Research Panel: Examining the Employment Profile of Institutions Under the Mission-Driven Classification System and the Impact of Collective Bargaining

In his 1982 book, Why Teachers Organize?, education historian Wayne Urban suggested that the emergence of collective bargaining among local teacher organizations was an important development that helped faculty work together to establish employment guidelines and increase their overall compensation through the expansion of shared fringe benefits.The impact of collective bargaining has not diminished since its emergence and, in fact, continues at institutions to this day.As the U.S. continues to recover from the Great Recession that began in late 2007, and higher education institutions continue to face financial difficulties of persistently decreasing state funding as a portion of their operating budgets, collective bargaining serves an important role in determining the compensation and benefits awarded to employees at higher education institutions.Recent studies have examined the number of higher education institutions and their employees who utilize collective bargaining.The 2012 Directory of U.S. faculty contracts and bargaining agents in institutions of higher education (Berry & Savarese) found that, since 2006, two-year colleges added 50,000 members under unionized contracts, as the overall number of agreements increased.These agreements included part-time faculty and graduate student employees.In 2014, Sproul, Bucklew, and Houghton utilized the Union Membership and Coverage Database developed from the Current Population Survey (Hirsch & Macpherson,