Organizing the Ivory Tower

Methodology

Data for this article are drawn from a larger project on the politics of faculty associations in Ontario universities. Here we closely examine the unionization of the faculty association at Brock University, a primarily undergraduate publicly funded university in Ontario. We draw on in-depth, qualitative interviews with eight key informants who were at the university during the certification drive. Some participants were active in the faculty association at the time, while others played a role in the move to oppose unionization. Our key informants vary in rank and department. Six informants are men and two are women. One participant is retired while the other seven are active faculty at the university.

In addition to interviews, we analyzed minutes of faculty association meetings, association newsletters, and press releases concerning certification. We also studied individual correspondence between the association and members.

Participants were asked about their involvement in the faculty association over the years and general questions concerning the role of faculty associations in the workplace and unionization more generally. They were also asked to provide details of the certification campaign. Interviews were transcribed and common themes were identified. In addition to information about the certification drive at Brock, the interviews revealed that our interviewees were highly invested and involved in the institution.

Collegiality and Professionalism

Collegiality is often understood as a defining characteristic of universities (Bess 1988; Brown 2003; Gappa, Austin, and Trice 2007; Rastin 2000). A classic approach to the concept of collegiality is Pascale’s (1990, 12) description as “evok[ing] images of warm, supportive relationships and teamwork.” We see the continuing allure of a collegial environment as junior faculty in the United States, for example, identify collegiality as more important for their job satisfaction than their salaries or workload or institutional policies (Fogg 2006; Trower and Gallagher 2008). Furthermore, Manger and Eikeland (1990) identify weak collegiality as one of the primary factors of a faculty member’s decision to leave a university; those who feel a sense of collegiality are more likely to remain at their institutions (Gappa, Austin, and Trice 2007).

A key element of collegiality is decentralization, with a wide participation of university community members in decision-making (Hardy 1996). Union supporters often argue that unionization can actually enhance collegiality by serving to facilitate communication between key groups (DeCew 2003). However, few people in the university setting are given any guidance on the best ways for creating and sustaining collegiality (Hardy 1996). Furthermore, attention to creating and sustaining collegiality is even less of a priority in institutions that are increasingly being managed along new managerialist lines (Hardy 1996). Countering this claim is Hatfield’s (2006) observation that some universities are moving to add an evaluation of collegiality to tenure and promotion decisions.

Collegiality is also a discourse of power and can be used to mobilize power without conflict (Hardy 1996; Rastin 2000). Rastin (2000) argued in her analysis of the Queen’s University unionization drive that collegiality held strong currency that the faculty association was able to draw on to achieve certification. We echo this argument in our analysis of the Brock University certification drive.

Professionalism is another discourse that shaped the certification drive at Brock University. Academics have long been identified as professionals (Cheng 2009). An oft cited definition of a profession is provided by Webb and Webb (1917, 4) who state that a profession is “a vocation founded upon specialised educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain.” The historical rise of the concept of the professions occurred in the mid-1800s (Cheng 2009; Freidson 2001; Williams 2008). Professions can also be defined as jobs with “specialised training and education, certification based on the testing of competences and the provision of an altruistic service” (Cheng 2009, 194). Many approaches to the concept include some aspect of occupational control and autonomy as well as moral requirements of trust and integrity (Aronowitz 2003; Evetts 2006; Goldey et al. 2010; Williams 2008).

Related to the construction of academics as professionals is the deployment of the term professionalism. Professionalism can be understood as an “ideology of expertise and service” (Cheng 2009, 194). In a British study on the impact of the audit culture on academics, faculty actively used professionalism as a discourse to shield themselves from perceived external surveillance; they argued that as professionals, they should be able to assess themselves and not be subject to evaluation and scrutiny from those outside of their fields (Cheng 2009).

University administrators, in their efforts to oppose unionization, have long drawn upon discourses of both collegiality and professionalism (Bender and Kinkela 2001; Devinatz 2001; Julius 2011; Nelson 2010). Unions are positioned as having no relevance for a class of professional workers such as academics. At New York University, administrators launched an antiunion campaign with a simple but strong message of “unions and academics do not mix” (Bender and Kinkela 2001, 10).

Drawing on commonsense notions of professionals and what is means to be a professional, faculty members are told that they have little in common with blue-collar workers and therefore do not need unionization to protect their interests (Bender and Kinkela 2001). Many academics agree with such a characterization (DeCew 2003; Devinatz 2003; Goldey et al. 2010). Research in the United States indicates that professional workers are often at odds with collective action, especially action that utilizes “adversarial tactics” (Badigannavar and Kelly 2005, 519). Administrators tell academics that “unions are anti-intellectual” (Westheimer 2002, 11) and that they “threaten the foundation of academic exchange” (Bender and Kinkela 2001, 9). Further, some antiunion campaigns successfully convince faculty members that unionization will undermine collegial governance and that relations on campus will become adversarial (Devinatz 2001; Julius 2011; Nelson 2010); administrators position the university as being “above and beyond the hurly-burly of class relations without the hierarchy of the industrial shop floor” (Bender and Kinkela 2001, 9).

We argue that the Brock University Faculty Association successfully used both the concepts of collegiality and professionalism to counter antiunion sentiment.

Brock University and the Trajectory of Union Certification in Ontario Universities

Brock University is a primarily undergraduate public university located in the Niagara Region of Southern Ontario. The University was established in 1964 as part of a massive expansion of postsecondary education in Canada. A year later, faculty members created the Faculty Association at Brock University, later renamed the Brock University Faculty Association (BUFA), for the “purpose of advancing teaching, scholarship and research in the University and of maintaining and improving the standards and welfare of the teaching and research staff” (BUFA n.d.-b, 1). Membership in the association was strictly voluntary, and members paid a token amount in dues. Soon after, the association affiliated to the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), the umbrella group of both union and nonunion faculty associations across Canada (BUFA n.d.-b, 1).

By the mid-1970s, the period of university expansion in Ontario that saw the creation of Brock University was replaced by a period of contraction, prompting a number of faculty associations across both the province and the country to unionize in an effort to better protect the interests of faculty members (Axelrod 2008; Rastin 2000). ¹ Amid the flurry of certification drives across the province, a Brock English professor, Angus Somerville, outlined the advantages and disadvantages of unionization in higher education in the October 1976 edition of the association’s newsletter. However, Brock faculty opted not to pursue certification at that time, preferring instead to watch how collective bargaining would play out in the postsecondary sector, essentially adopting a wait and see approach.

There was a further contraction of government support for post-secondary education in the 1980s, prompting universities to pursue partnerships and fundraising initiatives with the corporate sector in an effort to offset rising costs (Axelrod 2008; Rastin 2000). Amid legislated restrictions on labor union rights and freedoms, a number of additional faculty associations in Ontario chose to pursue certification (Rastin 2000). ²

First Attempt at Certification

Impressed by the workplace gains being made by unionized faculty associations across the province, in 1983 a group of faculty members at Brock pushed for the faculty association to consider certification. The executive committee of the faculty association, generally supportive of the idea, organized a general membership meeting to consider the question. Our interviews and analysis of documents reveal that in advance of the meeting, a number of antiunion faculty members put together a “Collegiality Committee” designed to organize opposition to certification at the meeting (Interviews 2, 4, 5). The committee, which adopted the name the “Collegiality Committee” to reinforce the idea that unionization was incompatible with the university’s collegial governance structures, recruited well-known and well-respected full professors from across the university to oppose the move towards certification. The committee used a combination of rhetorical and technical arguments to make its case against unionization. On the rhetorical side, the committee argued that certification would make the university more adversarial and the work process more restrictive and mechanistic. Similar to the actions of antiunion activists at other universities, unions were cast as institutions of the industrial working class—they had no place in the ivory tower (DeCew 2003; Devinatz 2003). On the technical side, the committee argued that the faculty association already acted as a de facto union, representing the interests of faculty members both academically and materially. ³

While the university administration and the faculty did not always agree, opponents of unionization reasoned that the state of the employment relationship did not warrant talk of union certification. Even with a union, they argued, the only way to force the university to cave in to faculty demands would be through a strike; an action the Collegiality committee argued was incompatible with the professional and collegial nature of the university (Interview 4).

Proponents of certification also made their pitch, arguing that unionization would improve the working lives of academics. However, in the end, the arguments of the Collegiality committee won out, with nearly two-thirds of faculty members present at the general membership meeting voting against launching a certification campaign (Interviews 4, 5). The faculty association’s unionization drive was effectively stillborn.

That said, the failed union drive alerted the senior administration to growing discontent among the faculty. In response, the university negotiated with BUFA an Agreement on Terms and Conditions of Employment in 1987. The special plan agreement, as it was known, was a quasi-legally binding agreement that outlined the terms and conditions of work. The agreement as a whole was renegotiated every few years, whereas the salary settlement was negotiated annually, without any recourse to binding arbitration (Interviews 1, 5).

The special plan agreement, implemented in the wake of the association’s failed attempt at certification, acted as a form of union substitution. On the surface, some faculty members reasoned, the special plan agreement gave faculty the best of both worlds, namely, the security of a negotiated contract without the risk of having to go on strike or the burden of having to pay substantial union dues or levies to build a strike fund (Interview 1). However, as faculty soon discovered, the special plan agreement had severe limitations. Because of its quasi-legal status, the university routinely treated the agreement as quasi-binding, especially around issues of consultation. The university also steadfastly refused to allow the terms and conditions of work of professional librarians to be covered by the special plan agreement. What the agreement lacked was a strong enforcement mechanism to resolve disputes. Notably, while the association had the right under the agreement to refer matters to arbitration, this route was impractical given the relatively high cost of arbitrating disputes and the association’s small annual budget (Interview 2). Without the theoretical threat of a strike, the association could not effectively pressure the administration into ceding to faculty demands (Interview 2).

Dissatisfaction with the special plan agreement was highest among members of the BUFA executive. They understood, better than the average faculty member, the limits of the special plan agreement, especially in situations where the faculty association and the administration experienced sharp and entrenched disagreements. For several years before certification, the executive of BUFA was on record as officially supporting unionization, but leaders of the association were very cognizant of the fact that a previous attempt at certification had failed and talk of unionization was very divisive. As a result, the group was content to wait for the favorable conditions that would allow for a successful organizing drive (Interview 3).

Second Attempt at Certification

The macro-political provincial context unquestionably helped to foster faculty discontent. University faculty had just endured the Social Contract ⁴ and were now faced with further proposed cuts to postsecondary education by the new, and decidedly antiunion, Progressive Conservative government of Mike Harris, elected in June 1995 (Patrias and Savage 2012, 114). Professor Terry Carroll, a political scientist and editor of the BUFA newsletter, wrote in November 1995, “Relations between university administrations and their faculty members and librarians have been becoming increasingly conflictual as, at a number of universities, administrators have used the real challenges created by cut-backs in funding as a pretext for unprecedented attacks on fundamental rights of faculty members” (Carroll 1995a, 5).

During this period, the BUFA executive started holding a series of special meetings to talk about issues affecting members. The meetings allowed the association to recruit supporters from individual departments, agitate members against the administration, and generally push the idea that certification could help restore both collegial decision-making and professionalism in labor-management relations (Interview 3).

In the spring of 1996, the stars aligned perfectly for the prounion BUFA executive. While the provincial government was busy announcing massive funding cuts to postsecondary education, the dean of social sciences decided to unilaterally implement a new ranking system for merit increases for faculty members (Interviews 1, 2, 3, 6, 7). The new system would punish faculty members who were not publishing “enough” (as determined by the dean of social sciences) with additional teaching responsibilities. As documented in other research on faculty unionization, there is often a hot-button issue that acts as a catalyst for the certification campaign (Holsinger 2008). An act of “administrative malfeasance” (Goldey et al. 2010) at Brock was clearly the catalyst for the 1996 union drive. This followed the trend of earlier unionization drives at other Ontario universities in the 1970s that were sparked by workplace issues as opposed to demands for higher salaries (Martinello 2009)—a trend echoed by research on faculty union drives in the United States (Hedrick et al. 2011).

In the March 1996 issue of the BUFA Forum, editor Terry Carroll blasted the dean of social sciences’ workload proposal as “unjust, unreasonable, and contrary to the [Special Plan] Agreement” (Carroll 1996b, 3). Carroll went on to complain that the criteria that made up the basis for the dean’s performance reviews was “indefensible in its crudeness” (1996b, 3) and that the dean’s actions served only to “humiliate and infuriate” faculty members (1996b, 3).

On March 13, 1996, BUFA held a special general meeting of the association’s membership to discuss the action of the dean of social sciences. At that meeting, the association adopted two motions. The first motion was to find “the proposal from the Dean of Social Sciences regarding ‘Review of Teaching and Research Activities’ unreasonable” and in violation of terms of the special plan agreement (Good 1996c, 4). The second motion authorized the executive of the association to “appoint an ad hoc committee to canvass the membership for support for certification” (Good 1996c, 5).

The ad hoc committee on certification wasted no time canvassing faculty members by sending out a paper ballot to each member asking them to indicate support or nonsupport for certification and to mail the ballot back to the association using the university’s interoffice mail system. Seventy-eight percent of faculty members responded, with 61 percent indicating support for certification. A majority of both BUFA members and non-BUFA members indicated support for unionization, prompting the executive and the ad hoc committee to formally initiate a certification campaign. Research on the unionization campaign at the University of Vermont found that such testing of support for certification before the signing of cards was important to the success of the overall drive, as was the early involvement of many potential members in the campaign (Holsinger 2008).

The formal-legal process of union certification in Ontario is governed by the province’s Labour Relations Act. Because Ontario’s long-standing system of card-based union certification was repealed by the Harris government in 1995, BUFA was forced to organize under the new mandatory vote system, which required the association to sign at least 40 percent of the proposed bargaining unit on union cards in order to trigger a certification election under the supervision of the Ontario Labour Relations Board. Certification is achieved when 50 percent plus one of voters cast ballots in favor of unionization.

BUFA’s ad hoc certification committee, headed by psychology professor Jack Adams-Webber, identified one representative in each academic unit in the University to act as a liaison. According to one interviewee, “the key to the whole campaign was to get a really good canvasser who had the respect of their colleagues and were really committed” (Interview 5). Departmental canvassers targeted first and foremost the 70 percent of faculty members who were already dues-paying members of the association, and eventually met one-on-one with all members of the prospective bargaining unit about card-signing, taking care not to reinforce the negative stereotypes associated with unionization. In the words of one member of the organizing committee, the association’s strategy was “don’t rock the boat” (Interview 2). This idea was reinforced by the certification committee’s conscious decision not to involve students, other employee groups, politicians, or the media in a prounion campaign against the university’s administration. As research on the successful certification of professional workers shows, the certification committee was interested in a campaign of “political socialization” while avoiding adversarial tactics (Badigannavar and Kelly 2005, 519; Devinatz 2003).

While canvassers were busy meeting with members individually, the BUFA executive also used the association’s newsletter to promote the case for certification. Professor Terry Carroll, a strong proponent of certification, made the case for unionization in the March/April issue of the association’s newsletter. Here we see the careful use of the discourse of collegiality to counter the earlier message of the Collegiality committee that argued against unionization:

When we last considered this question in the early 1980s, I was opposed to certification because I believed that we had something even better. That was collegiality. And I was afraid that the greater formality of the relationship between a certified association of faculty members and librarians and the administration might reduce collegiality.

I now believe that I was wrong in thinking this . . . whether decisions are made collegially depends on the good will of the people involved, not on the legal character of their relationship. . . . I have a strong impression that, above the level of departments/programmes, decision making at Brock has become considerably less collegial over the last several years. This varies by Faculty, and the change has been greatest in my own Faculty (Social Sciences), but it does seem to be generally true across the University.

This development has obviously not had anything to do with the legalities of faculty/administration relationships. I’m not certain why this happened. In part, it may be that some of our academic administrators have come increasingly to think that their role is to “manage” the university, and to see as undesirable anything—including collegiality—that restricts their flexibility and autonomy as managers. And one could substitute “arbitrariness and unilateralism” for “flexibility and autonomy.”

The consequences of certification are important, but they are also limited. Certification will not be a panacea for all that is wrong at Brock, and it need not change anything that a majority of faculty members and librarians believe to be good about the way things are done now. The main consequence of certification is simply that the negotiation of salaries, benefits and terms and conditions of employment, and the actual observance of agreements on these matters, will become requirements enforced by the Labour Relations Board (Carroll 1996a, 4–5).

Psychology professor Kathy Belicki, also addressed the topic of certification in the same issue of the Association’s newsletter: “Our current administration is best described as preferring a benevolent, vertical structure; one in which faculty are consulted but not necessarily included as partners in the decision-making process” (Belicki 1996, 6). Belicki argued that while the association and administration worked well together on a host of different issues, the instances where the parties forcefully disagreed with one another underscored the need for certification. In short, unionization would provide the association the legal power to prevent the administration from simply vertically imposing resolutions to complex workplace issues (Belicki 1996, 7). In an attempt to subvert the argument that unionization would undermine collegiality, she further argued, “There is no relationship between certification and friendliness of relations between faculty and administration. . . . I am interested in certification because I am hoping, and have reason to expect, it will improve collegiality and cooperative policy development” (Belicki 1996, 7). BUFA recognized that in the university setting, elements such as shared governance and democratic processes hold sway for faculty, often more so than issues of salaries (DeCew 2003; Goldey et al. 2010; Hedrick et al. 2011).

In its campaign, BUFA offered three primary arguments in an effort to convince faculty to unionize: “1. The administration must bargain; 2. Librarians can be defined as part of the bargaining unit; and 3. Members will have the protection of the law” (BUFA 1996).

BUFA complained of the “unilateralism” of the administration, arguing that the University administration had adopted new policies on Freedom of Information and Integrity in Research without any input or negotiation with the faculty association (Carroll 1995b; Good 1996c, 4).

To a lesser extent, BUFA was also able to encourage faculty to support certification with the promise of improved salaries and benefits as the average faculty salaries at Brock lingered at the bottom of the list of Ontario universities (Interview 1). ⁵

As is common in institutions of higher education (Bentham 2002), the university administration responded to the association’s certification campaign by urging members to reject unionization. In a letter to faculty dated April 4, 1996, Harold Leece of Personnel Services accused BUFA of having circulated “misleading” information concerning certification and warned that “unions cannot compel employers to agree to certain positions any more than employers can compel unions to do so.” Leece also argued that under the existing special plan agreement, the association already had legal recourse to arbitration and noted that faculty enjoyed the collective benefits of the agreement while preserving individual contracts of employment with the University. Leece warned that certification would make BUFA “the sole bargaining agent for even individual concerns,” reinforcing a long-standing union avoidance technique designed to portray the union as an intrusive third party (Leece 1996b, 1; DeCew 2003). Faculty members appeared undeterred. The association’s ad hoc organizing committee reported unprecedented faculty interest in certification (BUFA n.d.-a).

The administration’s sense of the faculty’s mood was captured in an email exchange between Leece and the association’s president, Dawn Good. Leece wrote,

I am concerned about the general increase in heat in the relationship without the light that often accompanies the heat. Faculty members who usually seem reasonable are MAD at everything in general in a way that seems beyond normal. I know there are issues but the reaction seems out of proportion to the issues even putting soc sci workloads, salary negotiations and everything else together with the fact that spring refuses to come. There seems to not be enough to justify the tide of feeling that I sense is out there. (Leece 1996b)

In a bid to quell growing faculty unrest, the senior administration decided on April 19, 1996 to send a letter to department chairs in the Faculty of Social Sciences announcing that the university was quashing the dean of social sciences’ new merit rating system, but the gesture proved to be too little too late (Good 1996b, 4, 6). One interviewee explained, “[The dean of social sciences] scared [faculty] into supporting the union because if he was a harbinger of things to come then we best get organized and ready to respond because otherwise, we could be in big trouble” (Interview 7).

The actions of the dean of social sciences, coupled with the provincial government’s austerity agenda, scared and, in turn, angered faculty into supporting unionization. Members liked the idea that certification would enshrine what the association had negotiated as part of the Special Plan Agreement, but give it even stronger legal weight in terms of enforceability. This was seen as particularly important in combating efforts by the university administration to unilaterally change the terms and conditions of work. Furthermore, many faculty members no longer seemed to view collegiality and professionalism as irreconcilable with unionization (Interview 6).

To be sure, not all faculty members responded positively to the prospect of union certification. A report by the organizing committee identified several reasons offered by faculty who would not sign cards (BUFA n.d.-c). According to the report, some members expressed an inability to reconcile unionization with the culture of academia. Others expressed an ideological opposition to unions or BUFA more generally. Some feared the implications of a faculty strike, while others complained that unionization would only help to protect “poor performers” (BUFA n.d.-a).

Other antiunion faculty members argued, like they had in the 1980s, that unionization would be impolite given the relatively small size of the university and of the St. Catharines community, thus threatening the close friendships that existed between faculty members and administrators (Interview 7). However, this argument had, by and large, lost traction by 1996. The informal “old boys network” based primarily on friendships and personalities, pervasive until at least the late 1980s, had become more and more marginalized and increasingly less effective given the expanding size of the university ⁶ and the growing complexity and bureaucratization of its administrative structures (Interview 7). Arguments that unions destroy collegiality would not derail the second attempt at certification.

The association was able to use the dean of social sciences’ decision to alter the guidelines for assigning merit ratings as part of annual performance reviews and the university’s propensity towards unilateral policy implementation more generally to dispel the idea that unionization would threaten collegial relationships by imposing antagonistic negotiation processes and rigid work rules. Instead, the association was able to paint unionization as a method of promoting and protecting collegial decision-making structures.

That said, some faculty could never quite reconcile unionization and their own perceived professional status, as those who accept traditional notions of professionalism often see unionization as incompatible with “proper professorial conduct” (Goldey et al. 2010, 334). As Bender and Kinkela (2001) found in their analysis of unionization at New York University, faculty members have trouble conceptualizing the university as a space in need of a model of labor relations associated with blue-collar workers. Some of our participants recalled these views:

There was just a sense that professionals don’t do this. Unions are for blue-collar. Unions are for workers. We’re professionals. Professionals don’t unionize. (Interview 6)

We’re not like that, we have nice offices. We have labs . . . we’ve got lovely homes, our kids are well taken care of, we can educate them, what the heck do you need a union for? (Interview 3)

We’re professionals, we really don’t work for a living, so unionism has no meaningful role for us. (Interview 1)

Professionalism also gets linked with social class. Confrontational tactics, which are associated with unions, are cast as uncivilized and inappropriate for middle-class professionals (Goldey et al. 2010).

We are professionals . . . we should be able to work this out through reason and discourse. We shouldn’t need an oppositional model to do this; it will degrade the quality of the experience we all have here as colleagues at the University. (Interview 7)

According to the association’s records, the faculties of social sciences and education responded most positively to the certification campaign, while professors in the faculties of humanities and business were the least likely to sign union cards. However, over the course of the summer and fall of 1996, BUFA’s prounion message anticipated dissenting arguments and trumpeted certification as the key to restoring collegial governance and professionalism in labour-management relations. The Association’s approach steadily gained support across the university. In the end, at least fifty percent of professors in each of the university’s faculties had signed union cards, thus demonstrating widespread support for certification.

At the association’s executive meeting on October 29, 1996, President Dawn Good announced that 60 percent of the potential bargaining unit had signed union cards and that BUFA would move forward with a certification application (Good 1996a).

In a last-ditch attempt to persuade faculty to reject unionization, several antiunion faculty members sent a flurry of emails to the membership outlining arguments against certification. Their communications cast doubt about a union’s ability to change things for the better and argued that the specter of faculty strikes would be detrimental to the university community. Some even suggested that unionization might result in severe economic losses for faculty.

In an email to the potential bargaining unit, one faculty member wrote, “I simply have no faith that [BUFA] can be counted on to even hold on to the strengths of our current agreement in the negotiations after certification. I think we could lose a lot, especially in the area of working conditions.” ⁷ In response, Professor Ann Marie Guilmette, from the Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies, wrote,

Under current legislation, certified bargaining units are considered more equal and have more legislative “leverage” when they “come to the table” in negotiations. . . . Based on my university experiences, I have found bargaining/negotiating “in good faith” to occur more frequently and successfully after certification. This explains my preference for bargaining/negotiating from a position of “legal entitlement” rather than benevolence! (Guilmette 1996)

For its part, the BUFA executive refrained from debating the issues in email exchanges. Instead, the executive used the association newsletter to continue to convey their message which emphasized the positive role unionization could play in upholding collegiality and professionalism at the university:

With certification, we can achieve a kind of closure on some of the recent unilateral attempts by administrators to change terms and conditions of employment in arbitrary and far-reaching ways. We can look ahead to the development of a less rancorous and more professional relationship between equal partners who share a common concern for the welfare of Brock and a common commitment to teaching, research and scholarship. (Carroll 1996c)

On November 26, 1996, Brock University Faculty voted 64 percent in favor of unionization and Professional Librarians voted 75 percent in favor. After the vote, association president Dawn Good explained in a press release that “the university administration has increasingly tried to alter employment conditions unilaterally, rather than negotiating such changes with the people affected. Under these circumstances, two out of three Brock faculty members have concluded that we need the more equal playing field that will come with certification.” Countering the suggestion that certification will harm collegial governance or produce more adversarial relationships between faculty members and university administrators, Good offered “once we have the rights associated with certification, I think we will be able to return to a collegial and harmonious style of decision making since each side will see the other as an equal partner.” ⁸

The faculty association’s successful organizing drive prompted the university’s teaching assistants, part-time instructors, lab demonstrators, marker-graders, and office and clerical staff to follow suit a few years later. As academic leaders in the university, the decision of faculty members to certify validated unionization attempts by other groups of employees at Brock. As of 2012, the overwhelming majority of university workers at Brock belong to labor unions. Indeed there are five separate union locals on campus representing roughly two thousand employees (Patrias and Savage 2012, 115–17).

Conclusion

Fifteen years after the certification of BUFA, those who were involved in the campaign have no regrets. Our participants point to higher salaries, improved benefits, effective grievance procedures, and stronger faculty association clout in university decision-making as evidence that certification has served faculty well (Interviews 1, 2, 3, 6, 7). Even faculty members interviewed for this research who had opposed certification in 1996 conceded that unionization was, on balance, a good thing for faculty. One, for example, argued that “if anything the union serves as a bit of buffer against the further erosion of collegiality” (Interview 7).

For those faculty members who primarily wanted the faculty association to represent their own material interests, unionization was an easy sell. However, for those members who understood the role of the faculty association to be mainly about upholding standards of quality and professionalism in teaching and research, the traditional “union advantage” arguments were not as compelling. This is why the union’s certification strategy relied so heavily on alternative discourses of professionalism and collegiality. Specifically, the association’s strategic decision to invoke the discourses of collegiality and professionalism in support of unionization helped to inoculate faculty members from anti-union arguments that cast certification as anathema to collegial governance and professional standards. The BUFA executive learned from the first failed attempt at certification of the appeal to faculty members of the concepts of collegiality and professionalism. Thus, when the timing was right, they were able to use faculty members’ attachment to such ideals to their advantage and productively use collegiality and professionalism as the bases for their certification campaign.

Turning our gaze beyond Brock University, the demographics of union membership in North America have undergone an incredible transformation in recent decades. Deindustrialization coupled with the relative strength of public sector unionism has turned the popular image of the union member as a blue-collar male industrial worker on its head. Today, the typical union member in Canada is a woman and works in the public sector. This demographic shift in union membership will likely undermine future attempts by university administrators to paint unionization as alien to university culture. Indeed, postsecondary education is one of the most heavily unionized sectors in the Canadian economy with levels of union density that far exceed that of manufacturing or the commercial service sector. Furthermore, we know from U.S. research that unions provide important protections for women faculty members by formalizing such processes as tenure and promotion and may be vitally important for broader equity concerns as further demographic shifts take place in the academy (May, Moorhouse, and Bossard 2010).

Our case study has important implications for organizing drives involving professional workers in the broader public sector. Specifically, our findings draw attention to the need to frame such organizing campaigns in a way that reinforces rather than diminishes the professional identity of the workers in question. At Brock, this was done by presenting certification as the solution to enhancing collegial governance, and thus the decision-making capacity of faculty, at a time of increased neoliberalization of the Ontario university system.

Public sector restructuring and downsizing, which increases workloads and decreases the autonomy of professional workers shatters the false dichotomy between professionalism and unionization, thus presenting unions with greater opportunities to use discourses of professionalism in support of certification campaigns. As bargaining for higher salaries and improved benefits becomes ever more difficult by virtue of harsh public sector austerity measures, non-compensatory issues will also inevitably grow in relative importance in the arena of public sector collective bargaining. Thinking through the strategic implications of employing discourses of professionalism and collegiality in an effort to better organize and represent professionals will therefore become increasingly important, particularly as the ranks of professional workers in the public sector continue to change the face of organized labor.