(RNS) — Non-tenure-track faculty at Marquette University, a Jesuit school in Milwaukee, had been working for months to unionize and were preparing for a National Labor Relations Board-sanctioned election to join the United Campus Workers of Wisconsin when, in October, their employer invoked a religious exemption to quash their efforts.
Giordana Poggioli-Kaftan, a non-tenured faculty member who directs the Italian program, and a Catholic, was bewildered. “ I don’t understand how that is possible,” she told RNS. Not only had other Catholic institutions already unionized, but papal teachings stretching over a century promote unions.
A September 2024 report by the Catholic Labor Network listed more than 20 Catholic universities in the United States that have some type of faculty union, representing less than 10% of U.S. Catholic higher education. In the last 15 years, at least eight Catholic universities have invoked religious exemptions to avoid recognizing unions that include faculty or graduate students.
The move has become easier in recent years, since the requirements to receive an exemption from the NLRB only stipulate that the university be nonprofit, present itself as religious and have a religious affiliation.
Religious exemptions to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which gave employees the legal right to form and join unions, have been worked out ever since in federal court cases and the NLRB rulings that have often turned on which employees were eligible for …