Faculty at several of the state’s major universities—including the University of Illinois at Chicago—are turning to organized labor for help as state budget cuts and declining enrollment threaten to devastate higher education across the Prairie State. 

But unionization at these campuses won’t be easy. In fact, faculty suggest they are being “kicked around like a ball” as they take steps to ensure our universities maintain some of the best teachers and instructors in the nation.

The UIC United Faculty campaign filed to unionize by turning in the signed authorization cards to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board on Friday. Lorenzo McDonald of the Illinois Federation of Teachers said minimum qualifications required cards from 50 percent plus 1 of the faculty. Estimating about 1,000 faculty members, McDonald said he had signed cards from "over a majority" of the teaching staff at UIC.

Lennard Davis, a top professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and former head of UIC's English department, said the faculty are "kicked around like a ball" because they have no input on decision making at the university.

"We’re the brain power and brain trust of the university. We want to be able to affect the quality of education and research and what [kind of education] the students receive," Davis said.

If approved, this union would make UIC one of the few Tier 1 schools in the nation where faculty has collective bargaining powers. UIC would join the ranks of Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, State University of New York, Alaska State University, and the University of Vermont. UIC currently has 18 other bargaining units -- none of which represent educators. The union would cover tenured and non-tenured faculty who are classified by the school as working at least 50 percent of the time, including lecturers and clinical and research staff.  

But push-back from the university has already started. Davis said the chancellor and provost issued a statement (PDF) "putting down the gauntlet" on the prospects of the union, citing what Davis calls a "loophole" to keep the tenured and non-tenured faculty from unionizing together.

"They want to weaken us, and divide and conquor, and spend taxpayer and tution money [on it]," Davis said. Part of the reason the UIC union wants to include non-tenured educators is the fact that they have poor working conditions, according to Davis. Because they can be hired on a year-to-year basis, Davis alleges that they are "completely abused" and "like migrant workers."

"This is not only about the highly paid or secure faculty being taken care of," Davis said. "We all seriously believe there needs to be a union."

At the private Columbia College in Chicago, there is a similar fight fronted by the Part Time Faculty Association, which has 1,000 members. Non-tenured part-timers make up 75 percent of the faculty at the urban arts and media school with some 10,000 students, union spokesman John Stevenson said. PFAC has been in talks for a new contract (their last one expired last August) for over a year. What PFAC is after is some sort of health insurance offering and job security.

Job security, Stevenson said, is not just in the sense of layoffs or the guarantee of academic freedom promised to tenured professors. Instead, they’d like one- or two-year contracts with a guaranteed set of courses based on seniority. Currently, part-timers can teach 18 credit hours for two semesters, or three courses per semester. Stevenson, a PFAC founder, has been teaching philosophy at Columbia for about 20 years, and up until last fall, he said he had been teaching three courses every semester for the last several years. Recently, the school has been cutting courses or combining them, effectively taking away work from the the non-tenured instructors.

Most recently, the union submitted a complete proposal in October, but the school didn’t submit a partial counterproposal until late March. "We feel the school has been doing a lot of stalling and dragged it out," Stevenson said. And what they offered is not good enough anyway, according to Stevenson, who said they countered the job security piece of the PFAC proposal by offering two-year contracts for just 30 positions. "They want the freedom, [and are] concerned to preserve as much administrative [weight] and power as they can have," Stevenson said.

Last week, four unions representing 3,400 educators and workers at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale issued a "notice (PDF) of intent to strike." This threat or "strike watch" by the SIUC Faculty Association, Non-Tenure Track Faculty Association, Graduate Assistants United, and Association of Civil Service Employees, they said, is an attempt to get the school officials back to the bargaining table after an impasse was declared, and is a direct response to the "disrespect" the school has shown.

At Northeastern Illinois University, the local chapter of the University Professionals of Illinois have been seeking better work conditions as well, remaining in negotiation for over two years. Elsewhere in the state, Chicago State, Eastern Illinois, Governors State, Illinois State, Northern Illinois, and Western Illinois universities all have unions to watch and may be the next domino to fall into the collective bargaining spotlight.