Changes in Faculty Composition Within the State University of New York System: 1985-2001

[Excerpt] The last two decades of the twentieth century saw a significant growth in the share of faculty members in American colleges and universities that are part-time or are full-time without tenure-track status. Growing student enrollments faced by academic institutions during tight financial times and growing differentials between the salaries of part-time and non-tenure track faculty on the one hand, and tenured and tenure-track faculty on the other hand, are among the explanations given for these trends. However, surprisingly, there has been no recent econometric evidence to test whether these hypotheses are true. Our study uses institutional level data provided to us by the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis of the State University of New York (SUNY) System to begin to address these issues. In the next section, we present background data on how the ratios of full-time lecturers to full-time professorial faculty and of part-time faculty to full-time faculty changed at SUNY during the fall 1985 to fall 2001 period. Counts of faculty numbers tell one little about who is actually teaching undergraduate students and so we also show how the share of undergraduate credit hours taught by part-time and non-tenure track faculty members increased during the part of the period for which we had access to credit hour data. Section III presents a simple conceptual framework that illustrates why an institution’s usage of part-time and non-tenure track faculty members should depend upon both the revenue per student received by the institution and the relative costs to the institution of the different types of faculty. While we have no data on the costs of part-time faculty members, we do have institutional level information for SUNY institutions for an eleven year period on the average salaries of tenured and tenure track faculty on the one hand, and of non-tenure track faculty on the other hand, as well as information on the revenue per student received by each institution each year. This enables us in section IV to estimate the roles that average salaries of both types of faculty members and revenues received by institutions play in explaining the observed changes in faculty composition

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

[Excerpt] In 2001, a twenty-day sit-in at Harvard University brought the living-wage debate to the forefront of American consciousness. After a six-month study, the Harvard Committee on Employment and Contracting Policies, a 19 member committee of faculty, staff, administrators and students that had been appointed by Harvard’s president as a result of the discussions to end the sit-in, recommended giving raises to the university’s lowest paid employees and relying more on collective bargaining in the future to assure that the wages paid by subcontractors did not undercut local union wage scales. A three-day sit-in at the University of Connecticut that related to the living wage issue also yielded a substantive victory for campus workers. The protesters there generated an almost two-dollar increase in wages, as well as substantial improvement in benefits for many of the university’s workers. Collectively these struggles represent a new battleground in American higher education. The growth of living wage movements on almost one hundred campuses reflects the large variation in the wages paid to college and university staff across the country. There are many potential explanations for these salary differences, including differences in local cost of living and differences in the resources that the academic institutions have available to pay faculty and staff salaries. One other possible explanation is the influence of staff unions. Previous studies of the impact of unions on salaries in academia have focused on faculty unions and have concluded that faculty unions have increased the salaries of their members relative to the salaries of faculty at academic institutions in which faculty are not covered by collective bargaining agreements by at best a small percentage amount. There have been no studies, however, of the impact of collective bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Our paper addresses this issue. After providing some background data on the number of blue-collar and white-collar employees covered by collective bargaining agreements at American higher education institutions, we use data from a 1997-1998 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (APPA) and other sources to estimate models that explain the variation in academic institutions’ salaries for a number of narrowly defined blue collar and white collar occupational groups that are employed by the academic institutions’ facilities divisions. Of primary interest to us, is the extent to which the salaries of academic staff covered by collective bargaining agreements exceed the salaries of otherwise comparable academic staff that are not covered by such agreements

Collective Bargaining and Staff Salaries in American Colleges and Universities

Our study is the first study that addresses the impact of collective bargaining coverage on salaries in academia for employees other than faculty. We use data from a 1997-98 study on the costs of staffing in higher education conducted by the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers and other sources to estimate the impact of staff unions on staff salaries in American higher education. Our best estimate is that for the occupations in our sample, collective bargaining coverage raises staff salaries by at most 10 to 20 percent relative to the salaries of comparable higher education employees not covered by union contracts.

Evaluating Work: Enforcing Occupational Safety and Health Standards in the United States, Canada and Sweden

The United States’ occupational safety and health enforcement system is breaking down. Klaff argues that much of this breakdown has to do with a fundamental lack of worker participation in the United States’ safety and health system. Klaff makes his case by comparing and contrasting the history and enforcement schemes of the United States, Canada, and Sweden. After arguing for economic rights as human rights, Klaff concludes by offering a set of recommendations for the United States’ occupational safety and health system based upon his value-centered analysis

Collective Bargaining in American Higher Education

[Excerpt] No discussion of governance in higher education would be complete without a consideration of the role of collective bargaining. Historically, most researchers interested in the subject have directed their attention to the unionization of faculty members. Given several recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that leave open the possibility that unionization of faculty in private colleges and universities may increase in the future, we discuss collective bargaining for faculty in the first section (Leatherman 2000, A16). Recently, however, attention has been also directed at the unionization of two other groups in the higher education workforce. Activists on a number of campuses have pressed for academic institutions to pay their low-wage employees a living wage, and this has brought attention to the role of staff collective bargaining in academia. In the second section, we present the first empirical estimates of the impact of staff bargaining on staff salaries in higher education. Finally, the number of public universities in which teaching assistants, and in some cases research assistants, have won the right to bargain collectively began to expand rapidly at the turn of the twenty-first century. A NLRB ruling in 2001 that permitted collective bargaining for teaching assistants at New York University (NYU), led the university in the following year to become the first private one to sign a contract with a union representing teaching assistants. Building on this ruling, graduate assistant organizing campaigns are underway at a number of prestigious private universities. In the third section we address why graduate assistants are increasingly interested in organizing and then present evidence on the effects of graduate student unions on a number of economic variables

Recent Defined Benefit Pension Reform: Reasons and Results

In the face of corporate bankruptcies, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (“PBGC”) assures workers that their defined benefit pensions will be protected. It is this fact which has motivated recent reform of the PBGC and the overarching defined benefit plan system by Congress. This paper explores those reforms by addressing the reasons for and results of the most recent reform which had as its primary aim restoring the fiscal solvency of the PBGC. The paper challenges popular accounts of the reform process while examining the results of such reform for important stakeholders without resorting to an overly technical discussion of each provision of the reform. The paper argues that while special interests were successful in obtaining changes in the bill throughout the course of its legislative journey, focusing on such small changes obscures important structural changes to the defined benefit pension system