Since SEIU filed the petition, we have worked diligently to facilitate the election process and today have reached what’s called a “stipulated election agreement” with the NLRB and the union. This type of agreement provides voting unit employees the opportunity to vote in the election without delays.
This agreement includes a description of the voting unit, the date and manner of the election, and other details required by the NLRB. The agreement will be available for your review once it is approved by the NLRB, which we expect will occur sometime later today or perhaps tomorrow. Once the NLRB sends out the Notices of Election, we will make sure to publish those just as we did with the Notices of Petition Filing in various visible areas on campus. In the meantime, please note the NLRB will mail ballots to all eligible voting faculty on May 8, 2024 with a return date of June 5, 2024.
An important point is that all parties to this election agreement agreed that some of our faculty will be voting “subject to challenge” (should they decide to cast a ballot in this election), in keeping with the NLRB procedures. It is worthwhile spending some time on this point to avoid confusion or misunderstanding.
When the SEIU filed their election petition, they correctly stated that “managers and supervisors” should be excluded from the voting group consistent with federal labor law. Ballots cast by “statutory supervisors” or “managers” are subject to challenge because the law provides that these individuals should not be part of a unit with non-managerial/non-supervisory employees, which could lead to a conflict of interest.
As of today, we were unable to reach an overall agreement with the union as to which of our teaching faculty qualify as managers and/or supervisors under the NLRB guidelines. To avoid delaying the scheduling of the election and proceeding to an NLRB pre-election hearing on these issues, the parties instead have agreed that certain faculty members can vote “subject to challenge.” This way, the election can go forward, and these voter eligibility issues can be decided after the election, if necessary.
Eligible voting faculty will receive a ballot in the mail, have the right to complete the ballot and mail it back to the NLRB in New Orleans. However, challenged ballots may or may not ultimately be counted in this election. These determinations will be made at a later date and involve legal considerations we will do our best to explain prior to the election. For now, we wanted to provide a general overview of where things stand today.