USC faculty rallied Wednesday to demand the university recognize their union with two new political allies on board — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and her reelection opponent, City Councilmember Nithya Raman — amid a growing dispute at one of the city’s largest employers.
A crowd of at least 200 faculty, students and supporters gathered at the Tommy Trojan statue on campus in the afternoon, holding signs saying “Union Now!” and “Respect Faculty Now,” and chanted, “Drop the appeal! Elections matter!”
USC, which has opposed the two-year effort to unionize thousands of adjunct, part-time and nontenure-track faculty, has turned to the nation’s highest labor board to toss the unionization vote.
The university argues that those faculty hold management rights through their role in shared governance, exempting them from unionizing under federal labor law, and that the bargaining unit, which spans instructors to pharmacists and therapists, is too broad.
Shared governance is the system in which faculty and administrators share authority over how a university is run. Faculty influence over big-picture decisions such as budgets and top appointments has declined nationally over the last two decades, and at USC, professors have complained that faculty input is often only advisory and can be overridden.
Bass sent USC President Beong-Soo Kim a letter this week urging him to drop the university’s legal challenge to a June vote to form a union and to “bargain in good faith.” Raman spoke at the rally, as did city attorney candidate Marissa Roy and state Sen. Lola Smallwood-Cuevas (D-Los Angeles).
“I’m so honored to stand with all of you who are fighting for your basic rights as workers,” Raman told the crowd. She noted that 40% of faculty nationally are adjuncts, like many of those in the crowd, with lower pay, fewer benefits and less job security than tenured faculty. USC, she said, has “taken this trend to an extreme.”
Noting that faculty first signed union cards in December 2024, she said USC “spent the next 15 months trying to prevent the election from even happening.”
“We want USC to drop their appeal to Trump’s NLRB,” Raman said. “We want USC to come to the table to bargain with faculty now.”
In a statement Wednesday, USC said that it was “grateful to our faculty for all they do for our students and as partners in our academic mission,” and that it wanted the labor board to “quickly review the validity” of the union election.
Wednesday’s rally took place as Bass and Raman vie for key labor backing in the mayor’s race. Bass has gained more than 30 union endorsements. Raman has landed five, notably including Unite Here Local 11, the hotel and airport workers union. It announced its support for her this week, citing her position in favor of a $30 hourly minimum wage for hospitality workers.
Raman also picked up an endorsement this week from the L.A. chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, a sign of the left-wing energy behind her campaign.
The USC union, United Faculty-UAW, represents about 2,700 nontenure-track faculty across more than 20 schools and the USC libraries, including lecturers, researchers, clinicians, librarians and pharmacists. In June, 1,272 faculty voted to unionize, about 70%.
USC has refused to recognize the result, asking the National Labor Relations Board to throw it out. It has presented the same managerial-employee and bargaining-unit arguments in its appeal, filed June 1, after the March regional labor board decision that allowed the election to proceed. Earlier in the case, USC also argued that the NLRB’s own structure is unconstitutional — a position a regional labor board director rejected in the March ruling.
USC’s constitutionality argument mirrors ones made by Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX in their labor cases. Those companies have argued the NLRB’s structure violates the Constitution’s separation of powers because the agency combines investigative, prosecutorial and judicial power.
USC’s labor board appeal remains pending before a board reshaped recently by a new President Trump-appointed majority viewed by experts as less favorable to organized labor.
The university union dispute is playing out as USC navigates its own budget strains, having laid off more than 1,000 workers last year amid a $200-million deficit, even as leaders say it’s on track to end the year in the black.
For union members, the fight has been deeply personal, touching on pay, healthcare and job security.
“Every October, USC reduces our healthcare options, and at this point only the most expensive plan covers my doctors,” said Sanjay Madhav, a Viterbi School of Engineering professor of practice who has muscular dystrophy. “A union contract would guarantee that the administration could not continue to unilaterally change our benefits.”
Janis Yue, an assistant professor of clinical occupational therapy, said she lost access to a therapist after USC changed its coverage last year.
“It felt ironic that as a healthcare worker providing mental health services to the community surrounding USC, that USC was taking away my own mental health options,” she said.
Dan Lainer-Vis, an assistant professor of sociology who has taught at USC since 2008, said his pay has not kept up with inflation and rising costs of living. “Alone, I can only feel bad about it, but as a union, we can demand improvements together,” he said.
Not everyone backs the union. In an open letter last spring, faculty from the Gould School of Law said they were “unanimously opposed” to being included in it.
In another letter, two Viterbi professors also objected. One, Steve Bucher, wrote that “the current level of shared governance at USC is untenable and must improve,” but that “turning over a defining part of our professional identities to an outside union is unlikely to advance faculty agency or influence.”
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