The Chronicle of Higher Education
March 3rd, 2015
Applying for the first time its new standards for weighing whether college faculty members can unionize, the National Labor Relations Board has given the green light to a union election by contingent faculty members at Seattle University.
In a decision issued on Tuesday, Ronald K. Hooks, a regional director of the NLRB, ordered the counting of ballots that were cast in a union election last spring but had been impounded, pending the university’s appeal of his earlier decision to let the election go ahead.
Mr. Hooks based his latest decision on new national standards laid out by the NLRB in December, in a ruling involving Pacific Lutheran University. In that decision, the board held that, instead of trying to determine exactly what religious role faculty members serve at colleges seeking a religious exemption from NLRB oversight, it would now simply consider whether colleges hold their faculty members out as doing religious work.