Dive Brief:
- Adjunct faculty members have voted down a proposed union at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN, by a wide margin: 136 to 84.
- The vote is a setback for the Service Employees International Union’s efforts to organize adjuncts across the country with its Adjunct Action program.
- In the weeks before the vote, the university's president, Julie Sullivan, held campus meetings appealing to adjuncts to reject the union, the Star Tribune reported.
Dive Insight:
This is a rare defeat for the adjunct unionization effort. One sign before the vote that the union might be headed for defeat: Some St. Thomas adjuncts recently had urged union organizers to delay or cancel the vote to give university administrators more time to address their concerns. Sullivan had depicted union contracts as “rigid and inflexible” and said it was better to solve problems through collaboration rather than union contracts. Plus, she said, the union would infringe on the university’s “unique mission” as a Catholic institution. While St. Thomas has more than 600 adjunct instructors and 466 full-time or tenure-track professors, only the 300 adjunct instructors who teach undergrad students voted on the proposed union.