Taking a seat at the table: Organizing temporary faculty

The union coached, but these temps handled their own person-to-person organizing.

YOU KNOW WHY THEY'RE COMING OUT here," John Dickerman said in the clipped tones of a teacher correcting a student. "They're coming out here to unionize us. What did you expect?" he demanded of Toma Heldt. "Did you think they were just going to come here and tell us how to wave a magic wand to solve our problems?" It was late January 1992, and a group of Northern Illinois University temporary instructors had gathered to discuss what to do next. After four years of fruitless but polite meetings with provosts, department chairs, and deans on the DeKalb, Illinois, campus, the instructors were beginning to contemplate solutions outside of the university community.

A few weeks before, Toma had met with Mitch Vogel and Mike McNally of University Professionals of Illinois (UPI), a local of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), to see if they had any ideas. The union men insisted on meeting with the other organizing instructors, and Toma was too polite to turn them down. She looked diffidently at John, a lab assistant in the biology department whose shoulder-length graying sandy hair and enormous glasses hid a Jesuit-like mind. Her pink cheeks grew pinker.

"Well, I don't want to unionize," protested Toma, "but these guys from the UPI said they wanted to talk about our options, not about organizing us."

Outside the university campus, corporate management paid temporary employees extra for the kind of flexibility the instructors offered NIU. Inside the striated hierarchy of the traditional university, flexibility did not increase market value. Illogically, it decreased it. Toma, for example, brought an NIU doctorate and years of experience to her work teaching upper-division education courses and supervising Northern's student teachers during their semester-long internships in elementary schools.

Northern had a rule that it wouldn't hire its own doctoral graduates. For Toma to earn the wage her credentials rated, she'd have to travel the country, seeking the brass ring of tenure at other colleges and universities. But Toma's husband was place-bound in nearby Sycamore by the railroad seniority system.

Sandy Flood was in the same situation: her husband, Brian, worked as an entomologist for Del Monte in Rochelle, a little town just west of DeKalb. She could afford to teach physical education, work that she found challenging and stimulating, because Brian earned a real salary. She was hired the first time to replace a Northern professor who was sick. Then she was hired the next year and the next. She had never intended for her work at Northern to be a career, but there she was, with sterling teaching evaluations term after term. Other instructors were foolishly trying to support families on as little as $11,000 a year.

The instructors had discussed their low pay and other problems calmly with the administration for several years. Possibly, thought Toma, if the administrators had given us the minutest part of recognition-a certificate of appreciation, a service pin, or some minor gesture that said "you make a difference in the education of our students"-we would have taken the tokens and gone home happy. When she voiced this notion to Sandy, Sandy just nodded: of course. "But they couldn't be bothered," she pointed out.

"Are we that much trouble?" Toma mused to Sandy.

"Not yet," Sandy said, and then laughed dryly.

Perhaps it never occurred to the deans, provosts, or department chairs to recognize the wallflowers of the department. Perhaps, as David Leslie and Judith Gappa write in 'Die Invisible Faculty, their book on adjunct instructors, the university cornmunity was more comfortable not seeing Sandy, Toma, and John-or Darlene Whitkanack (math), Janet Ainsworth (education), and Brad McDonald (management)-teachers working without hope of tenure. Leslie and Gappa say, "When institutions believe parttime faculty value derives from the quality of what [these faculty] do, employment policies ... tend to translate this belief into practice. When institutions believe part-time faculty value derives from the dollars [institutions `save,' or the 'buffer' and 'benefits' [part-time instructors] create for tenured faculty, employment policies and practices are markedly different." Judging from its actions, Northern appeared to regard its temporary faculty members as cheap thrills in the classroom, a way to save money.

Toma and the others could feel how uncomfortable they made the administration and the full-time faculty. It was as if, Toma laughed, a chicken sat up and insisted on a seat at the dinner table. Their bid for recognition, for regularization of their employment and pay, was certainly greeted with the same consternation that a chicken would have elicited. Gappa and Leslie suggest that such consternation might perhaps arise out of an understanding that "the security, professional lifestyle, and economic well-being of the comparatively insulated full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty may depend directly on the continued exploitation and disenfranchisement of parttime faculty."

Tough Decision

Only Toma had met Mitch and Mike before, and she wasn't looking forward to meeting with them again. They didn't seem like men accustomed to fitting in on a university faculty, although Mitch was a tenured professor of educational leadership at Chicago's Northeastern Illinois University. Mike had taught junior high and high school English in Maine before becoming a union organizer on the East Coast for the National Education Association more than twenty years before; he had come to the UPI through the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the state affiliate of the AFT. Mike came from a union background: his father was an organizer for the boot and shoe workers, and his grandmother led 750 shoe workers out on strike in 1937 for union recognition.

When Mitch and Mike marched into room 245 of NIU's Anderson Hall, the two of them took over, turning the gathering into an old-fashioned-to Toma's mind-union-organizing meeting. "Look," said Mitch, "we want to help you, but the only possible way we can help is for you to organize. If you want to unionize, you have to decide now. Today. If you don't want us, we're not going to twist your arm. But we're not coming back."

John turned to glare at Toma.

Toma slid down into her chair. She felt all the instructors' eyes on her.

Sandy looked away from Toma to contemplate Mitch and Mike, who were leaning against a table at the front of the room. They reminded her of an odd couple of used-car salesmen: Mitch was wiry and dark-bearded, vibrating with energy, while Mike looked like Santa Claus, with his broad chest and full gray-white beard. She expected them at any moment to say, "This is the car; if you want it today, right now, let me know; otherwise it will be gone."

"Trying anything else but unionizing is a waste of time," Mike said -with certainty.

Well, we have tried, and nothing has happened, Sandy thought.

Slumped in her chair, Toma mused that Mike's comment actually enhanced his credibility, since it echoed the instructors' experience.

"We'll give you twenty minutes to decide," Mitch said, acting, John thought, like this was more than enough time.

Mitch didn't want to give the temps time to cogitate over unionizing. After first meeting Toma, Mitch, the UPI's president, had debated with the UPI's executive board over whether the union should expend any effort on the temps. He and the board regarded bringing them into the union as a big gamble, since the unit would never yield much in terms of dues, thanks to the instructors' low salaries. Worse, taking the temporary faculty out of a potential all-faculty bargaining unit would make winning a tenure-track faculty election difficult, if not impossible; during the 1986 all-faculty union election, which the UPI lost by fourteen votes, the UPI's analysis showed that 80 percent of the temporary faculty had voted for a union versus about 40 percent of the tenure-track faculty. It was the temporary faculty who could swing the election in favor of unionizing. Mitch and his board came to the conclusion that they should "do the right thing" and help the temps unionize, but they didn't intend to waste much time or patience on them.

"You mean we have to decide today?" Sandy asked.

"Today. This afternoon. Now," Mitch said, and vanished with Mike.

Stunned silence filled the vacuum of their departure. "I'm not going to be a part of a union," announced Brad

McDonald, the management instructor.

Toma looked at the group. "Another layer of bureaucracy?" "We don't want a union. We just want to get a vote on the University Council." Sandy Flood glanced at Toma. She must be losing it. Union?

The only thing Sandy knew about unions was the stories her Teamster uncle from New York City told when she was growing up, horrendous stories about people being murdered. What the others-side from Toma and a professor from the College of Law-knew about unions was what little they remembered from their school history books, the tidbits about the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies, and pitched battles between union organizers and coal-mine operators.

Sandy put in, "Is union really the way we want to go?" The others chimed in that the whole thing didn't feel right. Why was there such a rush? They had just met these guys.

Who the hell were they, really? How did the instructors know the union wouldn't be even more useless to deal with than the administration had proven to be?

This could be a lot of work, Sand thought. Suddenly, those three years of dickering with the university adminstration seemed not long enough. They all looked at each other.

"We need to do this," said the law professor. Sandy looked at her with interest. Her opinion shifted Sandy's thinking, that perhaps unionizing might be worth considering. Toma sat up looked at the law professor, relieved.

"What bothers me the most about a union is, well, striking," confessed Darlene.

They discussed the idea, reminding each other about the constant meetings, the feelings of futility, of impotence. Brad and one or two others remained implacably against unionizing, but most of the instructors warmed to the idea.

Then Sandy reminded the group that they didn't seem to be making any progress getting a vote on the University Council. John added, "We've been systematically excluded from any raises. The rest of the campus gets whatever increase the legislature approves. The only time any of our salaries are raised is when some department chair decides to do it ad hoc." It was this particular issue that had brought Brad to temp meetings: he had watched from the sidelines as everyone else in the management school received raises that year.

They looked at each other. And a what-the-hell-do-wehave-to-lose feeling overwhelmed them. It was exhilarating like skydiving is exhilarating. If nothing else, they'd be working with a different group than the ever-patient, ever-pleasant provosts, deans, and department chairs who were fonder of talk than action.

Less than an hour after they'd given their "you have twenty minutes" ultimatum, Mitch and Mike filled the room again, wound up from waiting.

"Well?" Mitch asked, pacing back and forth. "What did you decide? Are you going to do it?"

The group told him the vote was two against; the majority wanted to try to unionize.

At the next meeting, Mike told the group how much work they were looking at. The organizing instructors would have to personally contact all the instructors, on and off campus, and persuade them to sign a card requesting a union election.

"That's over four hundred people," protested Sandy. "One-third of the entire faculty teaches on these temporary contracts."

"We want you to collect cards from 60 percent so you'll have some margin for error," answered Mike, unperturbed. The numbers would be the group's problem, not his. And they needed to do the work in fewer than eight weeks.

As it turned out, seven people did the whole job: Sandy; Toma; Darlene; John; John's office mate, Dan Olson; Trish Etynre-Zacher from the Allied Health department; and the professor from the College of Law. Instead of twenty-five people contacting eight instructors each, seven people contacted over fifty instructors each.

Mike McNally turned out to be someone who thought that people who organized ought to know how to do things themselves. He would show them how to put together a union, he said, but they had to do the work. Of course, Mike didn't mention that the union planned to maintain a low profile in this election, correctly calculating that the temps would be more effective organizers than would union outsiders.

Footwork

Mike made himself comfortable at the McDonald's adjacent to campus. John or Darlene or someone would bring people over all day long, whenever they could grab an instructor who was free. In his laid-back way, Mike offered a structured argument. He would talk about how many college faculty across the country were unionized, and how the AFT represented most of them, neatly leaving out that most of the unionized faculty taught at community colleges. He described benefits, stressing the low-rate mortgages available to members. He even had ways to buy a car more cheaply.

Sandy found herself running to class, teaching, running back to her office, telephoning instructors, talking about why the union was important, pressing for an answer on how each instructor would vote, and arranging to deliver and pick up the actual sign-up cards. For six weeks, she spent more time talking to Mike McNally than to her husband and children.

Darlene discovered that persuading people to join the union was more a matter of avoidance than the hard sell. At first, she approached instructors she knew, rather like cookieselling Girl Scouts who ask friends and family first before approaching strangers. She found that, because she understood the situations of the instructors in the different departments, the talk was nonconfrontational. For example, it didn't make any sense to talk to math instructors about salary raises. They were already making so much more than anybody else that there was nothing the union could do to improve their salaries. But the benefits package was attractive to them-and there was the potential for some serious discussion about dismantling the five-year rule, which limited instructors on temporary contracts, including visiting professors, to no more than five consecutive full-time appointments.

Similarly, John found that some of the computer-science instructors thought that they were particularly well paid, and, as a result, didn't see any point in unionizing. John looked at his computer printout of individual salaries, and pointed out that there was an instructor in the College of Education who was paid twice the salary of the computer instructors. That information captured their attention, and John escorted them through the parking lots to meet Mike in his McDonald's hideout.

The only reason Sandy continued to exhaust herself was because the trip had a definite ending date: signed cards showing the group intended to seek collective bargaining with the UPI had to be filed with the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board (IELRB) on April 21. The union hoped to get a favorable ruling from the labor board in the spring, vote before school was out, and negotiate the first contract over the summer. That was the plan, but it didn't happen.

The instructors called. They made lists. They colorcoded the printouts to show each instructor's office hours. which would be the best time to share information about the union. Yellow meant the person could be contacted on Monday, Wednesday, or Friday; green on Tuesday; pink on Wednesday. Toma began to see those yellow-, green- and pinkhighlighted computer printouts in her dreams. Few of the calls were definitive.

The group members could never contact a person just once; some people took ten callbacks, and they still told Toma, Sandy, John, or the others, "No Bad idea." Others said, "I don't know. Couldn't the university refuse to renew my contract if they found out I'd voted for the union?" The standard response was, "No, your vote is secret." After investing so much energy in the cause, Toma found it hard to believe that so many instructors just didn't get that the union was meant to protect their jobs.

Some instructors didn't want to be seen with the organizers. If an instructor shared an office, he didn't want to talk in front of his office mates. The group found that they had to be very careful about choosing times to approach people, and to be paranoid about who was listening, because the other instructors were paranoid.

By April, the group had the two hundred cards necessary to request an election to certify the instructors group as a unit of the UPI.

On April 20 the UPI filed the representation petition with the IELRB, which sent a copy to the Northern administration. But rather than simply certifying the cards Sandy, Toma, and the others had collected, the labor board opened up hearings at the university's request.

Mitch sighed when he heard about the board's decision, because it meant that the UPI was facing a process that could last as long as a year in order to get the bargaining unit determined. And this for a group on which his union really hadn't wanted to spend much time, let alone money for lawyers' fees.

Before the IELRB stepped in, the instructors' group was looking at a union of potentially four hundred people, or a third of the faculty. A union with clout, as columnist Mike Royko would have put it. By striking, such a union could shut down a third of the campus, primarily undergraduate classrooms, although the group couldn't imagine that they'd ever have the nerve to do that. Still, undergraduates' parents, who also tended to be Illinois taxpayers, would definitely notice if their children's instructors went on strike, and perhaps might not be pleased to find out why. Then the disagreement between temporary faculty and the university would bleed outside of the administrative offices, where so far it had been neatly contained through inconclusive discussions.

Loss of Members

But thanks to the IELRB ruling, the unit lost a number of potential members: the part-time faculty who taught less than 50 percent of a full course load, instructors working off campus, faculty paid by grants, and visiting professors. The College of Law instructors were disallowed as well, because of a National Labor Relations Board precedent barring law school and medical school faculty from union membership.

The size of the unit was thus whittled down to 150. The group that remained was made up of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty, which accurately described the people who had started the whole mess, faculty who were around year after year with no clear rules for promotion or salary increases.

When the IELRB judge issued his decision, Northern appealed it, even though the decision seemed to favor the university. But the university wanted one more concession: for employees who had been hired after Sandy, Toma, and the others had turned in the cards requesting a union to be eligible to vote. Conventional labor policy dictates that only those people who are on board when you turn in the cards can vote when the election is held. That prevents the employer from hiring a hundred new people to vote against the union.

The university won its appeal, and temporary faculty hired by August 24, 1992, were eligible to vote. "That was a dangerous thing to happen to us," says Mitch. An appeal by the union would take another year's fight. "Should we fight for another year?" he asked. "Or do we just say we're going to win the election anyway?" Rather than appeal, the union negotiated its own addition to the IELRB decision, that the UPI have one extra month to reach out to the new people.

Altgeld Hall, the site of the union election the following October, has represented established tradition at Northern Illinois University ever since Illinois governor John P. Altgeld wielded the first shovel at the ground-breaking ceremony on September 17, 1895. At Governor Altgeld's behest, enormous gargoyles decorated the roofline. If Toma and Sandy had looked up toward the gray sky as they walked into Altgeld early on the morning of the election, they would have seen the tall gargoyles perched on the roof, grinning at them, as if to ask, "Who will have the last laugh this day?"

Instructors cast their ballots in one of the cavernous, dustysmelling Altgeld rooms, where pipes decorated the ceiling and walls were painted in that washed-out yellow peculiar to institutions. Each of the core group of instructors served as poll watcher throughout the day, as their class schedules permitted. Mike had worked out a careful lockstep of comings and goings, ensuring that an instructor was watching over the proceedings every second. Each poll watcher memorized the names of the voters as they deposited their ballots. As a watcher finished a shift, he or she dashed out of the room and spewed the names to the instructor waiting outside with a checklist. No-show voters were called.

Mike worked behind the scenes of the dance. He wouldn't let up, insisting that the group contact everyone. He even picked up several instructors who were ill and wouldn't drive. "If you do something like this, you don't do it halfway," he insisted. "Do it all the way or don't waste anybody's time."

When the polls closed at 4:30 that afternoon, eight instructors were in the basement room, along with Mike and Mitch; Steve Cunningham from the board of regents; one of the university's lawyers; and a few other administrators.

"Yea" or "nay" was called out as each card was removed from the ballot box and counted. As the number grew and grew in favor of a union, the faces of the university representatives became more and more rigid. To Toma, they didn't look so much angry as frozen, dumbstruck. She realized then that the administration really had been convinced the vote would go against the union.

The final number was decisive: two to one in favor of organizing a union. Some administrators mumbled congratulations to the instructors, stiffly shook hands, said something about arranging a meeting and preparing a contract, gathered their coats, and left, all without eye contact.

Toma and Sandy were momentarily euphoric at their victory. Then they looked at each other with the same thought: how did we do that? Toma summed it up in her usual midwestern way: "It's like looking at a hill. You don't realize how steep it is until you get to the top, look back and think, `How did we climb that high?"' e

Lisa Kartus has worked as a journalist for twenty-five years and has taught

on year-to-year contracts at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, since 1992. She is currently on leave of absence to research a book on the lives of teachers at a suburban high school. The following article, as well as the accompanying story titled "Toma: A Day in the Life," is condensed from her book manuscript, "Cheap Thrills," which is about the lives of temporary faculty.

Copyright American Association of University Professors Nov/Dec 2000
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved