Penn State faculty say they will vote on forming a union

A Pennsylvania State University faculty group has taken the next step to form a union across the system’s campuses, which eventually could represent some 6,000 faculty.

Officials from the Penn State Faculty Alliance and the Service Employees International Union said they had filed Tuesday with the Pennsylvania Department of Labor after having obtained at least the required signatures of 30% of eligible faculty.

The next step would be an election, and if approved by a majority, a union would be formed and contract negotiations could begin. How long it takes to schedule an election depends on whether the university opposes the move.

“It would be the largest single union election in the public sector in the history of the Commonwealth if not the last 50 years,” Steve Cantanese, president of SEIU 668 said at a news conference held at the Capitol building Tuesday in Harrisburg.

» READ MORE: Some Penn State faculty want to unionize as the university considers campus closures

The announcement comes about a month after graduate student workers at Penn State voted to unionize, with 90% in favor. That vote came nearly a year after the Coalition of Graduate Employees at Penn State filed the required signature cards with the labor board. Their vote came amid a wave of graduate union workers’ efforts to unionize.

Penn State is the only state-related university of the four in the Commonwealth without a faculty union. Faculty concern about the university’s decisions began to accelerate during the pandemic and have continued to mount amid budget cuts and the decision in May to announce the closure of seven of the school’s Commonwealth campuses. A seeming lack of shared governance, salary, and workload inequities across campuses, and transparency are among other concerns cited by faculty involved in the effort.

» READ MORE: PSU board approves closure of seven Commonwealth campuses by a 25-8 vote

“Penn State faculty are filing for a union election to bring transparency to their workplace, to bring job security to their workplace, to have an opportunity to have a greater voice at their workplace, to have some economic security at their workplace,” Cantanese said.

Julio Palma, associate professor of chemistry at Fayette, one of the campuses selected for closure, said faculty tried to fight the Commonwealth campus closure plan but didn’t have enough power.

“We organized,” he said. “We held rallies on campus. We talked to our elected officials. Nothing moved the needle.

“If we had a faculty union, we wouldn’t be in this situation...We need a faculty union now.”

Cantanese said SEIU reached out to the university in the hope that it will welcome faculty’s efforts to unionize.

Penn State did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“As a teacher, I know that my working conditions are my students’ learning conditions,” said Kate Ragon, an assistant clinical professor of labor and employment relations at University Park, Penn State’s main campus. “We want a voice in the decision-making that affects us, affects our students, and affects our work.”

The three other state-related universities in Pennsylvania ― Temple, the University of Pittsburgh, and Lincoln ― already have faculty unions. Temple’s has existed for more than 50 years and its graduate student workers have been unionized for about 25 years. Lincoln’s formed in 1972. Pitt’s is more recent. It was established in 2021.

Faculty at Rutgers, New Jersey’s flagship university, are unionized, too. So are the 10 universities in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.

Faculty in the alliance have said they hope to secure better wages and benefits, job security protections, and a greater role in decision making. When they announced plans to form a union last March, they said they wanted full and part-time, tenure, and non-tenure faculty to be included as members and believed all campuses would be involved except for the medical school faculty at Hershey.