South Dakota becomes fourth state to ban faculty unions at public colleges

South Dakota lawmakers have approved a ban on faculty unions at public universities, a move which would make the state the fourth to outlaw collective bargaining at public colleges.

The Republican-led South Dakota State House sent the legislation Tuesday to GOP Gov. Kristi Noem for her signature. Employees at the state’s schools for the visually and hearing-impaired are exempted in the bill, which Ms. Noem’s team says she supports.

South Dakota would join Virginia, Texas and Wisconsin in banning faculty labor unions on public campuses.

“If [the bill is] passed, faculty senates on our campuses would have more power, more influence than they currently do,” Tiffany Sanderson, an adviser to Ms. Noem, told a state Senate committee last month.

Currently, roughly 200 faculty are dues-paying members of the union, representing a faculty body of 1,400. Ms. Sanderson said the bill would see faculty publicy “propose and debate employment policies” at Board of Regent meetings, rather than through contract negotiations.

But the state’s public faculty bargaining agent, the Council on Higher Education, says the legislation would dramatically reduce the South Dakota’s ability to recruit and retain “world class faculty.”

Democrats in the state Legislature opposed the bill, which they argue is a solution in search of the wrong problem.

“It’s unfortunate that the South Dakota legislature has chosen to target our universities’ faculty and staff as the problem to South Dakota’s higher education system,” Democratic state Rep. Ryan Cwach told The Washington Times. “The reality is that the South Dakota Legislature has created the problem by failing to adequately fund our universities.”

Mr. Cwach cites higher-than-average student debt for the state’s higher education — a consequence of inadequate state funding, he says — as a better target for the legislature’s focus.

During a Tuesday hearing, Republicans focused less on cost-savings and more on flexibility to hire “professors of practice,” or those who lack academic credentials but posses industry experience.

“Higher education is changing as the workforce needs of our state are changing and it is imperative that our institutions of higher learning are as flexible and adaptive as possible to do that change,” said House Majority Whip Jon Hansen, the bill’s sponsor. “If one of our universities want to hire an accomplished individual with significant industry experience but the person was lacking your traditional academic credentials … they wouldn’t be able to do so.”

Supporters of the bill point to a similar action the state Legislature took up two years ago to rid technical colleges of collective bargaining obligations.

Faculty who spoke on condition of anonymity to The Times said no official communication had been made to them about how the changes to collective bargaining might affect tenure and retirement packages. Some voiced concern about the loss of competitiveness in attracting faculty to the state.

Robert L. Turner III, an associate professor of Spanish and chairman of the University Senate at the University of South Dakota, told The Times the faculty Senate passed a resolution affirming collective bargaining.

Public employee unions are banned in traditionally right-to-work states such as Virginia, South Carolina and North Carolina. Texas and Wisconsin also ban college faculty from organizing for contractual purposes. In 2011, then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker signed a bill into law outlawing faculty unions to compensate for a million-dollar state deficit.

By 2017, teacher benefit packages had dropped 8.2%, according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. The free-market MacIver Institute touts Act 10 saved Wisconsin more than $3 million.

While faculty unions have been under the gun in many conservative states, a victory for labor in Virginia is on the way. Last month, the newly empowered Democratic majority in the Virginia House of Delegates sent a bill to the Senate that would reinstate collective bargaining for some public employees.