Positive Collaboration: Beyond Labor Conflict and Labor Peace

Abstract

Institutions of higher education collectively constitute a major economic concentration that ranks—by whatever measure: resources, budgets, endowments, employees, constituencies— among the major industries in the United States. The unionized academic U.S. workforce ranks sixth among organized labor (Hurd, 2007) with 432,897 faculty and graduate student employees (Savarese, Berry & Boris, 2012). Yet, when compared to the top-tier manufacturing industries of steel or automobile or to national unions such as the UAW or the Teamsters, both the public institutions of higher education and their academic unions lack national visibility, lack influence on national debates, and, most tellingly, lack major successes in the quest for public monies. Health care, the environment, energy policies, and the current global economic crisis drive both state and national discourse. At a time when many other countries invest in higher education because they recognize how critical intellectual capital is in the competitive and troubled global economy, American public higher education is the caboose of the train of public commitment (except to make declining public monies contingent on producing more graduates in less time with fewer resources) (Seligman, 2008). Consequently, during the last two decades public funding—local, state, federal (including publicly guaranteed student loan debt)—for public institutions of higher education has diminished to the point that many if not most institutional budgets are dominated by non-public monies (student tuition, privately raised non-tax levy funds, grants, and gifts) and by savings achieved through use of cheap academic labor. Angelo Armenti, Jr. (2008), former President of California University of Pennsylvania, noted “declining public support for public higher education in Pennsylvania” and stated “without fear of contradiction… [that] California University of Pennsylvania is being privatized without a plan… [with] implications for our University, our students, and most especially for our faculty, and those implications are challenging, inexorable and increasingly obvious.” Loss of public revenues demonstrates how politically impotent our public higher education institutions and their unions have become. (I am not here speaking of the 200-300 top-ranked, exclusive private institutions, most of which are not unionized.) This paper situates some of this political weakness and invisibility within the historical and current context of campus labor/management relations and offers some possible strategies for increasing local and national influence.