Barriers to Collective Bargaining for Higher Education Professionals in Nevada

This article is part of a series, "Expanding Union Rights in Public Higher Education."

Nevada is the sixteenth-most unionized state and home to the large and famously influential Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas. Although local government employees, K–12 teachers, and state classified employees have collective bar­gaining rights under state law, the faculty and professional staff of Nevada’s public colleges and universities do not.

Nevada faculty have been battling for full col­lective bargaining rights since at least 1968, when the AFT attempted to organize faculty at Nevada South­ern University, now the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In response to an inquiry from the university system chancellor, the attorney general issued an opin­ion that public employees in Nevada were prohibited from bargaining or striking, despite there being no state laws on the subject. The 1968 attorney general’s opinion further stated that public employers could even prohibit their employees from joining unions, partly by falsely arguing an equivalence between AFT membership and striking teachers.

In 1969, the Nevada legislature first gave col­lective bargaining rights to county, municipal, and school district employees through the Local Govern­ment Employee–Management Relations Act, Nevada Revised Statutes (NRS) 288. These nonstate public employees are now mostly unionized and have long enjoyed the benefits of negotiated collective bar­gaining agreements with their employers, although Nevada is a “right-to-work” state and NRS 288 has strict antistrike provisions for public employees. State and university employees were not included in the legislation.

In the 1973 legislative session, faculty members of the National Society of Professors (affiliated with the National Education Association), supported by local AAUP chapters, promoted a bill to include university and community college faculty in collective bargaining under NRS 288. That effort, like many others over the years, failed. In a unique Nevada twist, however, fac­ulty gained limited collective bargaining rights in 1974, when the board of regents invoked its constitutional authority to act without legislation. Partly to head off legislative action in the 1975 session, the regents amended the Board of Regents Handbook to include regulations for collective bargaining with pro­fessional employees. However, when UNLV faculty petitioned for a bargaining-unit election, the chancellor rejected the petition on the basis of technicalities. It would be two more decades before another faculty bargaining unit was formed and negotiated a contract.

By the 1980s, the Nevada Board of Regents was overseeing two universities and four community colleges. The Nevada Faculty Alliance (NFA) was founded in 1983 as a united statewide organization of AAUP chapters, and one of its efforts was to advocate in support of community college faculty, who had major grievances about compensation and manage­ment. The NFA successfully pushed for changes to the board of regents’ collective bargaining regula­tions to help community college faculty organize at a time when the AAUP had few collective bargaining chapters. An ad hoc regents committee—with recom­mendations from university and community college faculty as well as involvement by faculty senate chairs and the NFA—revised the regents’ collective bargain­ing regulations in 1990, allowing community college faculty to organize separately from the faculty of the two universities. The faculty of Truckee Meadows Community College in Reno achieved their first nego­tiated contract in 1995, followed by Western Nevada College in Carson City in 2014 and the College of Southern Nevada in the Las Vegas area in 2020.

Nevada’s public college and university employees need collective bargaining rights that are established in state law. The fundamental problem with collec­tive bargaining under the regulations in the Board of Regents Handbook is that management itself both writes the rules of engagement and interprets them. The president of each institution has the final say on any grievance, whether covered by a contract or not—even for a grievance against the president personally. Negotiation issues or contract disputes cannot be taken to the state Government Employee–Management Relations Board for resolution. Instead, institutional and system management has the final say. For decades, bargaining over compensation was not permitted because of a clause in the regulations stating that funding depends on legislative appropriations. In recent contracts, however, College of Southern Nevada faculty have gained modest salary adjustments beyond legislatively enacted cost-of-living adjustments by demonstrating that the college has sufficient resources and financial reserves.

In 2019, fifty years after its introduction, NRS 288 was finally extended to Nevada classified employees after a strong push by the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees and other public-employee groups. Even with a new, prolabor Democratic governor, the bill passed only on the penultimate day of the legislative session after serious compromises—including the right of the governor not to provide funding in the executive budget for a collective bargain­ing agreement negotiated by the executive branch.

Legislation promoted by the NFA in 2019 would have extended collective bargaining rights to faculty and professional staff but had no traction, as the bill for state classified employees barely passed at the end of the session. The NFA’s 2021 bill had a strong hearing in the Senate Government Affairs Committee, which approved it on a bipartisan vote. However, even though the NFA had accepted all of the compromises in the 2019 law for state classified staff’s collective bargaining and had a Democratic trifecta with the same prolabor governor, the bill died in the finance committee.

The 2023 session saw greater progress with Assem­bly Bill 224, sponsored by Assemblywoman Sarah Peters with twenty-nine cosponsors. The bill was presented in a committee hearing by the NFA with supporting testimony by AAUP and AFT representa­tives and was backed by many labor organizations, including the Nevada AFL-CIO. Although the board of regents did not take a formal position on AB 224, four of the thirteen regents spoke in its favor and none spoke against it in a discussion of legislative priorities.

The main opposition to AB 224 came from the Nevada System of Higher Education (NSHE) and its general counsel. The NSHE first argued that the constitutional status of the Nevada Board of Regents prevented the legislature from enacting collective bargaining rights for faculty, an objection firmly repudiated by the legislative counsel. The NSHE also submitted a multimillion-dollar fiscal note with grossly exaggerated estimates of the costs for labor relations and arbitrations of grievances.

Ultimately, the assembly approved AB 224 in a bipartisan 31–11 vote, with three Republicans join­ing all Democratic members of the assembly. On the very last day of the session, the senate approved it in a party-line vote after bipartisanship evaporated amid contention over the state budget. Unfortunately, Republican Governor Joe Lombardo, who had taken office in January 2023, vetoed AB 224 in June after the end of the session, along with seventy-four other bills, setting a record for vetoes. Lombardo’s veto letter stated concerns that appeared to come straight from the NSHE administration.

Without full collective bargaining rights to negotiate over compensation, faculty are reduced to begging at the legislature and with the board of regents. In 2023, the Nevada legislature enacted historic cost-of-living adjustments for most state employees to make up for decades of lagging com­pensation; this 23 percent increase, over two years, was driven in part by collective bargaining agree­ments with state classified employees. But NSHE professionals were once again left out when the state underfunded cost-of-living adjustments for faculty and left it up to the board of regents to approve and the institutions to fully fund them. The NFA led a vigorous and successful campaign to persuade the board of regents to approve the full cost-of-living adjustments for NSHE professionals. Much of the NFA’s success was attributed to the crucial support of student leaders, who recognized the value of better compensation for faculty.

In the meantime, the NFA has been pursuing revisions to modernize the board of regents’ internal regulations for collective bargaining for professional staff. That effort has faced obstruction from the system administration, despite having fairly broad support among the regents. Our surveys of faculty without collective bargaining show that 83 percent support collective bargaining rights, but the rigid NSHE rules for forming bargaining units impede organizing. In 2019, a bargaining-unit election at Nevada State Col­lege (now Nevada State University) failed by a handful of votes, in part due to problems with voting and bal­lot logistics that couldn’t be resolved within the NSHE regulations.

The governor’s 2023 veto of AB 224 set us back in the fight for collective bargaining. An override vote in the 2025 legislative session is possible but has a realistic chance only with a Democratic supermajor­ity in both houses of the legislature—which is being vigorously fought in the 2024 election campaign by political action committees connected to the governor. In a state that generally upholds workers’ rights, the faculty and other professional employees of Nevada’s seven public colleges and universities remain the largest group of public employees with no collective bargaining rights in state law.

In reviewing this history of incremental progress and setbacks, we have to wonder why it is so difficult for professional employees of public colleges and universities to gain the collective bargaining rights afforded to other public employees. Although local politics and individual politicians play a role in the success or failure of legislative initiatives, a broader issue is the continuing attacks against higher educa­tion as elitist and the perception that the academic workforce consists primarily of highly compensated tenured professors. That construct ignores the reality of the structure of labor in higher education, where the great majority of instructors are poorly paid adjunct lecturers or teaching assistants and where, at least at mainstream public institutions, highly inflated salaries are reserved for executive administrators and coaches.

Kent Ervin is past president of the Nevada Faculty Alliance and professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has served as the NFA’s lobbyist at the Nevada legislature since 2017. His email address is [email protected]. Alissa Surges is a former senior lecturer and interim director of undergraduate studies in the Department of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. She left the university in 2023 for a communica­tions and writing position in health-care technology.