Joy Bennett studies faculty unions for her PhD

By Sarah Binder

When Concordia University management and professors next sit down at the bargaining table, they might take inspiration from Joy Bennett’s doctoral dissertation on the unionization of full-time faculty in English-Canadian universities.

Not that she included Concordia in the thesis’s three case studies. ”I can’t be objective about a place I know so well,” Bennett explained. The librarian-turned-administrator-turned-consultant has sat on both sides of the negotiating table during her long career at Concordia.
Concordia, whose full-time faculty won certification in 1981, actually makes a good showing on the spectrum of industrial relations in academe.

“We take a long time to bargain, but we stay at the table,” Bennett said. “We’ve never had a strike. It’s a credit to both sides.”
Compare this to Dalhousie University, one of Bennett’s case studies. The Halifax institution, certified since 1980, has suffered though four strikes in its four last rounds of contract talks.

Or take Queen’s, in Kingston, where teaching staff rejected unionization until a salary freeze in 1995, then breezed through the certification process in three months due to a “sophisticated” faculty that included supportive law-school comrades.

By contrast, it took a lengthy battle to win the right to bargain collectively in 1974 at the University of Manitoba, Canada’s first English research-level university to have a unionized faculty association; it was Bennett’s third case study.

By now, most of Canada’s full-time university professors negotiate collectively through faculty associations. Bennett set out to explore the impact of this in her PhD thesis, submitted in August 2003 under the title “From gentlemen’s agreements to collective agreements: how the unionization of full-time faculty members in anglophone Canadian universities has changed the management and governance structures of those universities.”

Using documents and interviews with faculty and administrators reflecting different regional and university cultures, she examined why and how collective bargaining developed.

She found that trust can be a major issue in the administration-faculty relationship, and that management efforts to be open can run up against faculty with an axe to grind. At the same time, management intransigence can force academics to adopt tactics, such as work stoppages, that do not sit well with their professional self-image.
She concluded that on the whole, unionization has had a positive effect because it codifies the rules of the game, making them fairer and clear to both sides. How tenure is achieved, how promotions are decided, what constitutes a minimum teaching complement — these are no longer decisions made arbitrarily; they are written down and subject to a recourse procedure.

“It has made the relationship between the administration and faculty more litigious but also more transparent,” Bennett said.
This transparency can be a relief to many on the management side of the table, Bennett found, especially for deans and vice-deans who have been faculty and are likely to resume that status at another point in their career.

Unionization has led to a tremendous improvement in salaries. Although academics don’t like to think of themselves in the usual labour-management terms, the issue of salaries remains a high negotiations priority, along with tenure and the number of full-time tenure-track faculty.

Academic freedom is also a hot-button issue, and given recent cases where attempts were made to suppress research results, it could take on an even higher profile in future contract talks. Bennett, who received her PhD this spring and has submitted the thesis to a Canadian book publisher, credits her doctoral committee members for adding breadth and depth to the work: Enn Raudsepp, chair of the Journalism Department; Donald Savage, former executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers and adjunct history professor; and her main supervisor, Jerry Tomberlin, dean of the John Molson School of Business.

Bennett is currently advising Concordia management in negotiations with part-time faculty, and is teaching a management course at McGill’s Graduate School of Library and Information Studies.