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State officials dismiss Ohio University’s challenge following the faculty vote to unionize
By: David Forster
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) — State officials have dismissed a challenge Ohio University filed last month after faculty voted overwhelmingly to form a union.
The university can appeal the board’s decision, issued Wednesday, and has 15 days to do so. A university spokesman said “we are currently reviewing the resulting Board Order in order to appropriately assess next steps.”
The university’s main objection was that the union held two meetings during the organizing campaign restricted to members only. Nonmembers could sign up for union membership at the door.
This, the university argued, violated a state law that says meetings held during a campaign to discuss representation or election issues must be open to all employees who would be represented by the proposed union.
Because two meetings held by the union were conditional on union membership, the university argued, they were not available to everyone.
The administrative law judge who reviewed the university’s challenge rejected this argument, and the board agreed with the judge’s findings.
“… an election or campaign meeting is deemed ‘available’ to any proposed bargaining unit employee where they may sign up for union membership at the door,” the judge wrote.
The judge also rejected the university’s argument that requiring people to sign up for union membership to attend meetings was coercive.
“Mere Union membership does not require an employee’s ‘yes’ vote during the election,” the judge wrote.
The judge noted a union member is free to withdraw from the union at any time, so signing up for membership at the door to attend a meeting was not making any kind of long-term commitment to the union.
And even if the union did violate the rule requiring it to allow all proposed bargaining unit members to attend a meeting, the judge wrote, the university cannot use this to set aside the results of the election and call for a new one.
The university has shown “no real probable demonstration of harm,” the judge wrote.
“When examined closely, the reasonable person (including well-educated faculty such as in this case) is not likely to change his or her vote because two union meetings required membership or sign-up at the door,” the judge wrote.
The new union, known as United Academics of Ohio University, will represent most full-time faculty on all campuses.
In response to objections by the university, the union agreed that faculty from the medical school, most faculty from the College of Health Sciences and Professions and all part-time faculty would not be represented.
The union will now work with university leaders to schedule meetings to hammer out the terms of the contract covering represented faculty, said John O’Keefe, a faculty member on the Chillicothe campus and president of the Ohio University chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
“For us, the sooner we sit down together with the university and begin negotiating, the better,” O’Keefe said.
The contract will cover wages and benefits and presumably a host of other employment-related issues. O’Keefe said the union’s research team “is currently looking into what is within the range of items that we are legally permitted to negotiate.”