Bill would pave the way for more than 23,000 U of M staff and students to unionize

More than 23,000 University of Minnesota employees — including adjunct lecturers, medical residents and student workers — will have a clearer path to unionize under a bill moving through the Democratic-controlled Legislature.

While most workers form unions based on shared workplaces or similar job duties, state law explicitly circumscribes 13 possible bargaining units for University of Minnesota workers, including two sprawling groups that are impractical to organize, according to university workers pushing for the law change.

For example, one bargaining unit enshrined in the Public Employee Labor Relations Act groups together more than 5,500 staff across nearly 200 job categories — including over 1,000 instructors, five event planners, a hundred or so librarians and Athletic Director Mark Coyle (whose salary is $1.4 million).

Another unit includes more than 4,000 workers from many of the same departments, like student services, research and communications, according to an analysis of data obtained by university workers through a records request.

“In order to win a union, [we] would have to organize thousands and thousands of people in jobs that I had never even heard of across the five campuses,” said Tracey Blasenheim, a lecturer in political science and one of the leaders pushing for the law change with the group UMN Labor Rights Coalition.

Organizers call the current situation “gerrymandering,” referring to the name used in politics for drawing electoral districts for maximum partisan advantage. Whatever state legislators’ intent when they drew up the scheme in the 1980s, the effect is clear: The university’s union membership is far lower than other public institutions, including state colleges.

Thirty-one percent of the University of Minnesota’s employees are represented by a union, according to the university. (Student workers are not included in this total, as they are not considered public employees.) By contrast, 95% of faculty and staff are represented by unions across the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, which has more straightforward bargaining units.

“This is arguably the biggest piece of union-busting legislation on the books in the public sector,” Blasenheim said.

The bill (HF4508/SF4597) — authored by Rep. Sydney Jordan, DFL-Minneapolis, and Sen. Jen McEwen, DFL-Duluth — eliminates several of the bargaining units defined by state law that are not unionized. Those workers would then be able to unionize a bargaining unit according to the rules governing other public employees, which directs state labor regulators to consider job duties, geography and desires of the employees.

The bill would also make it easier for undergraduate students to form a union. Under current state law, undergraduate students who receive financial aid or participate in work study programs are not public employees, and therefore barred from unionizing.

“U of M workers should have the same rights to join common sense unions as everyone else,” Jordan said during a House committee hearing.

University of Minnesota Interim President Jeff Ettinger told lawmakers the university supports workers’ right to unionize but urged them to slow down before rewriting state statutes.

“The challenge with the proposed bill as it is written is, as well as the pace with which this bill seems to be going through the Legislature, is that it has the potential to lead to unnecessary complexity, conflict, litigation and administrative burden,” Ettinger told a House committee in March.

He acknowledged that some of the current units may be “unduly large and cumbersome,” but noted the bill doesn’t place limits on how small or numerous future bargaining units can be.

In 2017, the state law thwarted a yearslong organizing effort by faculty and academic staff, who tried to unionize under SEIU Local 284 even though they were split across two separate bargaining units. State law says professors have to be in one unit while academic staff like lecturers must be in a unit with the university’s accountants, IT staff, museum curators and golf pro.

The state Bureau of Mediation Services sided with the union and said the academic staff and professors could vote as one bargaining unit. But the university appealed the decision and the Minnesota Court of Appeals ruled that BMS did not have the authority to reassign lecturers and teaching specialists to the bargaining unit with other faculty, even though they largely do the same jobs.

Unionization is not assured if the law passes. There were faculty opponents to unionizing in the 2010s, and University of Minnesota graduate students voted against unionizing five times since 1974 before voting last year 2,487-70 in favor of joining the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America union.

Blasenheim, the political science lecturer, says he came around to the idea of unionizing after he earned his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota and saw his pay and benefits cut by roughly 40% to teach the same class he had taught as a graduate student.

He said lecturers earn about $6,000 per course, which can require as much as 30 hours of work per week even though it’s recorded as 13.5 hours for 13 weeks.

This semester he doesn’t have work at the university because they decided not to offer his class, and he says adjuncts can have their classes removed up to the first day of classes.

“It’s basically gig professor work,” Blasenheim said.

He said he believes a union could secure better pay and more stability for contract instructors like himself — on whom the university increasingly relies to teach students. It could also provide more academic freedom protections for adjunct instructors in contentious political times.

Last year, Hamline University declined to renew the contract of a professor after a student complained to the administration that the professor showed a 14th-century painting of the Prophet Mohammad in an art history class.

Ultimately, Blasenheim says forming a union is up to a majority of his colleagues. They just need a fair way to decide.