Goucher College Adjuncts Expect Union Victory As Organizing Spreads in Maryland

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17556/goucher_college_adjunct_union

BY BRUCE VAIL

Part-time faculty members at Maryland’s Goucher College say they are on the threshold of winning formal union representation, marking another step forward in an organizing campaign spread across multiple campuses in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., area.

If Goucher adjuncts win, their victory will be among several won last year by Gaithersburg, Maryland-based Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 500, which activists say is successfully harnessing the pent-up demand for labor reforms in the academic sector.


SEIU Local 500 now represents about 3,000 adjuncts in the Washington, D.C.-Baltimore area. (Goucher College)


The campaign at Goucher, a small liberal arts school in Towson, Maryland, is not quite finished, however, as lawyers for the college and Local 500 argue over challenged ballots in an unusually close election completed in early December. The tentative count in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-supervised election produced a tie, with 33 adjuncts voting in favor of the new Goucher Faculty Union and 33 against, according to Maureen Winter, one of the instructors who helped organize the group.

But that 33-33 count is misleading because the legal challenges against most pro-union votes are spurious, Winter contends, and there is every indication that the union will prevail when the NLRB makes a ruling on the challenged ballots in the coming weeks. Nine ballots—all of them pro-union votes—were challenged by the lawyers for Goucher, she explains, even though all nine of the voters were specifically named as eligible in a pre-election agreement between Goucher and the union.

FULL story at link.