Bates College. | David Gale Studios, Creative Commons via Flickr
Originally published in the Maine Beacon on March 23, 2023
After more than a year’s delay, a campaign to organize a union for the adjunct faculty and staff at Bates College in Lewiston failed to get enough votes.
On Thursday afternoon, the Boston office of the National Labor Relations Board counted workers’ ballots that were cast in January 2022 to form the Bates Educators and Staff Organization (BESO), a wall-to-wall union that would have been part of the Maine Service Employees Association, SEIU Local 1989 and available to any worker who is not management, tenure-track faculty, or a campus safety officer. But the campaign failed with a vote of 254 against and 186 for the union.
“Of course, we are disappointed in the outcome of our election. However, we’ll continue to stay connected and work to build a voice for us educators and staff on campus,” the Bates Educators and Staff Organizing Committee said in a statement on Thursday.
“We faced a difficult and heavily-funded anti-union campaign, and still overcame so much together,” the statement continued. “Win or lose, it is clearly time for change at Bates, and although we won’t be able to take this step of forming a union together right now, we are incredibly proud of our organizing and the way our campus has come together over the past 18 months.”
The union drive began in October 2021, when the organizers announced their intent to unionize, citing low pay, poor working conditions and declining staff retention at the private liberal arts college as their reasons for organizing.
Staff members and student supporters hoped for an amicable response from administration, but, as Beacon previously reported, the college dug in against the organizers and hired anti-union consultants who began hosting meetings presented as unbiased informational forums about the pros and cons of unions. Routine for decades, such meetings are tactics used by employers to erode possible union support by requiring workers to attend anti-union briefings.
After staff voted by paper ballot last year, the administration petitioned the NLRB to impound the ballots while their legal team challenged the composition of the bargaining unit. The 2019 rule that allowed the ballots to be impounded for 14 months has since been rescinded by the NLRB.
In a statement released ahead of the vote count on Thursday, workers emphasized that the campus community is tired of Bates’ time, money and resources being used on expensive anti-union legal battles.
With a new incoming college president, there is optimism that such tactics will change. On March 7, the college’s Board of Trustees announced that they had unanimously selected Gary Jenkins as the ninth president of Bates since its founding in 1855.
“The outgoing administration jammed our union efforts with now-illegal delay tactics and process challenges wherever they could,” said Jon-Michael Foley, a grounds and maintenance worker at Bates. “We’re ready to move on from the constant interference and get to the negotiations table. Is President Jenkins ready to collaborate and deliver better for us, or will it just be more of the same? Everyone is waiting eagerly for Bates to choose a more productive path forward.”
Dan Neumann studied journalism at Colorado State University before beginning his career as a community newspaper reporter in Denver. He reported on the Global North’s interventions in Africa, including documentaries on climate change, international asylum policy and U.S. militarization on the continent before returning to his home state of Illinois to teach community journalism on Chicago’s West Side. He now lives in Portland. Dan can be reached at dan@mainebeacon.com.
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