College teachers unionizing might not sound like a victory for low-wage workers, but when the teachers in question are part-time adjuncts, that's just what it is. Now, organizers say adjuncts are
on the brink of a win at Maryland's Goucher College:
The tentative count in the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)-supervised election produced a tie, with 33 adjuncts voting in favor of the new Goucher Faculty Union and 33 against, according to Maureen Winter, one of the instructors who helped organize the group.
But that 33-33 count is misleading because the legal challenges against most pro-union votes are spurious, Winter contends, and there is every indication that the union will prevail when the NLRB makes a ruling on the challenged ballots in the coming weeks. Nine ballots—all of them pro-union votes—were challenged by the lawyers for Goucher, she explains, even though all nine of the voters were specifically named as eligible in a pre-election agreement between Goucher and the union.
Goucher's administration retained a major anti-union law firm, but it looks like a string of wins for adjuncts in the Washington, DC, area is likely to continue.