State and national
union organizations (the Illinois Federation of Teachers, the American
Federation of Teachers, and the American Association of University Professors)
have invested considerable staff time and resources into the faculty union
campaign on this campus. Have you wondered why?
Two words: Big Money.
These
organizations will receive a hefty chunk of the money earned by faculty via union
member dues and “fair share” dues automatically charged to non-members within
the bargaining unit. We have collected some rough numbers to give you an idea
of how much money we are talking about.
The campus Graduate
Employee Organization (GEO) admirably provides full information about their
finances on their web page. We
want to note here the striking contrast with the faculty and student unions up
at UIC, who provide none of this detail, and for that matter our own Campus
Faculty Association, which makes this information available only to its members,
and only upon request.
The GEO is
affiliated with the IFT, the AFT, and the AFL-CIO rather than the AAUP. They
collect 2% dues on gross salary, which in 2013 totaled $772,837. Of that, $525,529
(68%) went to these external organizations. They explain on their web site what these funds are used for, but it is
clear that nowhere near a half million dollars of resources and services come
back to the campus each year.
The GEO charges all graduate employees the 2% rate,
making no distinction between regular membership and fair share dues. This
seems to belie the rationale for fair share dues: the AAUP says that fair share dues should cover only “costs . . . that are germane to
the Chapter's legal duties to represent you.” Since these are only a subset of the overall activities
unions use dues for, fair share dues clearly should be less than full membership
dues.
It
is worth noting that the same situation exists up at UIC.
Furthermore,
within our campus GEO fewer than half the students choose to be fully dues-paying
members: in the current year, 2014, 53.2% are paying “fair share” dues. Up at
UIC, even more remarkably, none of their GEO members are paying membership
dues; they are all “fair share”!
How
can you claim that your union is “democratic” when less than half of your
constituency choose to be members? It seems reasonable to require that unions maintain
a membership of over 50% of the members of the bargaining unit. Yet when this condition
was written into the UIC faculty contract, union negotiators condemned it as an
“anti-union” provision.
The
“specialized” (non-tenure-track) faculty on this campus have chosen to
unionize, but dues rates and other money matters have not been settled yet.
We
also don’t know what the AAUP would charge faculty unions, compared to the
AFL-CIO. But we do know that they just increased the per-member rate they charge
to campuses for union affiliation for adjunct faculty and grad students, hiking
it from $46 per member to $75 (that’s a 63% increase).
So
what revenues would a tenure-track faculty union yield for these outside
organizations? Excluding faculty from Law, Medicine, and Veterinary Medicine,
who would not be eligible for a union, and estimating the dues at 1% of salary,
membership and fair share dues would generate over $2 million annually. If the
percentage transferred to outside organizations is roughly comparable to what
the GEO is paying (68%), that would be about $1.4 million each year from
tenure-track faculty – plus, of course, the half million already being transferred
by the GEO, and plus whatever the non-tenure-track faculty union would be
collecting and transferring.
That would total well over $2
million dollars a year transferred to outside union organizations from this
campus: every year, year after year, in steadily increasing amounts.
For the CFA, this would mean
about $600,000 a year from tenure-track faculty, plus whatever they get from their
portion of non-tenure-track faculty dues. That’s more than 20 times what they
are currently receiving from faculty ($31,745 in 2013). What would they do with such a windfall?
It’s big money, indeed. You can see why they are fighting so hard to get it.
And
without a discount for “fair share” dues, all faculty would be paying the same
amount whether they choose to be in the union or not. That is inconsistent with
the AAUP guidelines, and a distortion of what “fair share” dues mean.
***This blog is a jointly authored project by two people who believe that the campaign for tenure-track faculty unionization has damaged morale and divided our campus, and that a faculty union, if ever established, would erode academic quality and undermine our highly successful system of campus shared governance, which has earned nationwide praise.
We speak for ourselves. We have no organization behind us, we don’t ask for funding, we don’t pay national hired guns to come in and make the case for us.
We want to start a different campus conversation about faculty unionization, which we believe will be more thoughtful and substantive when people have all the facts.
We welcome and will consider postings from others expressing issues and concerns about faculty unionization. We know that many faculty are very upset about the possibility of working on a unionized campus.
If you see any information here that is inaccurate, please tell us and we will correct it.
If you share our concerns and want to help, please forward these postings to your friends and colleagues, and urge them to do the same.***
