Professors and Picket Signs

On the day before classes were set to begin for the current semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors did what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire: The members voted on whether to strike.

The result, overwhelmingly in favor, gave the union’s bargaining team needed leverage during negotiations. But the seven-day strike that followed was anything but typical for a faculty union, for which work stoppages of any length are uncommon.

The strike, which forced Oakland to cancel classes, ended in a tentative agreement. Even so, local union officials and higher-education labor experts say boycotting the classroom is a last resort. Students’ education, after all, hangs in the balance.

“Nobody wants to go on strike, because there are really no winners when you do that,” says William E. Scheuerman, president of the National Labor College. “But sometimes you’re squeezed and pushed into a corner.”

For the 600-member union at Oakland, it came down to what chapter leaders said were unfair labor practices. The university, they said, had withheld crucial information. Faculty members were galvanized in their unified stance on the issues–among them maintaining faculty governance, curbing a move to hire more non-tenure-track professors, and protecting professors’ intellectual property.

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