PITTSBURGH (PAI)--Are private college professors managers?

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is once again tackling that question in a nine-year-old TNG-CWA case that has bounced up and down between the board, its Pittsburgh office and federal courts.

The case involves the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild’s organizing drive at Point Park University, where faculty voted overwhelmingly in favor of a collective bargaining unit.

That was in 2003. Since then, an NLRB administrative law judge twice has ruled that the 77 eligible professors aren’t managers – as the school argues – and therefore have the right to unionize.

The university administration’s appeals have kept the fight alive in the courts. Federal judges sent the case back to the NLRB, seeking clarification on the school’s claim that the professors are managers who wouldn’t be covered under the National Labor Relations Act.

Now the NLRB is asking anyone interested to submit briefs by July 6.

The case is important to the Guild, CWA, the UAW and other unions that been organizing and attempting to organize professional staff and faculty on college campuses nationwide.  

In the Pittsburgh case, NLRB Regional Director Gerald Kobell said that even after taking into account new evidence from Point Park, he still found that professors aren’t managers.

 “Faculty members are not presumed to be managerial employees,” Kobell’s second ruling said.  “The party seeking to exclude faculty” from labor law protection “has the burden of coming forward with evidence necessary to establish such an exclusion.”

Kobell said the key to determining the managerial status of college faculty “is whether the faculty so controls the academic affairs of the school that their interests are aligned with those of the university or whether they occupy a role more like that of a professional employee in the ‘pyramidal hierarchies of private industries,’

“The record here establishes the faculty’s lack of control over the academic affairs of the university and the divergence of the interests of the faculty and the administration,” he said.