Contract faculty at New York University won a historic victory on Wednesday when an overwhelming majority voted to form a union affiliated with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 7902. The union, known as Contract Faculty United (CFU-UAW), is now the largest union for full-time, non-tenured professors at any private university in the United States, according to union organizers.
In the union representation election, 87% of voters cast their ballots in favor of authorizing CFU-UAW to act as their bargaining representative. Of the 626 votes cast, 553 voted in favor, with 72 opposed (one blank ballot was also cast). Two-thirds of the approximately 950 faculty members in the bargaining unit participated in the election. The election was administered by the American Arbitration Association (AAA). Voting took place on February 27th and 28th, with polling locations on NYU’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses.
Faculty members, organizers from the UAW, and representatives from the university administration gathered in a fluorescent-lit event room overlooking Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, on a drizzly Wednesday night to observe the counting of the votes. The group waited in nervous anticipation as representatives from the AAA unloaded two boxes full of ballots, printed on blue and green copy paper, and began counting. As the results were read aloud, the union’s supporters erupted in a flurry of applause, hugs and handshakes.
“I’m over the moon,” said Elisabeth Fay, a professor in the Expository Writing program, after the election results were announced. “We knew that a majority of contract faculty have wanted a union for a really long time. We knew that that has only become more true as time has gone on … We knew that we’ve always been headed in the right direction. But it’s really nice to see it confirmed, and that it was important to people, and that people turned out to vote, and that they overwhelmingly voted ‘yes.’”
“I’m thrilled,” said David Markus, a professor in the Expository Writing program, “I think that we had a good sense that we had the numbers, but this definitely exceeded my expectations.”
Securing union representation empowers contract faculty as they prepare for negotiations over terms and conditions of their employment. CFU-UAW can now engage in collective bargaining with the university, in which faculty hope to win a contract that will afford them fairer pay, more stable working arrangements, and better job security. “I’ve been here 16 years, and I love my job, I love NYU,” said Matthew Rohrer, a professor in the Creative Writing program. “But having the union just means that we’ll be able to come to the table with them, and that there won’t be unilateral decisions.”
Wednesday’s victory is the culmination of years of organizing work by CFU-UAW, which was started by faculty at the College of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
CFU-UAW is a part of a wave of unionization at colleges and universities across the United States. According to a study published last year, 126 faculty collective bargaining units – involving more than 40,000 faculty members – won recognition between 2013 and 2021. While labor activism slowed across workplaces, including on campus, during the pandemic, the organizing trend resumed in 2022 and 2023. Since the start of this year, faculty at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and Wellesley College, and graduate student workers and postdoctoral scholars at several schools, have won union representation elections.
In contrast to the preceding 40 years, where new unionization was largely relegated to public universities, much of the growth in new bargaining units formed in the past decade has been driven by faculty at private institutions. For decades, private faculty were barred from unionizing by the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University. In that decision, decided by a 5-4 majority, the court found that full-time faculty at private universities were considered managers because faculty members were involved in university governance decisions, for example, about course offerings, pay and benefits, and grading policies. As managers, faculty were excluded from the collective bargaining rights afforded to workers under the National Labor Relations Act.
Washington Square Park, at the heart of NYU's Greenwich Village campus. (Photo by Doc Searls, CC BY 2.0 DEED)
As universities have expanded the number of faculty in non-tenured track positions, some are calling the relevance of the Yeshiva decision into question. “Yeshiva was issued at a time when there was still a majority of faculty who were on the tenure track,” says William Herbert, the Executive Director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College. “In 1969, basically 70% of all faculty were on the tenure track, and only 30% were non-tenure track. That has been reversed over a long period of time because of restructuring by institutions.” This restructuring of faculty roles has resulted in a two-tiered system, where many non-tenured track faculty have no meaningful role in university governance. “As a result, the Yeshiva decision is no longer relevant to the majority – 70% – of faculty who are in the private sector,” Herbert says.
The National Labor Relations Board has also narrowed the application of the Yeshiva precedent, most notably in its 2014 ruling in a case brought by Pacific Lutheran University. The university administration sought to block its full-time faculty from winning union representation on the grounds that faculty positions were inherently managerial roles under the Yeshiva precedent. The Board rejected the university’s claim, ruling instead that faculty members must be proven to exercise governance authority in practice, regardless of their job title, to be considered managerial. In other words, the NLRB re-interpreted the Yeshiva precedent, making it easier for faculty to pursue union representation.
Despite the narrower application of the Yeshiva precedent, universities have continued to use the 1980 ruling to challenge faculty unions. In 2019, the University of Southern California sought to defeat a union campaign by non-tenured faculty in the Roski School of Art and Design by arguing that faculty in these positions exercised sufficient governance authority to be considered managerial under the rules established by the Board in the Pacific Lutheran case. A federal appeals court sided with the administration, ordering the NLRB to reconsider an earlier ruling where it sided with the faculty. The faculty group later withdrew its representation petition, ending the unionization campaign.
On January 3, 2024, representatives of CFU-UAW signed an agreement with the university to hold a fair and neutral union representation election. (Photo courtesy of CFU-UAW)
Organizers in the union drive at NYU sidestepped this legal uncertainty by agreeing with the university on a process to verify majority support for the union via the AAA-administered election, rather than petitioning for an election administered by the NLRB. Jacob Remes, a professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, says that CFU-UAW negotiated for ten months, mostly over which roles should be considered managerial and which should not, based on the work that faculty members actually perform rather than their titles alone. The two parties eventually agreed to a bargaining unit that includes contract faculty who take on service work for the university in addition to their teaching responsibilities, while excluding those in primarily managerial or administrative roles.
Remes sees this voluntary recognition strategy as a replicable model that unionization campaigns at other private universities could follow, should they succeed in getting the administration to the negotiating table. He also hopes that CFU-UAW’s victory at NYU, combined with the recent successes by student workers and faculty at other universities, will add momentum to the wave of organizing across academic institutions. “My hope for our union is that we really are showing the way, and that other people are going to look at us and say, ‘Oh, yeah, we can do that, too.”
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