The Washington Education Association (WEA) and the Washington Federation of Teachers (WFT), who both helped write the bill, were obviously for it. Administrators at the University of Washington gave a predictably anti-labor answer: They flatly opposed collective bargaining rights for faculty members.
It was the reaction of UW's faculty senate -- the faculty's representative body -- that was bewildering. UW's faculty senate has long maintained that it's open to the idea of gaining collective bargaining rights. A union may be good for academia, faculty members have reasoned, since issues like salaries and tenure can be controversial topics that put them at odds with their administration.
But, faced with a real bill that would actually grant faculty members those very rights, the faculty senate balked. After a heated meeting, the organization, unable to pick sides, chose to do nothing. Instead of getting involved in the process, the group sat on the sidelines.
"They had 15, 16 days [to respond to this bill], which in legislative days is like eons," says State Senator Darlene Fairley (D-Shoreline), who sponsored the bill. "I told their legislative representative, 'You know, whole agencies are created and destroyed around here in that time.' She said, 'I know that, but not to these professors.' Fairley declared the bill dead in committee last week.
The aftermath of the failed bill underscores tensions between the cautious faculty senate and disappointed faculty members who are eager to gain more rights either through unionization or the ability to threaten unionization.
Faculty senate members say they had two main problems with the proposed legislation. First, Lea Vaughn, a law professor who specializes in labor legislation and spent four hours reading and analyzing the bill, concluded that it might do more harm than good.
"That statute has a pile of problems," Vaughn says. For one, its language was based on boilerplate verbiage from the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. As a result, Vaughn believes that the bill works on outdated principles concerning management-worker relations. The bill establishes an automatically adversarial relationship between the faculty and the university administration. Vaughn would rather see a more cooperative relationship encouraged.
Vaughn says the bill was also far too broad in scope. She and others cite pro-faculty, pro-labor bills in other states. While the bill was a mere 11 pages long, one California proposal ran as long as 70 pages. The bill in the Washington state legislature didn't specify a variety of things, including the kind of collective bargaining units that could be created. (Would grad students be included? How about librarians?) The bill also didn't prevent a tough administration from locking out a new faculty union.
The second complaint had less to do with the fundamentals of the bill than with who sponsored it. Faculty senate members were incensed that they had not been consulted on legislation that would affect them so directly. They had heard rumors of the bill in early December, but they weren't able to see it until January. When they finally got it, there was a sense of panic in the air that the faculty senate would be stuck with bad legislation.
"I don't know why it was kept from us," says Faculty Senate Chair Gerry Philipsen. "It was a cause of great concern to me that something was kept from us." On his own, Philipsen sent a letter to Fairley, and to the Washington Federation of Teachers. He demanded that the bill be withdrawn immediately. "We have no affiliation with the WFT or the WEA, and when our faculty decides it wishes to explore [union-]enabling legislation, we will be writing in collaboration with our colleagues at the other four-year institutions," he wrote. Philipsen threatened to file a complaint with the legislative ethics board if Fairley proceeded with her bill.
But Philipsen wasn't the only faculty member from the UW who wanted to weigh in on the topic. Senator Fairley says she's received hundreds of e-mails from outraged professors -- most critical of the faculty senate for not supporting the bill.
Mostly, UW faculty members charge their representative body with ineptitude. The organization just couldn't keep up with fast-moving issues in Olympia.
"I would really like that bill to be approved, amended and passed," said Galya Diment, a senate faculty member and a professor of Slavic languages and literature. "We're putting ourselves in a situation where we don't have any choices."
Diment is especially critical of Philipsen. He went too far in his letter to Fairley, she says. "The chair wanted to pre-empt the discussions. He kept saying that he had the authority to do so as the chair of the faculty senate, and that it was well within the spirit of the resolution that was passed."
And not all UW labor experts agree with Vaughn's pessimistic interpretation of the bill. Margaret Levi, director of the Center for Labor Studies, would have welcomed the bill's passage. "It's really innocuous language," she says. "It's simply enabling us to form collective bargaining units." Furthermore, because it does not mandate which collective bargaining units have to be formed, those who form faculty and staff unions are free to decide who joins and who doesn't, Levi says.
Levi and other faculty members supported taking their chances with the legislation that was being proposed. If this bill had passed, it would have opened the door for possible unionization. If problems with the new law appeared, amendments could have been added later.
That idea, however, was drowned out in the faculty senate. "The faculty senate is not the only voice of the faculty," Levi asserts. "It is often an incoherent voice. It allows a lot of different viewpoints and allows people to discuss them, but it doesn't always come to a conclusion." A local chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is also on campus. One UW professor representing the AAUP testified in front of Fairley's committee, in support of the bill.
For the next legislative session, things at the UW may be completely different. New faculty senate elections take place every year. "It's the sort of election that people don't take seriously," Levi says. With the collective bargaining issue striking such a powerful chord, faculty members may vote a lot more carefully for their representatives next time.
