AFT/Wisconsin President Jon Shelton addresses union leaders from Universities of Wisconsin campuses before the group briefly attended the Board of Regents meeting Thursday. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Universities of Wisconsin faculty and staff employees seeking a voice in UW operations have gained the ears of a number of UW regents, a union leader said Thursday, and want their request for recognition put on the Board of Regents agenda in October.

In March, American Federation of Teachers/Wisconsin leaders had hoped to confront the regents with their campaign to give faculty and staff employees a voice. Their efforts to meet in person then were thwarted.

AFT/Wisconsin’s immediate aim is to gain an agreement from the regents that would enable the union and university management to “meet and confer” over compensation and working conditions for faculty and academic staff in a non-binding process.

AFT/Wisconsin President Jon Shelton said Thursday that “a lot has happened” to advance the union’s goals since the March demonstration.

“We’ve started to have some really productive conversations with a number of individual regents,” Shelton told the Wisconsin Examiner just before a rally outside the University of Wisconsin-Madison building where the regents were meeting Thursday.

“We’d really like to see a meet-and-confer policy on the agenda in the Board of Regents’ October meeting,” said Shelton, a professor at the UW-Green Bay. “We’ve communicated that to the Board of Regents and feel like we’re really making progress.”

The rally preceded a silent demonstration at the start of the regents’ meeting Thursday in the Gordon Dining and Event Center on the UW-Madison campus.

A couple of dozen union members and supporters took seats in the meeting room in the 20 minutes or so before the meeting started at 1 p.m. They sat silently during the opening remarks, which started with an admonition from Board President Amy Bogost that any disruption “will be handled swiftly with responsible individuals subject to disciplinary action and/or citations for the disruption.”

At about 2 minutes into the meeting, the union group stood and silently walked out when Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman spoke to address the regents.

The campaign for union recognition took shape two years ago at a summit by faculty and campus advocates seeking “to do something about the diminishing conditions in the education system,” Shelton said at the rally before the meeting.

“And one of the things that we decided to do that day was to push for union recognition in the education system,” he said. “And for too long our voices as workers had been ignored by administration after administration after administration on campuses across the education system.”

A university system spokesman said Thursday that campuses rely on shared governance for faculty and staff input.

“Leadership at our universities and at the Universities of Wisconsin Administration meet regularly with shared governance groups to consult on a wide range of matters,” said Mark Pitsch, director of media relations for the Universities of Wisconsin. “These shared governance groups are authorized by state statute and regent policy as the official, elected bodies to represent faculty and staff.”

Campus union leaders contend, however, the shared governance system is ineffectual.

Speaking at the rally before the regents’ meeting, Lauren Gantz, an English professor at UW-Stevens Point, said there has been “very little discussion in shared governance” to work out details of a partnership with another college, and “no real concern for the working conditions of our faculty and academic staff” in the arrangement.

Gantz, who is co-president of an AFT faculty and staff union at UW-Stevens Point, said in an interview that among the top issues for faculty and staff seeking union representation was workload.

“We’ve lost a lot of personnel, both faculty and academic and university staff,” Gantz said. “We’ve had repeated discussions about the burnout conditions on our campus, and we’d like to be able to actually take some concrete steps to deal with that rather than slapping a Band-Aid on things.”

A rally speaker, Stephanie Spehar, former president of the faculty and staff union at the UW Oshkosh, said that when the university was confronted with a deficit of $18 million in 2023, “our administration did not consult with any of us workers” about how to address the deficit. “If they had done that, if we had meet and confer, I think we would have had very different outcomes,” she said.

Shelton said in an interview the union’s meet-and-confer proposal includes provisions that would require the union to demonstrate support from 35% of an individual university’s faculty and staff on a petition or a total of 500 people.

“This is not like some small minority of people who are pushing for this,” he said.

The union is asking for meet-and-confer discussion because collective bargaining is currently off limits as a result of the 2011 law known as Act 10, stripping most public employees in Wisconsin of most union rights. Although the law is now the subject of a lawsuit and a Dane County circuit court judge found it unconstitutional, the law remains in effect while the case is appealed.

The meet-and-confer is just a first step, however, Shelton told the rally. “And then next year, it’s flipping the Legislature” from a Republican majority to a Democratic one “and pushing for a collective bargaining bill in the UW system,” he said. “Because every single worker deserves to have a seat at the table and collective bargaining.”