Dive Brief:
- Adjunct professors at the San Francisco Art Institute have voted to unionize, 124 to 35.
- The union will be organized through Service Employees International Union, which now counts more than 20,000 unionized adjuncts nationwide.
- Besides the Art Institute, which has about 200 adjunct professors, SEIU has recently scored wins in campaigns to unionize adjuncts at Mills College in Oakland, CA — where a union was voted in on May 14 — and at Northeastern University in Boston, which voted to unionize on May 15.
Dive Insight:
The press release is telling in the emphasis it places on the perceived lack of respect for adjuncts at the San Francisco Art Institute, which almost seems more important than compensation issues. Adjuncts at the school are called “visiting faculty,” and with no job security, they “are essentially part-time temp workers,” according to Adjunct Action Bay Area. The union also took issue with the institute’s president, Charles Desmarais, praising his father, a teamsters union shop steward, while warning that a unionized faculty would be disruptive.