Santa Clara Faculty Fight to Unionize

Adjunct faculty and lecturers to vote on unionization

Non-tenure track faculty have been organizing to form a union for four years. Soon these faculty members will have the chance to vote on unionizing.  

The Adjunct Faculty and Lecturers Organizing Committee (AFLOC) asked the university to allow them to conduct an in-house vote on unionization after a court decision made unionizing through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) impossible. 

Unionizing would allow adjunct faculty and lecturers at Santa Clara to negotiate wages, benefits and working conditions with the university. 

Faculty members at Santa Clara report they have heard positive comments about unions from unionized faculty at schools including San Jose State University and Mills College.

“Everybody we talk to says it makes people better at their jobs,” said Andy Wolfe, a Lecturer in the Computer and Electrical Engineering Department. “It makes it easier for everybody to work as a team because everybody has to stand by their promises.”

University administration has instead chosen to endorse the model of collaborative governance currently in place for Santa Clara faculty, which includes existing University Policy Committees and groups such as the Faculty Senate. 

Maggie Levantovskaya, a lecturer in the English Department, doesn’t believe that shared governance gives non-tenure track faculty enough say in the decisions the university makes. 

“Shared governance should be collaborative governance. But if all we can do is make recommendations and it’s up to the administration whether or not to listen to those, that’s not shared governance,” said Levantovskaya. “That’s a very kind of weak advisory role... The faculty does not seem to have any way to hold the administration accountable.”

Levantovskaya also noted that shared governance and a faculty union can coexist, as seen in the existence of both a faculty union and shared governance at Georgetown University and San Jose State University. 

Levantovskaya is a member of AFLOC, which formed in 2017 to attempt to make their desired union a reality. 

Since the committee’s inception, the leaders have organized multiple demonstrations to raise awareness for what they believe are the benefits of unionization, urging the university to grant them an in-house vote. 

In Jan. 2019, AFLOC organized a protest outside of Santa Clara’s annual Golden Circle fundraiser, where students and faculty members raised awareness about the importance of a faculty union to university donors.

In June 2019, Commencement speaker Martin Sheen pleaded in his speech for the university to give the opportunity to let faculty vote. 

The most recent action that AFLOC has helped organize was a rally at the entrance of campus on April 9, where around 150 to 200 students, faculty, staff and elected officials attended, pleading the university to give faculty a free and fair election. 

A number of faculty members have expressed their worries about an unfair election due to several factors within the voting process.

Faculty at Santa Clara are required to go through the unionization process outside of the NLRB since Santa Clara is a religious institution. Therefore, both the administration and faculty organizers have to create and agree upon the unionization voting process. 

On Nov. 16, AFLOC and SEIU submitted a proposal to the administration that outlined the conduct for the election, which mirrored the NLRB election process. 

Later on Jan. 22, university administration responded to the submitted proposal with a revised draft that included new provisions, including required in-person voting on campus and signature verification, which some view as a form of voter suppression. 

The university hired the law firm Littler Mendelson P.C. to assist in the unionization process and help draft the proposal. 

According to the SF Gate, the law firm is notorious for union-busting and some labor lawyers call the law firm “Hitler, Mussolini and Fascist” because of its anti-union tradition. 

Acting President Lisa Kloppenberg said the university has worked with Littler Mendelson P.C. for decades and they’re making sure that the law firm is taking a cooperative approach.

“We are the clients, so it’s Father O’Brien and I that are making the calls on this, not Littler,” said Kloppenberg. “We’re telling them what to do… We are in charge of Littler, we’ve asked them to take a problem-solving and cooperative approach and they are.”

Although, members of AFLOC are suspicious of the practices that Littler Mendelson P.C. is using. 

“The agreement that we had put forth for the election was based really closely on existing election agreements,” said Levantovskaya. “When we met with this lawyer from Littler and asked him what the proposal that he put together was based on, he wouldn’t even tell us.”

Both university administration and AFLOC are wanting the vote on unionizing to take place before the academic year ends in June. 

Voting will take place sometime this quarter, although there is no specific date or time frame that it will take place. 

Two-thirds of non-tenure-track faculty will have to vote on unionization in order to reach quorum, and over half of them will have to vote “yes” on unionization in order for the union to be recognized.