Working In These Times
Collaboration Power: How Are Unions and Educators Joining Forces?
Lulu LoLo presented "Soliloquy for a Seamstress" at the ELC Forum 2010. Here she portrays reporter William Gunn Shepard at the scene of the Triangle Fire in New York City. (Photo courtesy the Education & Labor Collaborative)
I participated in a remarkable event this past weekend, the Education and Labor Collaborative, hosted by Adelphi University at its Manhattan center. The focus of the event was teaching the Triangle Fire, the 1911 tragedy that killed 146 mostly young, women workers. The goal was to explore ways for teachers to teach the fire as a larger lesson in social justice. With that in mind, Adelphi brought together labor scholars, unionists and activists, as well as area high-school teachers, for a weekend of training.
It was a great event and the teachers got a lot out of it. But, it led me to think about these kinds of collaborations, and wonder why Adelphi, which has its main campus in suburban Long Island, was hosting the event. I wondered why City University of New York (CUNY) wasn't hosting it—and then realized that it probably has hosted something similar, and I just didn’t know it. I began to explore other labor and educator groups and found many, scattered across the country.
Which brings me to this post. I write as a form of community journalism, in the hopes that readers will, via the comment section, list any and all such collaborations (with some contact info) between unions and educators (either through schools or districts or labor education centers). My hope is that activists and unionist will be able to see where activity is being done in their area and can lend their support and get involved.
As I sat in Adelphi's lecture room Saturday watching the school teachers in attendance, I realized the power of such sessions. Here were dedicated teachers, caring professionals, looking for resources to help make them better teachers. They left the event fully armed with new knowledge. I am sure that when they return to their classrooms in the fall, their lessons will help students better understand America's history of labor struggles.
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Here in my neck of the woods (Wisconsin), I helped create a new “Labor & Working Class Studies Project” in the Madison-area. The LWCSP intends to be a collaboration between campus academics (including faculty and staff, graduate and undergraduate students), unionists, and community activists. We are working to further the thoughtful consideration of issues relating to the labor movement and working class people, as well as to spur action around them.
So far, we have people from all targeted areas beginning to join in. We’re ramping up for the fall semester, bringing speakers, starting research projects, and opening dialogue between labor- and worker-oriented people from the campus and labor communities.
One of the reasons we had for beginning this project—which we believe can grow and flourish either as a university-housed program or on its own—is that while academia sponsors an indoctrination in business and capitalism, universities like ours give short shrift to working folks.
I work at Yale University, and presently am on a leave of absence working for my union, Local 34, Federation of University Employees. Here at Yale there is another group of workers attempting to organize themselves into a union. They are the graduate teachers here at Yale. Here, as in the large majority of institutions of higher education, much of the teaching is now done by graduate teachers and adjuncts. It is much cheaper for colleges and universities to get the teaching done in this manner than by hiring tenure track professors. The problems with this approach are many: students do not get the benefit of the expertise of full professors, but also graduate teachers have fewer and fewer tenure track positions to pursue. It is a sort of vicious circle of negativity. These young graduate teachers have many issues that any working person might have - pay, benefits, etc. But, above that, these teachers are mobilizing to influence WHAT IS TAUGHT in the academy at this time. They attempt to inject topics missing from the program, many times topics that are pertinent to poor and working class people. They are social justice topics.
The unions of workers here at Yale have formed an alliance with the graduate teachers here. We work together to achieve all of our goals, as well as the goals of other workers with whom we share issues in the community. It is not always easy to have our members in the working locals understand their connections with the graduate teachers. We work on that all the time. It is an valuable project, and has already garnered benefits for all. The teachers have helped us through organizing, research, manpower, etc, to achieve more in our recent contracts. We have helped them to leverage enough power against Yale to gain medical benefits (many of these young people are in the stage of their lives where they are forming families, having children, and have needs for expanded health care benefits), and other things that improve their work-lives.
I believe that our two groups of workers learn much from each other, and in our alliance, grow our power to make life better for ourselves and other working people.
Being an active member of the grad student workers’ union here at UW-Madison, I’ve followed the ups and downs of the grads at Yale. While many public institutions of higher education have enabling legislation for collective bargaining rights for grad student workers, private university grads have been excluded since the disastrous 2004 Brown decision by the NLRB.
But, grads at NYU, who had recognition as a union prior to Brown, kept on organizing and maintained majority membership—and now, they have petitioned for recognition. The NLRB likely will take this up, now that there is a full quorum and a majority on the Board who have said they’re for grad student worker collective bargaining in private universities.
It’s a good time for grad worker organizing. There are active campaigns at a number of public and private universities. AFT and UAW, and even a CWA local are organizing more grads. The reasons why are many.
One note about ‘managerial prerogatives.’ When the labor movement gave up bargaining and struggling over the “right” of management and capital to make decisions about the enterprise, the American labor movement lost a great deal of its ethos. We saw that play out decades later when plant-closings and off-shoring wreaked havoc on working people and the American economy, as unions were virtually powerless to stop it.
Grad unions, and those of other academic workers, have not really taken this up in great depth—although more than our brothers and sisters in many other sectors. However, I want to point out a lesson learned from my local along these lines. In the 1960s, when the TAA (my union, AFT #3220) formed at UW-Madison as the nation’s first grad student worker union, we were oriented around matters that certainly went beyond wages, benefits and working conditions. It was to no small degree about the scope of education and the nature of academia—modern managerial prerogatives in the corporate multiversity.
But the university administration refused to bargain on this and ultimately, our union backed away out of necessity.
Today, we are still clanking around at the edges. In our current bargaining platform, I put forward ideas related to this on things like discussion section scheduling and content, publishing and authorship rights, and the like—in previous bargaining we’ve won things like training requirements for TAs. To this day, aside from wages (hey, we’re poverty-wage workers still), these kinds of things excite our membership and represented workers as much as or more than anything else.
The rise of academic worker unionism today centers as much as anything on the need for systemic responses to systemic crises in higher ed. Only when we take up these systemic problems in collective bargaining—along with political action and organizing—will we really build the kind of vibrant, socially-dynamic unionism necessary to fight back against the bastards.
Keep up the good fight at Yale for real academic unionism. There is much to be learned for all of labor from what we do in our sector.
To Mr. Rickman:
I totally agree!
This article was inspiring to read! I am a union-based educator with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and the President of the United Association for Labor Education. UALE is a place where labor educators from unions, universities and community groups come together to network, to learn and to maximize the impact of our work. UALE has a working group that focuses on bringing labor education into the schools. Richard, I invite you and others to visit our website at www.uale.org and to come to our next conference: Unfinished Business - Workers’ Rights for the Next Generation. It will be in New Orleans, Louisiana from March 24-26, 2011.
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