Letter to the Editor at the MU Wire: Union asks MU to live our shared values

Featured image: Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) was educated by the Jesuits and led the Church to approach the major political and social questions of modern times from the perspectives of traditional Catholic teaching. His encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891) upheld the ideals of just wages and the right of workers to unionize.

Letter to the Editor of the MU Tribune: Union asks MU to live our shared values

On Tuesday, Oct. 22, two members of the steering committee of United Campus Workers of Wisconsin (UCW-WI) approached the Office of the Provost to invite the university to negotiate together to publicly announce a process to recognize the union to represent full-time, non-tenure track faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences. In advance of this communication between the union and the Office of the Provost, more than 65 percent of full-time, non-tenure track faculty in the college signed union authorization cards indicating their desire to stand together to collectively bargain their contracts with the university.

Instead of agreeing to negotiate with the union, on Friday, Oct. 25, university leadership chose to invoke the university’s legal right for a religious exemption from an NLRB election to recognize the collective bargaining unit, a legal right codified under the Trump administration. For comparison, on Monday, Oct. 28, SLU stipulated to an NLRB election to recognize a unit of graduate student workers on campus. Seemingly, SLU doesn’t feel it is Catholic, Jesuit intellectual life is threatened by a free and fair election. Indeed, neither SLU, Fordham, Loyola Chicago, Georgetown nor Santa Clara feel their religious freedom is threatened by collectively bargaining with faculty. Marquette may still follow the examples of these other Catholic, Jesuit universities and stipulate to a free and fair election administered by the NLRB or another third party. We ask university leadership to reconsider their choice and re-engage the union to negotiate together in good faith.

Non-tenure track faculty carry a more substantial teaching load than any other group of faculty on campus. They fill service roles in many departments. They advise students and direct academic programs. We love our students, we love our colleagues and we love our work and institution. Despite this, we possess almost none of the support or security of our tenure track faculty colleagues. And regarding wages, we make 30-50% less than similar non-tenure track faculty at unionized peer institutions. Even though some of us have been here for decades, most of us are hired on one-year contracts, and those few of us who possess multi-year contracts may be fired at will.

We are not trying to get rich.

We are not asking for lavish wages.

We are not asking for less work.

We are only asking for the fair wages and job security we deserve. This kind of support and stability will allow us to fully commit ourselves to our university, co-workers and students who we love.

University leadership’s flippant dismissal of participating faculty is another example of their disregard for campus workers. This administration has wantonly fired university staff in the middle of a global pandemic, wrecked shared governance on campus, and subjected department chairs to annual anti-union trainings. Now, it has chosen to respond to a good-faith invitation to negotiate with a union of campus workers by hiding behind the Catholic faith, a religious tradition whose support for unionization could not be more strident. As Pope Francis has said, “There is no union without workers, and there are no free workers without a union,” Or as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has said: “Catholic social teaching supports the right of workers to choose whether to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively, and to exercise these rights without reprisal…Workers, owners, employers and unions should work together to create decent jobs, build a more just economy and advance the common good.” From top to bottom, the Catholic Church respects and encourages the right of workers to organize and recognizes the vital social role played by unions.

We remain standing together asking in one voice for our right to organize and collectively bargain. As the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops said in 1986: “The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions. This is a specific application of the more general right to associate. In the words of Pope John Paul II, ‘The experience of history teaches that organizations of this type are an indispensable element of social life, especially in modern industrialized societies.’ Unions may also legitimately resort to strikes where this is the only available means to the justice owed to workers. No one may deny the right to organize without attacking human dignity itself.”

University leadership has dressed up a Trump-era legal exemption from national labor law in faux papal regalia, but we continue to believe deeply in good-faith collaboration; and so, we ask university leadership to correct its course and instead honor the compassionate core of the religious, intellectual tradition we represent as a university community. We ask the university to follow in the footsteps of our Catholic, Jesuit university peers including SLU, Fordham, Loyola Chicago, Georgetown and Santa Clara, who negotiate with faculty unions, clearly without sacrificing their Catholic, Jesuit identities or religious freedoms. We ask university leadership to open their hearts and minds to the ways unionization may strengthen the university’s Catholic, Jesuit identity and ministry, rather than remaining committed to the spurious idea that our Catholic, Jesuit identity and values preclude collective bargaining with faculty.

We ask the university to choose to live our shared values and recognize its workers’ desire to stand together to collectively bargain their contracts with the university.

This letter was written by the Steering Committee of UCW-WI, being composed of non-tenure track faculty, university staff, and graduate student workers at Marquette University.