University of Illinois at Chicago

To the Power of Many

On the importance of faculty committing not just to supporting graduate students but also to organizing themselves.

New Faculty Union Under Attack

On April 29, the University of Illinois Chicago United Faculty, a group jointly affiliated with the AAUP and the American Federation of Teachers, delivered hundreds of signed union authorization cards to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board—more than enough to certify the union under Illinois law. The faculty voted to have one union represent tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty who have appointments of at least 51 percent time.

Chicago Faculty Strike for Fair Pay

After a year and a half of contract negotiations—sixty bargaining sessions, with little progress—the faculty union at the University of Illinois at Chicago went on a two-day strike in February. The members of UIC United Faculty, which represents tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty in separate units and is affiliated jointly with the AAUP, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, demonstrated on campus during the strike, along with other supporters of the union. At issue was the question of salary, particularly for nontenured faculty.

From One Bargaining Unit to One Faculty

In fall 2009, representatives of the AAUP, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and the American Federation of Teachers contacted a few faculty members at the University of Illinois at Chicago to set up a meeting about the possibility of organizing a faculty union. Ten or fifteen professors attended, most of them senior, all of them tenured. One of the first questions they asked was who would actually be in the union—was it for tenure-track and tenured faculty only or would it also include non-tenure-track faculty? The answer was that Illinois law made no distinction between the groups.

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