Editorial: Chatham’s union vote should push Pitt

Pittsburgh is a union town.

This week, Chatham University joined other Pittsburgh universities in voting to unionize their faculty.

After organizing for over a year, Chatham faculty and administrators agreed to have an election beginning June 17, to vote on union representation. After ongoing disputes over the voting eligibility of full-time faculty due to their “managerial staff” status, the university will only include part-time faculty in the election. The United Steelworkers will be working with them throughout the process of unionizing.

Pittsburgh often earns praise for its top-tier universities, supposedly prosperous economy and livable conditions, but our city’s professors and students are missing from this picture.

As Pitt’s faculty enters the early stages of unionizing, Chatham’s push should propel our own efforts and successfully unite Pittsburgh’s universities in the fight for better work environments. Progress from Pitt’s own unionization efforts has been quiet since their launch last October — It’s time to change that and start making progress.

With faculty from Point Park University, Pitt and Robert Morris University all organizing for a union within the past few years, the trend demonstrates that our community is not immune to the unfair state of higher education.

The unionization group at Chatham reports that 67 percent of their faculty are adjunct faculty, making an average of $3,000 per three-credit course — about $11.74 per hour. According to Pitt’s 2015 Fact Book, 62 percent of faculty were non-tenured. The pay levels of Pitt’s adjunct faculty are not open to the public, but you can be confident none of them are making close to the millions Jamie Dixon and Paul Chryst made while they worked here.

Because their contracts face termination every semester, adjuncts have little job security or access to the health and retirement benefits that full-time faculty receive. This also impedes their ability for advancement in the workplace, making it harder to focus on their students.

As students, we should support and unite behind the professors who sacrifice to educate us in the face of dismal working conditions with little alternative. Our professors are the backbone of our education, and Pitt needs to be a university that truly values its employees.

But it’s been almost a year since Pitt’s union campaign began and we have yet to hear about any plans for a faculty vote. The sooner our faculty votes for a union, the quicker we can improve their working conditions. If they vote against it, so be it — that means we can rededicate our efforts towards things the community actually wants. Either way, it’s time to start seeing signs of life in this movement as the new academic year approaches.

Chatham’s vote for unionization should reignite the debate surrounding how Pittsburgh’s universities treat their faculty and give some needed momentum to a union push that has yet to show anything other than that it exists.

Universities must start investing in their professors and students again, and a union would help to make that happen.

But to win the fight, we need to show one is still alive.