A regional official of the National Labor Relations Board on Monday ordered the ballots to be counted in a union election for adjunct faculty members at Saint Xavier University, after finding that the Roman Catholic institution had failed to demonstrate that those adjuncts played a specific role in creating its religious educational environment.
The decision in the case follows a ruling last year involving Pacific Lutheran University, in which the full labor board refined its standard for determining whether a college’s religious nature should exempt it from the board’s jurisdiction. In February, the full board ordered its regional officials to reconsider several disputes involving proposed adjunct unions at religious colleges.
One of those disputes, at Saint Xavier, in Chicago, was initially decided four years ago. In that decision, the regional NLRB official said that Saint Xavier was not religious enough to fall outside the labor board’s jurisdiction, and cleared the way for the university’s adjuncts to vote on forming a union.
Peter Sung Ohr, the NLRB’s regional officer for the Chicago area, said in Monday’s decision that Saint Xavier did hold itself out as a religious institution, but did not hold its part-time faculty members out as performing a religious function. He made an exception for part-timers teaching courses in a pastoral ministry institute, but said no adjunct had taught such a course at the time the initial election was held. He ordered ballots that had been impounded in the dispute to be counted.
A spokeswoman for Saint Xavier said in an email to The Chronicle that the university was reviewing the decision and would comment later.