Below please find a written version of key messages from the video entitled "Message from President Hall on the efforts of SEIU to unionize Mercy adjunct faculty"
As members of Mercy College adjunct faculty, most of you are probably aware of a campaign by an outside labor organization called Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to unionize the work you do. This organization has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to schedule an election on this issue and the NLRB will be sending out ballots to Mercy College adjuncts next week. Adjunct faculty have until May 1st to return the ballots. I encourage you to vote.
I want to start with three main points. First, Mercy College respects the rights of its adjunct faculty to unionize. Second, the decision over whether to unionize belongs to Mercy’s part-time faculty, in accordance with a majority vote among our adjuncts. This is a very important decision with long-term consequences and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Thus, I encourage everyone to study the issue carefully and examine all of the relevant facts before making a final decision. Third, it is vitally important for everyone who receives a ballot from the National Labor Relations Board next week to cast your vote so that the outcome reflects a true majority rather than a majority opinion that prevails because of low-turnout.
Now, I’d like to begin by addressing an argument being circulated that Mercy is “anti-union” or that the College is attempting to engage in “union-busting.” This kind of rhetoric is not accurate and not helpful. I work hard to be truthful and transparent concerning the college’s affairs and my initial experience with the outside labor organization is that it will simply make up facts to try to alienate Mercy’s faculty from the college.
Here are the facts that SEIU wants to keep from you. First, Mercy has a longstanding cordial relationship with another union that represents many of our non-faculty staff. Second, the real issue facing us has nothing to do with the value of unions in general, but about whether this particular union will help both our adjunct faculty and the college itself to achieve our collective goals.
So, I’m going to do what this outside organization doesn’t want me to do, and that is talk with you about the unionization effort and give you the facts as I see them. From the moment SEIU showed up at Mercy, it’s tried to make sure you didn’t hear from me, that your only source of information was whatever claims SEIU was willing to make up. I’ll be frank: I think that’s a lousy way for people who work together to achieve their aims. If you can’t trust an organization to speak truthfully to you and on your behalf, how can you expect positive results?
In case someone has said something different to you about what I think concerning adjunct compensation at Mercy College, you should hear from me personally about this issue. Here’s what I think: adjuncts at Mercy are crucial members of the college community—crucial especially to the work of teaching our students—and they deserve to be compensated better.
You have a right to ask, “Well, if that’s what you think, what are you doing about it?” The answer is three-fold.
First, I’ve made modest improvements to adjunct salaries at virtually every year since I arrived at Mercy after those salaries had remained static for a number of years. You can rightly wonder why I didn’t do more and do it faster and I can only say it’s because Mercy, along with other private colleges in New York, has faced significant financial challenges over the past several years. Between enrollment declines based on things that happened before I came to New York and new challenges, like the state’s offer of “free college tuition” at public universities, this has been a challenging time. We’ve had to take care that we didn’t wind up like some of our sister institutions who have closed their doors or are struggling to keep them open.
Second, I have challenged our Board of Trustees to see that we must improve adjunct salaries. I’ve told the Board how important adjuncts are to Mercy’s educational mission and how we are lagging in compensating them. The Board agrees with me completely. I’ve told the same thing to our full-time faculty, and they also agree completely.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the college has been working most of this academic year on an arrangement with a sister institution, The College of New Rochelle, which will be closing its doors this summer. Under the terms of this arrangement, which we finalized with the College of New Rochelle in March, Mercy will be taking responsibility for nearly two thousand students, and this will give us both the students and the revenue to quickly bring our adjunct salaries up to parity with those of The College of New Rochelle. I presented the budget today to the Board’s Finance and Control Committee, which approved it unanimously. Under that the terms of that budget, our lowest paid adjunct salaries from about $2,200 to $3,000 this coming fall.
Now that I’ve shared this information with you, let’s get back to the issue of unionization. Do adjunct faculty at Mercy College need an outside organization like SEIU to be fairly compensated? I think the answer is no. I’ve tried to explain to you the direction where we are headed and I hope you will just give me some time to get us there. There will still be some colleges who pay more than Mercy, but these are colleges almost invariably that charge two or three times as much tuition to their students, or who are public institutions who are subsidized by the state and who already have more resources than Mercy College does. Those are very different institutions from Mercy College, which is private and without the support of the state and is trying to make sure it remains affordable for students who frequently lack affordable options for higher education.
That brings me to SEIU, the particular labor organization that wants to stand between you and the college. I respect the right of Mercy employees to unionize, but in this don’t believe this particular union is a good fit for our adjuncts or for the college generally. From what I have seen and researched, SEIU is a struggling organization facing a decline in memberships, layoffs and is now facing a strike by its own employees, as highlighted in a Huffington Post article from last week (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/union-employees-authorize-a-strike-against-their-own-union_n_5c881359...). I doubt whether SEIU told you any of these things.
We are certainly not perfect, but it is hard for me to accept that SEIU is the right organization to come in and attempt to dictate how things should be done at an institution as unique as Mercy College. I believe we can do this on our own, and without you being forced to hand over 2% of whatever you may make as dues to an organization that is facing funding issues and internal discord. I am asking for you to give me time to implement the changes that will make your salaries competitive as they ought to be and as they deserve to be.
What I want most out of this process is robust dialog, competing views to be heard, and for everyone to share information among each other so that whatever decision is made, it is carefully made, and I want to ensure that all voices are heard and we get as many votes as possible. Again, the vote will be decided only by the majority of those who actually vote so if only 100 adjuncts vote, 51 adjuncts could make a decision that will impact all 500 or 600 of our full number of adjunct faculty.
We will continue to post materials on https://www.mercy.edu/adjunct-organizing-information and I look forward to our continued dialog over the next few weeks.