MSU's non-tenure track faculty and many of MSU's non-academic staffers are already unionized, but research focused, tenure-track professors are not.

While cards are still being signed, Buchanan anticipates they’ve received “far beyond” the majority approval needed for MSU to recognize them as a collective bargaining group.

 UTSF requested that recognition from the Board of Trustees on Tuesday, and asked for a response by Jan. 10.

“We are hoping and we are expecting that they will, on their own, voluntarily recognize our union,” Buchanan said.

MSU spokesperson Emily Guerrant said “the university plans to work with the tenure faculty on a mutual card check process per the Board of Trustees resolution approved in Dec. 2021 and following the state Public Employment Relations Act.”

UTSF also filed a petition seeking recognition from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission, or MERC, a state government organization that resolves labor-related issues and can formally recognize unions.

Filing with MERC serves multiple purposes. If MSU’s board stalls or fails to recognize the union, Buchanan said MERC will be there “as a failsafe.” According to the MSU ordinance governing unionization, MERC requires at least 30% of the proposed bargaining group to be in support of the union, as opposed to MSU’s 50%.

The commission would also verify how many tenure stream faculty signed the authorization cards in their recognition process, which Buchanan said is convenient because UTSF and MSU need a third party to verify their counts anyway.

Faculty workloads and compensation were among several common themes that arose among UTSF's conversations with faculty, Buchanan said.

“Do we have equitable working conditions for all of the faculty on campus so that we can offer high quality instruction and commitment to our students (without being) overworked and overwhelmed?” Buchanan said.

Academic freedom was another concern.

“We've seen a decrease in tenure stream faculty lines on campus, but simultaneously we've seen almost a 50% increase in executive management positions,” Buchanan said. “We want to ensure … that we are guarding against the ways in which tenure is eroded.”

But Buchanan says the overarching goal of the unionization effort is to give tenure stream faculty a louder voice in administrative discussions.

“We want a say in some of the decisions that are impacting ourselves and other students,” Buchanan said.

She sees UTSF having a “symbiotic relationship” with advisory groups like the faculty senate. While the faculty senate allows faculty to lobby the administration and board through proposals and initiatives, they are advisory and not binding.

“There's no teeth to force the university to consider (faculty) concerns and to negotiate how to incorporate those concerns into policies as they go forward,” Buchanan said. “We can have faculty senate spend months crafting beautiful policies that will have meaningful impact on campus, and they can go to the administration and just be cast aside.”

She hopes UTSF’s existence will strengthen administration’s attentiveness to faculty senate’s concerns, “because then they don't have to become a union issue.”

Jack Lipton, chair of the faculty senate, agreed that the power behind a potential collective bargaining agreement could change how the faculty senate operates.

Specifically, he expects requests for salary adjustments, normally done by the senate’s university committee on faculty affairs, would instead be negotiated in the union’s legally binding contract.

“Anything that involves the faculty organizing around common shared principles is going to result in a strengthened body to work with the administration and board,” Lipton said.