Tenured and tenure-track faculty at Miami University will vote on whether to form a union on Tuesday, April 18.
The election will be conducted by mail through the State Employment Relations Board (SERB) and will give the over 800 eligible faculty members until May 2 to complete their ballots. Approximately 80% of Miami's total faculty will be able to participate during the two-week voting period.
The votes will be counted at SERB's office in Columbus on May 17. Faculty Alliance of Miami (FAM) will need just over 50% of the vote to solidify the union.
Representatives from FAM say they expect faculty to approve of the union and will be seeking to win by a wide margin to give the bargaining unit more leverage when it negotiates with the university.
Get caught up:Miami University professors will soon have a vote on whether or not to form a union
On Sunday, FAM announced another bargaining unit representing Miami University librarians would be moving forward with a vote of their own.
FAM originally intended to include all full-time faculty in the union but at the beginning of March, a ruling from SERB determined the first bargaining unit could only include certain faculty and excluded librarians, assistant professors, and hybrid-faculty positions from voting and joining the union. Shortly after the ruling, librarians at the university filed for recognition of their own bargaining unit, which was approved.
Special collections librarian Rachel Makarowski says the university's librarians have been a part of Miami's push for unionization from the beginning. Makarowski herself helps coordinate FAM's outreach effort. Even though her department was left out of the first union vote, she stands by the group's message of "One Faculty. One FAM," and continued to encourage her fellow librarians to organize. Now it appears to have paid off, and she is confident the group of around 40 librarians will vote to support the union.
Dive deeper:Miami faculty and administration in fight over union lines
"In terms of overall numbers, it is quite small but we have a very high percentage of those people who are supporters," Makarowski said. "When they took us out of the unit. We decided to go forward with making this kind of its own contract unit. We knew we would for sure hit beyond the simple majority when it came time for a vote."
Miami's librarians are expected to hold a union election sometime this summer.
