working to try and find some solutions, to rectify some of
the holes in the [UO] Constitution, to try and deal with the
trends in employment relationships and salary. So this was
a real look at how power works in the university system.
We realized we didn’t even have a tug on the reins.”
“I think we were all still getting to know him a little
bit,” says Deborah Olson, an instructor in special education.
“But everybody felt he was fighting for a vision for the
university. He just stuck his neck out one too many times.”
Coincidence or not, the card check drive finally began
less than two months after the Lariviere’s contract
termination, on Jan. 9 of this year, with the School of Law
— firmly anti-union — exempted from the vote. The union
had 90 days from getting the first signature to filing for
certification. On March 13 it sent 1,837 signed union cards
to the state Employment Relations Board. As the board
was counting the votes, it came out that the administration
had hired anti-union lawyers to try and squash the union
effort, but by that time it was a fait accompli. On April 27,
the union was formally certified. The work to maintain a
stable union is not nearly done. If the faculty activists are
not able to hammer out a proposal soon, the entire effort
could fall apart. The AAUP just opened a Pacific Northwest
office in Olympia, Wash., in large part to have someone on
the ground to support the newborn UO union.
D
ivisions remain among tenured professors, some
of whom feel that with a union membership
disproportionately weighted with adjuncts (at the
time of certification, only 521 of the 1,832 union
members were tenure-track faculty) the specific
concerns of tenured faculty will not be adequately
promoted. Art history professor Jeff Hurwit, who voiced
his anti-union sentiment at meetings prior to certification,
is blunt:
“Somebody who teaches a yoga class in the fall will have
an equal vote to a tenured full professor who teaches two
classes and a scientist who might bring in millions of dollars
from outside grants,” he says. “That strikes me as odd.”
students’ tuition money on a raft of pet projects incidental
to our mission.”
Howard Bunsis, AAUP’s collective bargaining chair,
recently did an analysis of the UO’s financial condition
and would agree.
“Despite what you hear, they have strong reserves and
a strong annual operating cash flow,” he says. The only
thing wrong with UO financial situation is their priorities.
They spend too much on administration and not enough on
the core academic mission.”
G ORDON
L AFER
I
Union pushers, as might be expected, have less a
Beatles-breakup, more a Peter-Paul-and-Mary-linking-
arms view of the prospects of an inclusive union.
“I work with non-tenure-track people all the time,”
Leubke says, “and they are cognizant of the needs of the
tenure faculty. I know our place in the university differs
from theirs and vice versa, but it doesn’t necessarily follow
that because interests are diverse, they are antagonistic.”
For economics professor Bill Harbaugh, the success of
the union drive was an outgrowth of a pattern of questionable
spending practices by the administration and a necessary
corrective to what has been a top-down power structure.
“In theory our administrators are supposed to work
with us to make this a good university,” he says. “But in
practice they don’t listen, and they’ve set it up so that we
can’t have anything effective to say. The university still
does not have a plausible plan for how it’s going to spend
its money between undergrad education, research and
graduate education. The administration has failed in its
responsibility to develop a plan for the university’s future
and a budget for the future. They’ve been spending
t’s hard to hear the word union without your thoughts
going to … STRIKE! and a faculty strike could
indeed have a devastating effect on the university. In
1990, the faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia
walked out for 29 days, a time during which more
than 1,800 students withdrew from the university. While
union activists scoff at the possibility, even if a no-strike
clause is included in the looming agreement, it is really a
misnomer — if the union decided the administration
wasn’t honoring the agreement, it would be within their
rights to walk out. The prospect of a strike is the big gun
unions have in establishing leverage.
“I’m concerned that should there not be a meeting of
the minds between the administration and the union, the
only recourse will be a strike, and that will harm our stu-
dents,” Hurwit says.
Marie Vitulli, who, along with Lafer, started the
movement, dropped out for health reasons during the
Ziemer phase and never re-entered the fray. She observed
the union’s certification from the outside but has never lost
her emotional investment in the process.
“I really hope that when the contract is negotiated
positive changes will happen,” she says. “A lot of things
have been done so unevenly and so secretly for so long; it
would be really nice if that changes.”
As this story went to press, union committees were still
working on their first proposal to present to the UO adminis-
tration, which did not respond to requests for comment. ■
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