A Field Guide for Faculty Unions Under Fire
When a public university invokes retrenchment (the contractual mechanism for laying off its workforce), the typical union response follows a familiar script. An emergency email goes out to members. A rally is scheduled. Someone drafts a petition. Leadership asks members to customize the subject line of a form letter to their state legislators and hit send. Within weeks, the energy dissipates, the administration controls the narrative, and the layoffs proceed on schedule.
This is not a failure of effort. It is a failure of planning.
That failure points to a different theory of how faculty unions should respond to institutional crisis: a coordinated operational strategy, in which internal contract enforcement and external political pressure function as a single system. Every grievance filed generates content for a legislative campaign. Every cost analysis feeds both the Board of Trustees testimony and a social media post. Every department-level unit representative functions as a compliance monitor, an intelligence gatherer, and a constituent mobilizer.
Servicing vs. Organizing in a Crisis
The labor movement has been debating two models of union operation for nearly four decades. The AFL-CIO’s 1988 manual, Numbers that Count, distinguished between the servicing and organizing models. In the servicing model, the union’s elected leadership and paid staff handle problems on behalf of a passive membership. Specialists file grievances. Officers draft communications. The membership receives updates, votes when asked, and returns to their departments. In the organizing model, the union treats every workplace issue as an opportunity to develop member capacity, build relationships, and expand the organization’s reach into every corner of the institution.
Kaminski’s 2024 research, drawing on the Harvard Trade Union Program, found that transformational and servant leadership styles were the strongest predictors of union effectiveness. Laissez-faire leadership, combined with a service-oriented approach in which the president manages workstreams, the executive council deliberates, and the membership receives updates, was the worst-performing combination. Personality traits had no significant independent effect after controlling for leadership style. The wrong structure defeats the right person every time.
Milkman and Voss reinforce this in Rebuilding Labor: declining member participation is a consequence of organizational strategy, not an independent variable that constrains it. A union whose primary public-facing strategy is asking members to send customizable emails to legislators is not giving people a reason to show up. And the emails themselves are symptomatic. A blanket message to every legislator in the state is an ask. A targeted campaign that identifies which legislators sit on education and appropriations committees, maps those who represent the university’s students and alumni, and organizes constituent pressure on those specific offices is a power analysis. The difference between the two is the difference between hoping and organizing.
The Rutgers strike of 2023 showed what this looks like in practice. Three locals representing five bargaining units struck after years of coalition-building through the Coalition of Rutgers Unions, formed during the COVID-era layoffs of 2020. The contract gains were real, but what survived the strike was the alliance itself, an organization capable of coordinating action across units toward concrete demands. By the time the crisis arrived, the organizational scaffolding was already standing. Not because someone wrote a stirring email, but because someone had spent years assembling the infrastructure. The California Faculty Association’s coordinated bargaining across 23 Cal State campuses reinforced the principle from another direction: demands framed not as “save our university” but as a workforce argument about what the system needed to serve its students.
A coordinated operational strategy has several defining features:
First, internal enforcement and external advocacy must be designed as a single system. Most union chapters treat grievance work and political action as separate functions assigned to different vice presidents who rarely coordinate. In a retrenchment crisis, this separation guarantees defeat. Every procedural violation the bargaining team documents internally is evidence that elected officials can cite. Every cost analysis prepared for Board testimony is content for a social media campaign. The two tracks are two uses of the same evidence.
Second, every action item must have an owner. Democratic governance is non-negotiable. But democracy without operational specificity produces paralysis. If the coordinated action plan says “monitor retrenchment compliance,” someone’s name must be next to it, with a deadline, a defined output, and a reporting structure. The unit representative network, the department-level faculty members who connect leadership strategy to workplace reality, must be activated as monitors, not informed as recipients.
Third, communications must be rooted in documented facts rather than general outrage. The most credible content a faculty union has is the evidence its own bargaining team generates through contract enforcement. A social media post that says “the administration is failing us” is noise. A post that says "our bargaining team identified that the university bypassed the contractual layoff order when selecting employees for retrenchment; we have filed a grievance" is a governance-failure narrative, backed by documentary evidence. The conversion of internal findings into external content must be systematized, with approval chains, platform-specific adaptation, and a 48-hour turnaround protocol.
Fourth, the strategy must operate on a multi-session timeline. The most common mistake in legislative advocacy is treating the current session as a single shot. If the legislature does not act during a session, the typical union declares defeat and demobilizes. A coordinated strategy treats each legislative session as one phase in a longer power-building project. The notice periods required by most retrenchment clauses, which can run from three months to a full year depending on employee category, create a lobbying runway, not a countdown.
The Four Layers
These four principles translate into four operational documents: a coordinated action plan mapping collective bargaining agreement (CBA) deadlines to the legislative calendar, a work distribution aligned with constitutional roles, a bargaining team operation with zone assignments and enforcement timelines, and a communications playbook with messaging principles and approval workflows. Each layer rests on the one before it. None works alone.
The first is the “no savings” math. Under a typical CBA, the university must provide notice before laying off bargaining unit members, and those notice periods vary: up to 12 months for senior tenured faculty and non-tenure-track faculty on continuous appointment, six months for academic professionals and mid-career faculty, and three months for junior and fixed-term employees. During those notice periods, the university saves nothing. Full salary, benefits, and retirement contributions continue to be provided. Severance costs the same. Recall rights block new hiring in affected departments for years. The total cost of retrenchment, including the loss of institutional knowledge, program teach-out obligations, and reputational damage, likely exceeds the short-term savings. This is the most counterintuitive fact in any retrenchment situation, and the one that stops elected officials and journalists in their tracks.
The second is the workforce framing. The weakest version of the union’s argument is “save our university.” The strongest version names specific workforce pipelines: the social work program that graduated nearly 90 MSW students last year and now serves the state’s child welfare system. The education program that fills more than a thousand unfilled teaching positions statewide. The engineering pipeline that feeds the state’s semiconductor and infrastructure employers. A union that walks into a legislator’s office with program-specific workforce data and says, “here are the professionals your constituents depend on, and here is what it costs to keep training them,” is making a different kind of ask than one that says, “please fund us.”
The administration will counter immediately with a single, repeating narrative: these are difficult but necessary decisions made in the interest of long-term institutional health. The union’s response must preempt this on two fronts. The “no savings” math demonstrates that retrenchment is a contraction, not a crisis-management measure. The governance-failure narrative, as documented in grievances, arbitration precedents, and Faculty Senate resolutions, shows that the process did not follow the university’s own rules. For instance, when an arbitrator has already ruled that the administration failed to involve faculty in budget decisions, and the Board’s own presiding officer has demanded transparency into contribution margins before programs are eliminated, the union would have amassed external validation, giving credence to the message that this is not responsible restructuring. It is administrative overreach with a public relations strategy.
Faculty Unions Are Not Industrial Unions
Most of the organizing literature that informs union strategy was developed for industrial, trade, and public-sector unions. Faculty unions draw on that tradition, but the differences are structural, which explains why the standard playbook often fails in higher education.
Faculty are the product and the labor. When an autoworkers’ union strikes, production stops. When faculty are laid off, the administration can claim the product (education) continues with remaining faculty, adjuncts, and online delivery. But fewer faculty mean larger class sizes, fewer course offerings, and degraded program quality, which in turn discourage enrollment and impair the revenue streams the institution depends on. A faculty union’s power in a retrenchment fight comes not from withholding labor but from demonstrating that the specific programs being eliminated produce the specific professionals that the state’s economy requires. The workforce argument is meant to replace the picket line, but it only works when backed by the same operational infrastructure described in this essay.
Shared governance creates a second front, at least in states with collective bargaining rights for faculty. Faculty unions in those states operate alongside Faculty Senates, curriculum committees, and program review processes, structures that industrial unions lack. A union’s retrenchment-response strategy must coordinate with these governance bodies, using Faculty Senate resolutions and governance failures as both internal pressure and external evidence. The union and the Faculty Senate are not the same institution, but in a crisis, they need to function as parallel channels carrying the same message.
Rank divides the bargaining unit. Its layers include tenured faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty on continuous appointment, academic professionals, probationary employees, and fixed-term employees, each with different notice periods, recall rights, and vulnerabilities. The CBA itself creates a layoff hierarchy that can divide the membership if the union does not build solidarity across ranks. The Rutgers model addressed this directly: tenure-stream faculty publicly acknowledged that the greatest gains from their strike would go to the most marginal workers, not to themselves.
Many unions organize across dispersed worksites: autoworkers across plants, teachers across schools. But universities add a layer of cultural resistance that most multi-site unions do not face. Academic departments view themselves as autonomous intellectual communities, not shop floors, and many faculty resist union involvement as incompatible with professional identity. Getting eyes on the ground in every affected department requires overcoming that resistance, not just covering geography. The coverage gap, departments without active unit representatives, is not a minor staffing problem. It erodes union culture among the very employees the contract is meant to protect, and when that culture is absent, CBA violations go undetected.
University retrenchment moves in months, not days, with consultation periods, provisional plans, comment windows, and appeals. That slowness is an advantage if the union has the structure to use it. It is a disadvantage if it creates the illusion that there is always more time to organize.
The Mobilization Trap
The typical faculty union response to retrenchment relies on what we might call the mobilization hypothesis: if enough people show up to the rally, send the email, and sign the petition, the administration will relent, and the legislature will act. The hypothesis is comforting because it locates the problem in member apathy, “if only more people cared,” rather than in organizational design.
The coordinated operational strategy rests on a different hypothesis: that the problem is insufficient structure, not a lack of commitment. People do not show up because they are not given meaningful work aligned with a clear strategy and visible results. A unit representative who is asked to “support the union” has no idea what to do on Monday morning. A unit representative who is asked to “verify whether the layoff notices in your department followed the contractual seniority order and report any violations to your assigned bargaining team member by Friday” knows what to do, understands why, and can see how their work connects to the legislative campaign their colleagues are running.
The Rutgers experience confirmed this. The coalition that produced the 2023 strike was not built through email. It was built by creating structures: the Coalition of Rutgers Unions, the cross-local Campaign Action Committee, the student coordinator position, and community partnerships around bargaining for the common good, which gave people concrete roles and responsibilities. When the strike came, the organization was already built.
The consequences of not building that infrastructure are visible at West Virginia University, where the administration eliminated 143 faculty positions across 28 programs in 2023, and at the University of Nebraska, where similar cuts proceeded over faculty objections. In both cases, the boards backed the administration, the unions mobilized too late, and the layoffs went through. Reactive mobilization without operational infrastructure produces outrage but not outcomes.
The four-step framework laid out here provides infrastructure for a different kind of crisis: a defensive campaign against retrenchment that must operate on two tracks across the full notice window, converting internal contract enforcement into external political pressure at every stage.
It is ambitious. Executing the full plan would require several full-time, dedicated people, a level of staffing that most faculty union chapters do not have. But the framework is modular. A chapter that cannot execute the full social media playbook could still implement the bargaining team’s college assignment matrix. A chapter that lacks the capacity for a three-phase content calendar may still produce the “no savings” cost analysis and present it to the trustees. The point is not that every chapter must do everything. The point is that someone must think through the structure before the crisis arrives, because the structure determines whether the energy generated by the crisis is captured and directed or dissipates into outrage and burnout.
The notice window that retrenchment clauses require should be viewed as a lobbying runway, not a slow-motion path to defeat. The question is whether a faculty union has built the operational infrastructure to use it.
If your chapter is facing retrenchment and you do not have a coordinated action plan, a work distribution tied to constitutional roles, a bargaining team operation with zone assignments, and a communications playbook that turns enforcement findings into published pressure, start building. Not next month. Now.