There are over 4,000 employees at Central Michigan University. Just like any business or institution, these individuals are the gears that maintain the university and serve over 14,000 students who help fund CMU through their tuition.

While CMU employees work to improve the campus and help students every day, over 1,200 employees are members of nine unions that work with university officials to ensure the workers they represent have stable wages and proper benefits.

What is a union?

A trade or labor union is an organization of employees that advocates for better work benefits and protects workers’ rights. Each union represents a specific group of employees and the work environment they are in:

National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians (NABET)
Central Michigan University Dispatchers Association (CMUDA)
Michigan Fraternal Order of Police Labor Council (MFOPLC)
Central Michigan Command Officers Association (CMCOA)
United Auto Workers (UAW), which oversees CMU’s Union for Office Professionals
American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)
Supervisor/Technical Association (or MEA-NEA)
Faculty Association (FA)
Union of Teaching Faculty (UTF)

Robert Schumacker is the director of CMU’s leadership minor and the president of UTF. This spring, for the first time as president, he will negotiate for better wages and benefits for himself and the rest of the university’s fixed-term faculty, he said.

Schumaker said the purpose of a union is to create a better work environment and preserve workers’ rights.

“It’s really about protection,” Schumacker said. “We’re protecting our rights, the university’s protecting their rights.”

AFSCME, NABET and the UAW will also begin negotiating their contracts after April 1. According to AFSCME President and CMU Journey Mason George Moore, the union and the university go page-by-page through the contract to review and revise any agreements made by both parties.

“Sixty days prior (to July 31), we’ll start doing tentative negotiations,” Moore said. “If management wants to change something or if we do, then we discuss the changes.”

These contracts contain detailed information on salaries, benefits, procedures and job protections.

Moore and other union representatives meet with CMU Director of Employee and Labor Relations Scott Hoffman. He negotiates on behalf of the university and helps certify contracts once both parties come to an agreement.

He said that the university works to meet the unions’ requests while also being conservative of the university’s funding.

“It’s always a balancing of the use of resources in the most effective way to accommodate all of those interests,” Hoffman said.

Unions at CMU

There are different considerations in colleges and universities than there are in the corporate world, according to Schumacker.

“A corporation’s job is to make money. It’s all about their bottom line,” he said. “In education, we’re here to educate the students. Having the right language in these contracts so that each side’s protected in way that no one’s vulnerable, is really the goal.”

This is a goal shared by both university officials and the unions. As an employer, Hoffman said that the university tries to maintain both gathering new employees and retaining skilled faculty and staff.

“From the unions’ perspective, my inkling is that they’re looking for what benefits their group as a whole,” Hoffman said. “Oftentimes they’re looking for things like, obviously, wages, benefits, job security, those types of items. Those items are also important to the employer.

“We want to be competitive when it comes to competing for potential new employees, as well as retaining talented employees that we have here on campus,” he said.

According to Schumacker, in order to get great staff, CMU has to get potential applicants interested in CMU. This comes in things like good wages and benefits, all things that the unions and CMU negotiate.

Amanda Garrison is a professor at CMU and is the president of the FA. She agreed with Schumacker and said a professor’s salary plays a role in a student’s education.

“If we want to be the best for our students and for each other, we have to have the best things,” Garrison said.

The polarization around joining a union

Unions have been part of the U.S. workforce since the first unionization of cobble and leather workers in 1794 according to PBS. Today, Americans are still divided on how unions affect the nation’s economy.

In 2024, Pew Research found that 55% of Americans believe that unions have a positive impact on the economy, and 41% believe that unions have a negative impact.

Schumacker said that supporting unions could often be divisive.

“Unions have had a negative view in some parts of society because, ‘Oh they demand higher wages and companies have to charge more for their product,’” he said.

Some laws have been seen as “anti-union” such as the Right to Work Act. This law allows employees to gain union benefits without having to pay union dues, which financially support union services. The law was removed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) in February of 2024, helping unions in private organizations.

However, unions in the public sector are still affected by a similar law. According to the June 27, 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 public employees can be represented by a union group but aren’t required to pay “fair share fees” or “agency fees,” which financially support unions.

“You’re part of a union, but you don’t have to pay union dues,” Schumacker said. “You don’t have to provide any financial assistance. ... You don’t have to be part of the group, but we still have to represent you.”

Despite negative claims against the unionization of employees, the U.S. Treasury found a correlation between the declining membership rates to unions and a rise of income inequality for American citizens. According to Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomics for the U.S. Treasury Laura Feiveson, unions “promote economy-wide growth and resilience.”

Schumacker said that supporting a union doesn’t have to be political, and there are several advantages for a workforce that is united.

“A united voice is better than just one person,” he said. “It’s kind of like having a team that is all trying to have the same goal of having the best contract and then being able to support families.”