University administration responded to the BGSU-Faculty Association’s petition for a vote for a union by filing a case of its own.
The case, filed with the State Employment Relations Board Feb. 3, disputed the appropriateness of the collective bargaining action proposed by the FA, citing factors such as the desire of employees, wages and hours, working conditions of the employees and the effect of over-fragmentation.
General Counsel Sean Fitzgerald said the filing is just a disagreement about views and is meant to spark discussion throughout campus.
“This is an important issue for the University,” Fitzgerald said. “There can be different opinions. There should be different opinions. We’re a university.”
Fitzgerald said the recent act is part of the process provided by the law.
“We’re following the law,” he said. “Reasonable minds can disagree about this issue and especially at a university, those issues should be debated by everybody, not just a handful.”
The filing stated, “while a bargaining unit consisting of tenured and tenure-track faculty may be appropriate, combining such a unit with non-tenure-track faculty is inappropriate.”
“All we’ve done is triggered a debate … if there has to be a faculty union, what should that union look like, who should be covered by this contract?” Fitzgerald said.
Ohio law does not permit part-time faculty to be included in collective bargaining. The remaining full-time faculty is divided by tenure track — the associate, assistant and full professors — and the non-tenure track instructors and lecturers.
The FA believes all faculty members should be equal, and therefore a part of the potential union, said FA President David Jackson.
“It’s not as if we’re putting plumbers and piano tuners in the same union,” he said. “We think it’s a tactic designed more to delay things, because I don’t think the argument holds any water that there are such great differences between the two groups of faculty.”
Geoffrey Howes, FA vice president, said the FA regards all faculty members equally as colleagues.
“I don’t know whether the purpose is to simply slow us down or that they really want to divide the faculty into tenure track and non-tenure track faculty,” Howes said. “I think we’ve had this debate already among the faculty. We heard clearly from NTTF [non-tenure track faculty] who were interested that they wanted to be part of the unit.”
Jackson said the recent actions by administration are not surprising, as similar scenarios have occurred at other Ohio Universities during the unionization process.
“It’s really unfortunate that it’s sort of the standard playbook kind of thing to do rather than taking the circumstances of our institution,” he said.
