Following a lightning-fast campaign, the faculty of Western New Mexico University (WNMU) have formed WNMU Faculty NEA, a new NEA-affiliated union.
This journey started just months ago, following the WNMU president’s resignation in December 2024. In the shadow of this leadership crisis (more on that later), unionization was viewed “as one way to overcome a persistent sense of isolation and bewilderment,” suggests an WNMU Faculty NEA member, which had been “exacerbated by an increasingly top-heavy and opaque administration.”
Within weeks of beginning their campaign, with the “renewed hope that we can indeed improve the structure of our university and serve our students more effectively,” says Professor Andy Hernández, faculty union organizers had collected signatures and cards from more than two-thirds of WNMU’s faculty and librarians.
Under New Mexico law, once employees in a defined unit submit authorization cards signed by more than 50 percent of employees, union recognition is automatic. Today, union membership spans all WNMU departments, schools, and colleges, including the university library.
First: A Look Back in History
Unionization carries a special resonance in Silver City, the county seat of Grant County, a community with a storied labor history. Most notably, Grant County is the site of the Empire Zinc strike waged by the International Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers, Local 890, from October 1950 to January 1952, which is the subject of the controversial 1954 film Salt of the Earth. Denounced on the House floor in the U.S. Capitol in 1953 by U.S. Representative Donald Jackson, of California (at the behest of Howard Hughes), Salt became the only film blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
In the Empire Zinc strike, miners challenged racist practices including segregated changing facilities at the mine and substandard housing for Mexican and Mexican American miners in Santa Rita, the company town adjacent to the mine, where running water was provided only to white miners’ homes. When a Silver City judge’s injunction seemed to end the strike by prohibiting miners from continuing, many miners’ wives jumped in to keep it going. The miners ultimately prevailed.
Although Local 890 was decertified in 2014, the original union hall in which portions of Salt were filmed remains standing, with colorful murals depicting moments from the Empire Zinc strike still visible from U.S. Highway 180. The wooden headframe of the Empire Zinc Mine also remains standing, approximately ten miles from WNMU’s Silver City campus, where in 1983, WNMU named a newly constructed student-services building for miner Juan Chacón, the charismatic union president and male lead in Salt opposite Mexican actor Rosaura Ravueltas. When students, faculty, and staff enter the Juan Chacón Building, they brush against the landmark strike and the film that immortalized not only union leader Juan Chacón, but also the many other locals who were cast in the film.
WNMU’s identity and mission was forged by this history. As a member of New Mexico’s Independent Community College Consortium (NMICC), WNMU is an open-access university, offering two-year as well as baccalaureate and master’s degrees. WNMU also is a federally designated Hispanic-serving institution (HSI), a focal point since the implementation of the annual Con Ganas Summer Institute in 2023, in which faculty are engaged in developing a climate of servingness to improve success rates for all students by providing culturally relevant experiences in both physical and virtual classes.
More Recent Events: WNMU’s Leadership Crisis
When online learning in higher education exploded this past decade, WNMU, like many other colleges and universities, navigated the new terrain with its local, commuter and residential student population on one hand and an online community of students, many from other states, on the other.
In 2020, then-university president Joseph Shepard initiated the “Road to 4K” and implemented a customer-service training model for faculty and staff with the intent of increasing enrollment, but significant increases never materialized. Then, in November 2023, the first of many damning allegations about the unethical use of state funds and university resources appeared, stalling WNMU’s forward movement on various fronts. University officials struggled to manage the resulting state-level public-relations crisis; Shepard resigned on December 20, 2024.
Soon after, in an unprecedented move, WNMU’s Board of Regents awarded Shepard a $1.9 million severance package and a $200,000 tenured remote faculty position with WNMU’s School of Business (following an extended, paid sabbatical leave that they also granted him.) The board took these actions in violation of both their own policies and those enumerated in the faculty handbook. Shortly thereafter, WNMU’s faculty carried out a vote of no confidence in the regents while New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham called for their resignations. A state-ordered forensic audit of WNMU’s accounts remains ongoing.
These events were symptomatic of the “erosion of faculty contributions to policy and decision-making that had been prevalent in recent years,” notes Hernández. They spurred faculty to look for ways to ensure their voices would be heard.
The Road Ahead
Unionization moved quickly, thanks in part to NEA organization specialists Candi Churchill and Amy Simpson, who are also working with New Mexico State University (NMSU) faculty on their first contract campaign. NMSU faculty organized in 2024 and have provided support to WNMU union leaders.
WNMU Faculty NEA’s wild ride to unionization included a call campaign in February, the addition of nearly 70 percent of faculty to union membership in May, and a jolt at 4 am, April 13, in the form of a cyberattack on WNMU’s servers by the Russian hacking group Qilin. The university is just now beginning to recover from this ransomware attack. Precisely one month later, on May 13, members of WNMU’s Organizing Committee submitted their cards and requested recognition at the New Mexico Public Employee Labor Relations Board in Albuquerque.
Today, as it builds upon southwestern New Mexico’s storied labor history, its proud linguistic, cultural, and racial diversity, as well as WNMU’s open-access mission and decades-long tradition of amplifying faculty and librarian voices, WNMU Faculty NEA commits to strengthening shared governance in community with colleagues at Central New Mexico Community College, New Mexico State University, New Mexico Highlands University, San Juan College, and University of New Mexico’s Main Campus who also have unionized. NEA New Mexico members include K-12 support personnel, teachers, health care professionals, and faculty. The overwhelming success in this union drive will enable WNMU faculty to strengthen their role in delivering educational excellence to all of their students.
That commitment to service and excellence in education led Roberta Brown, a WNMU professor of English composition, to say: “A few years ago, WNMU adopted the slogan Mustangs Serving Mustangs, and it struck me that the best way for Western faculty to serve each other, our students, and our staff colleagues is to form a union.”
Margarita Wulftange, a professor of education who has been a member of WNMU’s faculty since 2008, agrees. Says Wulftange,“Positive student and employee morale strengthen a university. Transparent and on-going communication about policies, procedures and practices and their consistent implementation leads to an expectation of fairness which in turn boosts morale. With this type of communication everyone benefits. A union clears the way for this communication and implementation.”
In a similar manner, Hernández notes that “having a strong, collective voice will improve our ability to do so while leaving us with more time and energy for our students and classrooms.” The formation of this unit thus offers many of WNMU’s faculty a sense of optimism for the future so notably absent for more than a year now.
