BY JONATHAN REES
Back in the 1990s, I studied labor history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Naturally, I belonged to the Teaching Assistants’ Association, the first graduate student union in the country. When I arrived in Colorado as a tenure-track academic, I naturally wanted to know if I could somehow duplicate my positive experience with unions in my new state. I had a lot of trouble getting a definitive answer.
Colorado isn’t a right-to-work state. In fact, as I mentioned in my Academe article on faculty organizing in Colorado, “Organizing for Collective Bargaining in Colorado,” the state legislature recently passed a law that reinforces the right of public university faculty to organize. The problem is that our employers are not compelled to recognize us, so organizing seemed pointless, at least until recently. That’s why a lot of people (including me) were deeply disappointed when our recent efforts to get enabling legislation that would force our administrations to the table with organized faculty failed.
But what if that failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise? One of the things I remember from studying labor history back in Madison is that there was once a school of thought that believed that the landmark National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was the worst thing that ever happened to the labor movement because it led unions to rely upon laws do their organizing for them. Get a majority, this critique went, then organizing stops and inertia takes over.
For me, the most important moment of our campaign at CSU Pueblo came when one of our organizers explained to me that teachers in local districts like Denver and Pueblo face the same laws that we do, but they can bargain even without enabling legislation because something on the order of 80 or 90 percent of those teachers are union members. That’s why when the effort to get enabling legislation through the legislature failed, we just kept organizing.
Just last week, the president of our university came to a CSU Pueblo AAUP meeting and spent an hour and a half listening to faculty express a wide range grievances—everything from tenure and promotion standards to parking fees. Towards the end of the meeting, one of our more recent members, a senior professor who is very close to retirement, noted that when he first started to attend our meetings, there were maybe four to seven people in the room. Now he was looking at a room with thirty or forty highly engaged professors in it. He then suggested to the president that if he didn’t take the grievances that he was hearing seriously, soon enough he was going to have a real union on his hands. I don’t mean to split hairs and am so grateful for this colleague’s comments, but I still think they’re based on a faulty assumption. If our chapter isn’t a “real union,” how should we explain the president of the university spending an hour and a half listening to our grievances?
Collective bargaining in Colorado may take a while. Faculty unions in Colorado are already here.
Contributing editor Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University Pueblo.
