduced Senate Bill 823 last session, sponsored by state Sen. Benjamin Kramer and co-sponsored by state Sens. Joanne Benson and Sarah Elfreth, which would have given collective bargaining rights to certain faculty, including part-time faculty, postdoctoral associates and graduate assistants at certain state higher education institutions, but the bill did not come out of committee.
16 Nevada Faculty Alliance, AAUP-AFT, “Collective Bargaining for NHSE Professional Employees,” https://www.leg.state.nv.us/Session/82nd2023/Exhibits/Senate/FIN/SFIN1385F.pdf.
17 Clara Longo de Freitas, “University System of Maryland Workers Secure ‘Historic’ Systemwide Union Contract,” Baltimore Banner, Aug. 2, 2024, https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/education/higher-education/public-universities-maryland-labor-union-contract-XFT73VVQFVAP5CAD2WRPIJHAGY/
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