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Tenure-track and tenured faculty members and librarians at Saint Martin’s University voted to form a union affiliated with Service Employees International Union, they announced Friday. The new union is calling on administrators to honor the vote by engaging in collective bargaining with it. That’s despite previous administrative opposition to a non-tenure-track faculty union on campus on the grounds that as a religious institution, Saint Martin’s is not bound to National Labor Relations Board decisions. That board voted in 2014 to allow contingent faculty members at Pacific Lutheran University to form a union because they did not perform specific religious functions.
The newest Saint Martin’s vote is complicated by a separate, longstanding legal precedent against tenure-track faculty unions at private institutions, because these professors are managers. A local NLRB office ruled against a tenure-track faculty union at Carroll College in 2016 on the those grounds. University officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Roy Heynderickx, university president, said last month in response to a faculty walkout over union issues that the campus's Board of Trustees and Saint Martin’s Abbey have "reaffirmed their belief that a direct working relationship between faculty and administration best serves the educational mission of the university," according to The Olympian.
