WHY NOT DEMOCRACY IN HIGHER EDUCATION WORKPLACES?
By Nick Gier, President, Higher Education Council, Idaho Federation of Teachers
Representatives Shirley Ringo and Tom Trail have agreed to introduce a bill in the 2008 Idaho Legislature that would grant collective bargaining rights for higher education employees. For over thirty years Idaho's K-12 teachers have used their collective voice to negotiate contracts with their school districts, and the result has been that teacher's salaries have risen at a greater rate than higher education faculty.
About 75 percent of the nation's K-12 teachers are unionized, and some critics say that teacher unions have destroyed public education. Most of the European and Asian teachers whose students outperformed ours are heavily unionized and have centralized educational systems, so our education problems cannot possibly lie with the unions.
Since the first bargaining contracts in higher education were ratified in the late 1960s, 319,000 faculty members are now represented by faculty unions on 1,125 campuses. This number has slowed because 19 states still refuse to allow higher education faculty to hold elections for a bargaining agent. Even so, 62,000 unionized faculty have been added since 1998. Some of the new union members have joined in Washington, which now has contracts on 33 campuses. With contracts on 20 campuses, faculty in Montana have bargained on some campuses for 30 years, and 44 Oregon campuses are under collective bargaining agreements.
The largest new numbers in higher education are the 57,000 graduate students who are now covered by union contracts, which have given them substantial pay increases and retirement and medical benefits for the very first time. A full 60 percent of these instructors have joined since 1995.
In 1976 faculties at the University of Idaho, Lewis-Clark State College, Boise State University, and Idaho State University voted, in one case by 2-1, to support the public employees bargaining bill that was before the Legislature. The measure lost on a tie vote in the Senate HEW Committee.
A recent recruitment drive has more than double union membership on six Idaho campuses, and many of these new members inspired their leaders to try once again to end the exclusion of nearly 3,000 teachers from right to have union representation. After all, one of our basic rights as human beings is the right of self-determination as individuals and as groups.
All that we are asking for is representative democracy in the work place, as the following definition indicates: "Collective bargaining is a system of representative government in which members of the body politic participate, through a designated organizational representative, in decision-making that affects their working environment—salaries, terms and conditions of employment, and other matters related to their interests."
In a survey done in 1979 America's higher education faculty said that their participation in university governance was "below consultation," primarily because administrators have veto power on all decisions made beyond the academic department. Those results would be exactly the same today.
The supreme irony is that we, who are entrusted to educate the nation's young people for responsible democratic citizenship work in a completely non-democratic organization. Our faculty union is proud of its motto—Education for Democracy; Democracy in Education, and we want the second phrase to become a reality.
It was a sad day in Idaho history when in early 1975 the senator from Soda Springs compared college and university faculty with his herd of cattle, and declared that academic tenure was bad because it does not allow for sufficient influx of "new breeding stock." The good senator was, in a perverse way, correct. Faculty are indeed being treated as live stock, and the only way for us to regain our dignity is to demand a right to full self-determination.