The Brief

Last summer, after nearly two years of organizing, hundreds of untenured faculty at Loyola Marymount University celebrated the certification of their newly formed union.

In a message to the campus community, Thomas Poon, who served as LMU’s executive vice president and provost, wrote: “We honor the will of our [non-tenure track] faculty and the perspectives they expressed throughout the election campaign.” The university, he added, “will continue to engage the union in good faith and with transparency.”

Poon is now president of LMU and, earlier this month, he changed his tune.

Poon announced Sept. 12 that the university’s board of directors decided to invoke a religious exemption to the National Labor Relations Act. The board oversees unionization efforts and protects the rights of private sector employees. In practice, Poon added, LMU’s exemption means the school will no longer recognize unions or participate in collective bargaining.

Listen • 17:35

Listen • 17:35

Imperfect Paradise: How union organizing is being upended by private universities in Southern California

Colleges like the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University are trying different tactics to push back against new labor unions. What does it mean for unions at universities — and beyond— in the long term?

For the untenured faculty eager to negotiate their first contract, the announcement came as a blow. Multiple members described feeling blindsided and betrayed.

“I thought the fact that the union election had been certified and that the university had already been bargaining with us [meant] we had protections,” said Arik Greenberg, an assistant professor in theological studies.

At USC, untenured faculty also face resistance as they work to establish a union of their own. There, administrators say the faculty can’t unionize because they’re all “managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university has also aligned itself with companies like Amazon and SpaceX, which claim that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional.

Experts say the universities’ anti-union tactics aren’t wholly original. But, taken together, the pushback marks an era of more aggressive opposition to labor organizing at campuses in Southern California — one that could have implications for higher ed institutions nationwide.

Why are non-tenured faculty unionizing?

In the last 40 years, colleges across the U.S. have moved away from offering tenure-track positions, said William Herbert, executive director of Hunter College’s National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. Instead, new hires in academia increasingly sign on to short-term contracts. And, usually, this involves at-will employment — and lower pay.

The shift to non-tenured roles has also transformed campus labor relations, Herbert said. Among untenured faculty, there’s been a “massive increase in unionization,” particularly in the last decade.

At LMU and USC, the faculty who are fighting to get their units off the ground say their bargaining units are key to securing better working conditions in their precarious roles.

Why did LMU do an about-face?

Untenured faculty at LMU began building their unit, SEIU Local 721, in 2023. After the NLRB certified it, the bargaining team presented the university with nearly 40 proposals, spanning a range of labor issues.

“Money is a big part of it,” said Sam Goff, a lecturer in animation. “Obviously, we want to be making a living wage — but it's not the only thing. There's also job security, pathways to full-time employment, academic freedom. There's structure put around how we are evaluated, and when we have those evaluation processes take place.”

But in the months following their union’s certification, Goff and other bargaining team members said there was little progress.

“We were requesting bargaining dates as soon as we had that election certified in June of 2024,” said assistant professor Greenberg. The university’s representatives, he said, “dragged their feet.”

The bargaining team members said they and the university managed to advance on “a couple” proposals before the university invoked the religious exemption — but none of them had to do with compensation.

“We kept asking them: ‘When are we going to get a counter on the economic proposals?’ And they kept pushing that timeline down the road,” Goff said.

In the video to the campus community, Poon provided more details to explain the university’s about-face toward the union.

“When LMU began bargaining in 2024,” he said, “ the higher education landscape looked very different. Since then, higher education is facing seismic pressures, from the looming demographic cliff to shifting federal policies, creating a far more challenging environment than just a year ago.” After “carefully reviewing” the untenured faculty’s proposals, he added, the university determined they “proved financially unsustainable.”

Union members insist that their economic proposals were not outlandish, but simply rooted in the cost of living in L.A. County. They also said they never expected the university to accept their initial proposals — they expected to negotiate.

“I counsel them strongly: Please get back to the bargaining table. Save yourselves millions and millions of dollars of woe that you're going to wind up spending, either on attorneys' fees or on PR, just to try to silence us,” Greenberg said.

How does a religious exemption work?

Herbert, of Hunter College, said LMU is not the first university to invoke a religious exemption. A 1979 Supreme Court decision has been the basis for litigation by religiously affiliated institutions seeking to thwart faculty unions. In that case, the Supreme Court held that the NLRB should decline jurisdiction over questions of representation concerning parochial school faculty, to avoid potential First Amendment issues.

Still, Herbert underscored, “the fact that [a university] may or may not be subject to the National Labor Relations Act does not preclude [it] from agreeing to continue to negotiate” with a union. LMU’s peer Catholic Jesuit institutions, including Georgetown University and Fordham University, have active collective bargaining units.

By starting negotiations with the untenured faculty union last year, LMU “essentially said the NLRA had jurisdiction,” said Leticia Saucedo, a law professor at UC Davis.

“I think part of what's going on here is that [LMU] is reading the tea leaves and making a calculated decision about how [it] would fare under a National Labor Relations Board that is governed under the Trump administration,” she added.

After LMU announced it would no longer recognize SEIU Local 721, members staged a rally on campus. Then, they launched a strike authorization vote to pressure the school to return to the bargaining table. The vote closes on Sept. 30.

Students and other campus employees came out in support of LMU's untenured faculty in mid-September.

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Courtesy Emily Dorrel

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SEIU Local 721

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In an email, LMU spokesperson Griff McNerney said the university is “disappointed” by the strike authorization vote because it “risks disrupting the continuity of instruction and the student experience.” McNerney also said the untenured faculty’s union “has no standing,” since “the university lawfully invoked its religious exemption on September 12.”

“Since then,” he added, “LMU has reinstated merit pay retroactively, begun reviewing contracts for greater stability, and expanded professional development opportunities.”

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) represents about 2 million workers in North America, including at least 83 faculty units. McNerney said the union is “an outside, dues-funded organization that has acted more like a third-party bully than a partner advancing faculty or student interests.”

Greenberg, who sought out the SEIU — and who has been trying to organize untenured faculty at LMU for over a decade — strongly disagreed with McNerney’s characterization. So did Goff.

“We are SEIU,” she said. “And what’s wrong with paying dues?”

In his email, McNerney noted that LMU benchmarks pay “at the 75th percentile of the market.”

“That 75th percentile means nothing to me when my colleagues can't pay to sustain their lives,” said Goff. An LMU alumna, she’s still paying off her student loans. “If I can’t earn a living wage,” she asked, “what is the value of an LMU degree?”

What’s the status of unions at USC?

At USC, untenured faculty filed a petition for an election in December 2024. If a majority of votes are cast in favor of their union, United Faculty UAW, the NLRB will certify the group. The proposed bargaining unit is composed of about 2,500 educators from various schools — everything from engineering to music. (The school of cinematic arts has its own union.)

Sanjay Madhav, a USC graduate who is now an associate professor in the school of engineering, said he and his colleagues aim to secure salaries that keep pace with inflation and the cost of living. They also want to protect their retirement contributions and keep their health insurance premiums affordable. The cost of parking and tuition coverage for the faculty’s dependents are also top of mind.

Madhav also noted that, in recent months, the university has laid off over 600 employees.

“With the current structure,” he said, “the administration makes these top-down decisions, and we, as individuals, have no way to have input on that.”

“By forming a union, we'd have a seat at the table. We would actually be able to work with the university to figure out what's an equitable way to handle the budget cuts,” Madhav added. “The current model asks that we, as faculty, trust that the same administration that got us into the budget crisis also knows the best way to get us out.”

When the untenured faculty submitted their petition to the NLRB last December, the university could have agreed to an election, said Kate Levin, an associate professor of writing. Instead, USC issued a legal challenge.

Chief among its arguments is that the petition “should be dismissed because the proposed unit is comprised entirely of faculty who are managerial employees and/or supervisors.” The university also says the proposed unit is “not appropriate” because it’s comprised of faculty “who have distinct areas of scholarship, job functions, and work.”

On top of its unionization battle, untenured faculty at USC have seen hundreds of colleagues laid off in recent months.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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Like Amazon, SpaceX and other companies, USC’s legal counsel challenges the constitutionality of the NLRB, arguing that its structure violates the nation’s separation of powers and gives it unchecked power to enforce labor law.

If USC succeeds, it “will preclude non-tenured faculty from being able to vote on whether or not they want representation,” Herbert said.

But even if USC ultimately doesn’t prevail with this line of argument, delaying the vote could have adverse effects on the union, he said. If the unionization process gets dragged out, support for the effort could waver and ultimately result in a negative vote. This tactic, Herbert said, “is very real in the private sector.”

Are non-tenured faculty ‘managers’?

With regard to USC’s claim that United Faculty UAW’s proposed unit is “comprised entirely” of managers and supervisors, Herbert and UC Davis’s Saucedo also noted that this type of opposition isn’t novel. In 1980, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that faculty at Yeshiva University were managerial personnel and not entitled to the rights under the NLRA due to their role in making decisions through shared governance.

The issue at USC, Herbert said, is whether their untenured faculty have “played a significant role in the governance of the university, like the tenure-track faculty” at Yeshiva.

In the past, Saucedo added, the NLRB has made determinations about these types of cases by examining the faculty’s “participation in things like decision-making around academic programs, enrollment, finances and personnel policies.”

Thousands of USC employees signed a letter, urging the school to allow untenured faculty to vote if the NLRB allows them to proceed.

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Courtesy Kate Levin

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In an email, USC spokesperson Lauren Bartlett said "USC has a long history of good relations with the unions that represent our staff. But because of the role that our [non-tenure track] faculty play in shared governance, they are not eligible to unionize under existing law. This in no way diminishes our appreciation of the critical role that all USC faculty play in advancing our mission of academic excellence.”

What would it mean to lose the NLRB?

Attacks against the NLRB have become commonplace in the business world — but, among higher ed institutions, they’re still rare, Saucedo said.

If cases like SpaceX v. NLRB make it to the Supreme Court and succeed, she added, those decisions could affect “the whole structure of the National Labor Relations Board and the authority of the National Labor Relations Act.” Congress could have “to go back to the drawing board” and create a new agency, she said, which could make it harder for workers to unionize and take collective action in pursuit of better working conditions.

Members of USC’s United Faculty UAW expect a favorable NLRB ruling, one that will allow them to vote and, eventually, certify their union. Earlier this month, they teamed up with other campus workers to stage a rally on campus. They also delivered a letter signed by over 1,100 campus employees, calling on university leaders to respect the outcome.

“Do not issue any further appeals or legal delays — just let the democratic process proceed,” Levin said. “And when we win that election, meet us at the bargaining table and bargain in good faith.”

For Herbert, the conflicts at LMU and USC go beyond legal questions. “Are we a society that supports workplace and political democracy,” he said, “or are we a place where we think that those questions should be decided by people who have greater power than those who don't?”