Adjunct faculty members at St. Catherine University in St. Paul have petitioned to hold their own union election, organizers said last week.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) said in a news release that university instructors filed cards Thursday triggering a vote to join Local 284.

The election is expected to take place in June.

If the results hold, St. Kate's could become the fourth private college in the Twin Cities to form a faculty union in the past three years and would join a national movement to improve pay and working conditions for part-time faculty, organizers said.

The union will represent more than 100 part-time instructors.

Peter Morales, an adjunct faculty member teaching Spanish at St. Kate's, said that higher education institutions depend on contingent faculty to contain costs. The practice affords these schools "a lot of flexibility," he said.

"Part of it is the recognition that the work that we do is valuable and needs to be compensated accordingly," Morales said Monday. "Contingency faculty have various jobs and that juggling of work makes it very challenging to give students the best of what they deserve. We are giving a lot more than what we are getting compensated for."

Morales also teaches at Hamline University, where adjunct faculty unionized in 2015 and ratified their first contract in 2016. Morales said that at Hamline, he now has access to faculty development and is able to participate more fully in academic life.

"We get more recognition from full-time faculty," he said. "In general, I definitely feel more included in the process at Hamline since the unionization."

Nationwide, more than 13,000 college and university instructors have formed unions as part of a four-year organizing effort by the SEIU. The campaign has focused mainly on adjunct instructors, who typically are paid far less and get fewer benefits than tenured faculty.

In the Twin Cities, adjunct college faculty at Augsburg College and Minnesota College of Art and Design unionized last year.

Karen Zamora • 612-673-4647

Twitter: @KarenAnelZamora