Unequal Capacity Should Not Become Unequal Voice
When union leaders confuse showing up with standing up
Recently, a faculty union chapter communicated with its members about concerns raised about an event announcement. In their response, the chapter’s elected leaders emphasized that members who want to influence the union’s direction need to show up and participate in the spaces where decisions are actually made.
It was one line in a longer message, and it was almost certainly meant as encouragement, a call to participate, to show up, to be heard. But encouragement can carry assumptions, and this one carried a significant one: that a member’s voice in the union is, at some level, earned through attendance.
This reflects a pattern one sees across institutional life, not only in unions but in faculty senates, professional associations, community organizations, and anywhere that representative governance meets the messy reality of who has time to be in the room on a Thursday evening.
The chapter’s constitution clearly defines its membership. An active member is anyone included in the collective bargaining unit. The term confers voting rights and the right to hold office. It does not require committee service, meeting attendance, or any particular form of visible engagement. One is a member because of one’s position in the unit. That is the constitutional baseline.
The leadership’s message, however, used “active” in a different sense: a behavioral one. It distinguished between the general membership and those who regularly participate in governance, and it placed the union’s “public voice” in the choices and priorities of the latter group. The word hadn’t changed, but its meaning had shifted from a legal category to a moral one: from who you are to what you do.
It’s easy to miss, but when a union begins to treat participation as the price of representational standing, it introduces a hierarchy among members that the constitution does not recognize. It creates, in effect, two classes: those who show up and steer the conversation, and those who, for whatever reason, do not, and whose silence is taken as consent, disengagement, or forfeiture.
The reasons people don’t attend meetings are not hard to figure out. An adjunct faculty member teaching five sections at two institutions doesn’t skip governance meetings out of apathy. A staff member without job security might reasonably calculate that visibility carries risk. A single parent might simply not have a Thursday evening free. A faculty member managing a chronic illness might have the energy for teaching and grading but not for a two-hour meeting followed by a drive home in the dark. These aren’t signs of indifference. They are the material conditions of work and life that the union, in theory, exists to address.
The entire point of representative governance is to account for these asymmetries, to ensure that people who cannot be continuously present are still represented by the officers and councils they elect. This is not a workaround. It is the design.
Article IV of the chapter’s constitution assigns policy-making authority to an elected Executive Council, not to whomever happens to be assembled on a given evening. This isn’t a concession to low turnout or a default triggered by member disengagement. It is how democratic governance works: members elect representatives, those representatives act on their behalf, and members hold them accountable through elections and the constitutional power to overrule council actions by vote. The feedback loop is periodic, not continuous. That is how representative systems work: in unions, in legislatures, in any body that recognizes the impossibility of permanent assembly.
Open meetings matter within this structure. They provide transparency, access, and the opportunity for members to observe deliberation and contribute when they can. But when “you are welcome to attend” becomes “your absence has been noted,” a democratic feature turns into a gatekeeping function. The open door begins to operate less as an invitation than as a test.
This extends well beyond any single chapter or any single exchange. In many institutional settings, participation is treated as civic virtue, and non-participation as its opposite. The people who serve on committees, attend forums, and draft resolutions are understood to be the ones who care. Everyone else is background noise, or worse, free riders benefiting from the labor of the committed few.
That frustration is fair. The people who do the work of governance are often stretched thin themselves, and their irritation with empty chairs is earned. But the conclusion they sometimes draw—that those chairs’ absence diminishes those members’ claim on the institution—is a step too far. It confuses the legitimate desire for more engagement with a structural argument about who counts.
And it ignores what should be obvious: the capacity to participate is not equally distributed. Time, energy, job security, caregiving responsibilities, health, geographic proximity, and relationship to institutional power all determine who can afford to be in the room. When institutions treat presence as a proxy for commitment, they reward the already-advantaged and marginalize those whose circumstances keep them at a distance. The person with a tenure-line position, no children at home, and an office down the hall from the meeting room is not more committed than the person who couldn’t make it. They just have fewer barriers to participation.
Unions, of all institutions, should know better. The labor movement was built on the principle that collective power compensates for individual vulnerability: that workers who cannot protect themselves alone can protect one another through solidarity and structure. A union that conditions voice on visibility risks reproducing the very inequalities it exists to counteract. It begins to function less like a collective and more like a club, where influence accrues to those with the bandwidth to claim it.
None of this is to say that participation doesn’t matter. It does. Unions are stronger when members engage, and elected leaders are right to encourage it. The work of governance is hard, often thankless, and carried by too few people. But there is a difference between inviting participation and implying that representation depends on it. The first enriches democratic life. The second quietly narrows it.
As the exclusive representative of the bargaining unit, a union chapter’s authority and responsibilities extend to every member, the ones who attend every meeting and the ones who haven’t been to one in years. Its legitimacy comes from its constitutional mandate and the consent of the governed, expressed through elections, not from the composition of any given room on any given evening.
Representative governance exists so that unequal capacity does not become unequal voice. That principle is easy to affirm in the abstract. The harder work is noticing the small rhetorical moves—the shift from constitutional category to behavioral expectation, from open doors to implied obligations—that erode it in practice. These moves are rarely made in bad faith. They come from the habits of institutional life, from the tendency to equate what is visible with what is real. But intent doesn’t determine effect. And the effect, over time, is a union culture in which standing quietly migrates from the constitution to the calendar, from who you are to how often you appear.
The members who aren’t in the room are still members. Their union speaks for them, too. That is not a limitation of representative governance. It is the whole point.