Around 50 members of United Faculty-United Auto Workers – a union made up of research, teaching, practitioner and clinical faculty – gathered in front of Bovard Auditorium to hand a letter to USC President Carol Folt and Provost Andrew Guzman asking the University to recognize the union and advance to a union election.
The letter included signatures from more than 100 faculty members across 21 schools at USC. The group announced last week that it tallied approximately 2,500 signed union authorization cards, signifying that most faculty support forming a union.
As the union handed the letters to members of USC’s administration, the group began chanting in front of Bovard: “Who are we… UF-UAW.”
In a press release, the UF-UAW said their top priorities included “job security, compensation inequities, unilateral benefit cuts, and inconsistencies in teaching workloads.”
Ryan Boyd, an associate professor at Dornsife, said the final decision about which issues will be brought to the bargaining table first will be made democratically. He has ideas about which are the most pressing.
“From having talked to hundreds of professors over the past couple of years, it’s probably going to be things like cost of living, adjustments to our pay … protecting our health benefits, protecting tuition assistance benefits, stability of contracts, transparency around promotion, merit review and more transparency in the university in general,” Boyd said.
UF-UAW’s next steps will rely on authorization by the NLRB to move forward or recognition by USC. If one of those steps is complete, UF-UAW will begin a formal election faculty-wide to certify its unionization.
Sanjay Madhav, an associate professor at Viterbi, said the difference between action from the NLRB or USC is how long union certification takes. For example, he said if USC sits down with the union, certification could happen early in the spring, but if they defer to the NLRB, it likely will occur toward the end of the academic calendar.
The university did not say if they would recognize the union. In a statement to Annenberg Media, they questioned the credibility of one made up by non-tenured faculty.
“We have serious concerns – legal, academic, and operational – about a union purporting to represent almost all of our research, teaching, practitioner, and clinical faculty,” the university said in a statement. “All of our faculty have an equal voice, and exercise it regularly, in our system of shared governance over how the university operates.”
“We do not believe our faculty need a union to speak for them or that applicable law will permit it. We look forward to continuing to work, as we always have, in direct collaboration with our faculty on matters of importance to our university.”
The last time non-tenured faculty attempted to unionize in 2016, the NLRB hit USC with federal labor violations. A report alleged that the University undermined a free and fair election process by giving some faculty raises ahead of the vote and threatening that faculty would not be welcome in the Academic Senate should they unionize.
United Auto Workers – which traditionally represents workers for auto manufacturers – is one of the largest higher education unions in the United States. UAW represents over 100,000 academic employees at institutions including Harvard, NYU, the University of California system and USC – representing teaching assistants, research assistants, assistant lecturers and fellows through UAW Local 872.
This story has been updated with a statement from the University.