Ohio University’s appeal challenging the faculty union vote still sits in front of a judge more than a year later
By: Thomas Billington
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ATHENS, Ohio (WOUB) – The fate of the Ohio University faculty union has been tied up in a year-long legal battle. An appeal has now been sitting in front of a Franklin County judge with no action since October 2025.
That appeal argued the union broke the rules during its organizing campaign by holding members-only meetings before the election. The state board dismissed the claims in early May 2025, deciding the union vote was certified, and allowed the union to move forward with negotiating a contract.
The university then appealed the board’s decision about two weeks later, objecting to the certification of the election. All that remains now is for the judge to make his decision.
Public sector and private sector labor laws are governed by the state and federal government, respectively. This means a private sector dispute would go to the National Labor Relations Board, a body designed to settle disputes. However, public sector cases go through the state board.
Rick Bales from the Ohio Northern University College of Law said this case is in front of a state judge who may or may not know anything about labor law. They “may have to be educating him or herself about it, probably doesn’t understand the … way things are done right,” Bales said.
Bales says a delay in a labor case is especially beneficial to the employer.
“Normally in a civil case, if I’m suing you for $10,000, if it takes three years to go through the judicial process, we’re both frustrated,” he said. “I, in particular, am frustrated because I think you owe me 10 grand, and during those three years I’m not getting it right? But at the end of the day, I still should get my 10 grand. At the end of the day, the delay should not impact the outcome.”
“In a labor case, the delay absolutely 100% does affect the outcome,” Bales said. “And it’s almost always bad for the employee.”
WOUB spoke to union Director of Communications John O’Keefe, who described the university’s lawsuit as a “delay tactic.”
The union says the university has reasons to delay the unionization process, as the university has not given faculty a raise for three years and has yet to respond to its proposal on compensation.
If the rates the union proposed were enacted, union employees would have received a $3,935 raise in June 2025, and another $4,270 in August 2026. Spread over the approximately 795 faculty who were eligible to vote in the election, the raises would have totaled just over $6.5 million.
The union also requested two different 4% raises for all its members. The union represents professors, associate professors and assistant professors, whose salaries average $114,239, $98,005 and $87,948 respectively, according to university data. That’s a combined average salary of $100,064 for union members. So, after the first raise each employee would make an extra $4,002, with the second raise being $4,162.
This totals about another $6.5 million in salary. So the grand total of all the raises would be about $13 million. This number does not account for the union’s request for increases to promotion bonuses.
The university has not responded to the union’s wage proposals, which were made in October.
The union has little other recourse on this issue, as Senate Bill 1 made faculty strikes illegal in Ohio, so this is not a tactic faculty can use to attempt to pressure the university into wage negotiations.
With the union’s fate tied up for so long in the court at this point, the question arises, why not just hold another vote.
Joseph Slater is a distinguished professor at the University of Toledo College of Law and provided some insight to WOUB about why the union might not want to hold another vote.
“The union wants it established as a matter of law that what it did in this election was proper,” Slater said. “Elections are time-consuming and expensive, and even if the union were confident it would win a re-run election, there are no guarantees.”
Slater, a national expert on public sector labor law, said the university’s objection to the union is one he has never seen raised before.
WOUB reached out to the university for comment. Senior Director of Communications Dan Pittman wrote, “it is our continued goal to move through the overall collective bargaining process in a timely manner so that we don’t leave our faculty in the required status quo period for longer than necessary. However, we owe it to future generations of faculty and students who will be impacted by the result of this first contract negotiation to take the time necessary to get it right.”