Nontenured faculty to unionize

Nontenured faculty will have the opportunity to unionize this fall after voting to do so on Friday.

The 240 to 113 vote came after the Union of Nontenure-track Faculty organizing committee spent a year gauging union support among employees at MSU, said Richard Manderfield, a committee member and visiting assistant professor of writing, rhetoric and American culture. Now that union support has been solidified, the group plans to create a contract outlining its requests.

“We hope to begin contract talks in the fall, and there will be all kinds of preliminary things going on this summer,” Manderfield said. “We will survey our members and get their feelings about what is important, and we’ll begin bargaining, and when a contract is reached, we’ll vote.”

Terry Curry, associate provost and associate vice president for academic human resources, said the university would work to establish an open relationship with union members.

“MSU has always respected the collective bargaining process,” Curry said in a statement released by the university. “Our focus now is on developing with this group the same kinds of trusting and candid information sharing and bargaining relationships we have with all other such units at MSU.”

Some nontenured faculty at MSU have been employed by the university for up to 25 years and are still considered visiting faculty with short-term contracts, Manderfield said.

The union will be affiliated with American Federation of Teachers Michigan.

Negotiations involving nontenured faculty at other universities have included issues such as baselines for salaries, benefits and yearly evaluations of expectations from administrators, said Stephen Thomas, a committee member and visiting assistant professor in the zoology department.

“Having some security and investment by the administration allows people to invest more in their chosen field with regards to teaching and student interaction,” Thomas said. “If you are always afraid if you are going to be let go, it is harder to invest more.”

Unionization recently has become a trend at colleges because of large increases of fixed-term, nontenured faculty, and MSU is no exception, Thomas said. In the past 10 years, fixed-term faculty at MSU has increased by about 70 percent, he said.

“When you have such a large group of people coming together without representation, it is only logical that you will have this,” Thomas said. “It actually benefits everyone, in that you have clear communication with administration.”

There are about 40 different job titles fixed-term faculty fit into, and the union will help standardize how the administration manages those groups, Thomas said.

“These are people who are nontenured that have teaching roles,” Manderfield said. “The most important standard here is that they are people that have some teaching role or relation with students.”