Graduate Employee Unions and Coalitions

This paper was presented at the conference of the Modern Language Association on December 29, 1999. It was part of a panel entitled "Academic Labor: Key Issues for Graduate Students," arranged by the MLA Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession.

Daniel W. Kim, Chair

By Julie Schmid
Department of English
University of Iowa
308 EPB
Iowa City, IA 52245

jschmid@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu

Building Coalitions of Resistance: Graduate Employee
Unions and Cross-Campus Organizing

I would like to pick up where Ms. Carr's paper left off and begin my talk by summarizing the effects of the corporatization of North American colleges and universities on the academic workplace. The academy's increased dependence on part-time workers over the past 30 years has led to the creation of a permanent academic underclass. This academic underclass, which consists of graduate RAs and TAs and visiting/adjunct faculty, does an ever-increasing amount of research and teaching for poverty-level wages, no job security, and few benefits. As Cary Nelson and Jeremy Smith point out in recent essays, the experiences of these exploited workers are a bellwether; things will undoubtedly get worse for all sectors of academic workers before they get better. As Nelson and Smith also point out, full-time, tenured faculty, for the most part, are in denial about the sweatshop conditions under which this other class of teachers and researchers toil.

At the same time, as the emergence of graduate employee and adjunct faculty unions around the U.S. and Canada suggests, one of the results of this work speed up has been a renaissance in labor activism on university campuses. TAs, RAs, and part-time instructors are organizing, affiliating with international unions, and going out on strike as a means to address workplace issues such as wages, benefits, and work loads. Clearly, higher pay, health insurance, decreased work hours, and legally binding grievance procedures have been important results of this unionization movement. Equally important is our developing sense of ourselves as workers and the resulting solidarity between TAs and RAs and other employees on campus. Cary Nelson defines the emergence of this cross-campus solidarity in his introduction to Will Teach for Food. He writes:

Faculty members have long assumed a great gulf in status separates them from campus blue-collar laborers. But part-time faculty and cafeteria workers have a good deal in common. Moreover, even full-time faculty and workers lose relative authority when their numbers are reduced and their jobs outsourced or given to part-timers. Permanent faculty, adjunct faculty, graduate students, secretaries, and maintenance workers suddenly acquire common interests and reasons to build working alliances. Improbably enough, the academy has become a place to build workplace solidarity that crosses class lines. (6)

For the remainder of my allotted time, then, I would like to discuss the academic labor movement and the emergence these campus based "coalitions of resistance." My personal experience with cross-campus coalition building is the result of my work with COGS/UE Local 896 (the graduate employee union at the University of Iowa). Therefore, the majority of my talk will focus on the development of these coalitions around the union movement at the UI. I will discuss the interaction between COGS and other labor unions on campus and COGS and other radical campus organizations such as the Campaign for Academic Freedom, Students Against Sweatshops, and the recently-elected progressive student government. I will then briefly discuss graduate student union/social justice coalitions on other campuses--most notably the University of Arizona and the University Michigan. Referring back to these specific examples of coalition building, I will end my talk by suggesting strategies that may be useful to other graduate employees and adjunct workers elsewhere in the academy.

Back to the Future

Before giving my report from the academic labor trenches, I would like to begin with a little revisionist history. As a quick review of American labor history makes clear, the contemporary academic labor movement did not spring fully formed from the head of some Zeus-like campus activist. Class-consciousness and a sense of solidarity with the international labor movement among academics is nothing new. It has its roots in the radical political movements of the 1930s and from the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 through the late 1960s alliances between labor and progressive, mostly middle-class, social movements constituted a powerful force for political and social change. Labor historians and sociologists disagree on when this alliance started to unravel. David Croteau and Walter Galenson see the Taft-Hartley Act and the anti-communism of the 1950s as signaling the beginning of the end of labor/academic left coalitions. According to these two scholars, the antiwar protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s were the final blow to this already weakened cross-class alliance. Stanley Aronowitz sees things differently. He tracks the rise in membership in public employee unions (most notably, AFSCME and AFT) during the 1950s and 60s and argues that the reforms in social policy under the Johnson Administration were the result of the coming together of four progressive social movements--trade unionism, second wave feminism, the student movement, and the Civil Rights movement. According to Aronowitz, this coalition "despite . . . frequent mutual antagonisms, constituted together a dynamic force in American politics" (260). He goes on to cite the mass exodus of heavy industry from the Northeast and Midwest to the notoriously hard to organize South and to other countries and Reagan's eviscerating of labor rights as the primary reason for the break up of this coalition.

Regardless of which model you subscribe to, it is clear that over past few decades this relationship has been seriously eroded. It is also clear that despite the continuing class identity crisis in higher education, there is a history of collaboration between academics, social justice workers, and union activists. In other words, what we see happening at schools with active labor movements right now is not so much the emergence of labor/social justice coalitions as the resurgence of these alliances.

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: A Brief History of Cross-Campus Coalitions at the UI

Although very few of us were aware of it at the time, we were tapping into this tradition during our union organizing drive at the University of Iowa. COGS (the Campaign to Organize Graduate Students) was founded in 1993 by a group of graduate students at the University who believed that unionization was the most effective means to address the exploitative conditions under which we labored. Many of these graduate students were also active in the Campaign for Academic Freedom (CAF), an organization comprised of undergrads., graduate students, faculty, and community members. CAF was founded to challenge the Board of Regents' draconian "Unusual and Unexpected Materials Policy," a classroom policy that required instructors to notify students when materials that could be considered offensive so that he or she could make an informed choice about attending class. The policy also required the instructor to provide the student with an alternative assignment. This policy was undoubtedly unconstitutional. It was also homophobic (a student complaint after a screening of Taxi Zum Clo in his German class instigated the Regents' action). Although all faculty and instructors were subject to this policy, the only University employees who were ever punished under it--which included having letters of reprimand placed in their personnel files, being publicly censured at Board of Regents meetings, and being removed from the classroom (without a fair grievance procedure and without pay)--were graduate students.

This policy further convinced graduate students at the University of our status as a marginalized workforce. It also impressed upon us the relationship between our workplace struggle, campus-wide issues of academic freedom, and social justice issues. To that end, we have begun to develop and implement outreach programs in order to continue to address social justice and workplace issues and make our presence felt, both at the University and within the larger community. One such event was the October 1997 COGS/Faculty Forum on Social Justice, at which union members and University faculty held an all day workshop at the local public library on such issues as gender and sexuality at the UI, race and ethnicity at the UI, and higher education in the age of downsizing. Another was the 1997 Martin Luther King Day event, at which COGS members protested the University's refusal to include an anti-discrimination clause in our first contract. (We were able to negotiate the clause into our 1999-2001 contract and the University's bargaining committee made it very clear that the administration wanted to avoid the kind of negative publicity they received as a result of the MLK Day event.) In the past year, members of COGS's Family Issues Committee have worked with undergraduates, members of the Iowa City community, members of the other two unions on campus, and local legislators to begin to address the lack of affordable childcare in Iowa City.

Our ability to organize and ultimately win the right to be represented by a national union also depended upon the support of other unions both on campus and from the local community, most notably AFSCME Local 12, the union that represents the University's support staff, the AFT Local that represents the Iowa City school district's teacher, and UE Local 894. The support that we received from other unions around the community not only put pressure on the University^Òs administration; it was through these newly-forged relationships that we began to see ourselves as part of a larger community of workers. Over the past three years, we have continued to develop our ties to the local labor movement. We attend each other's rallies and show up at each other's social events. During negotiations last year, we worked with the AFSCME and SEIU locals on campus to develop proposed contract language on a University childcare center and on health and safety issues.

Moreover, individual COGS members continue to be active in other progressive campus movements. Larissa Faulkner, an officer in COGS, is also the new Vice President of the University of Iowa Student Government. She ran on a progressive ticket with other graduate students, undergraduates, and professional students. One of the main issues that Faulkner and her co-officers have pledged to address this year is the childcare issue because they see it as a gender equity and economic issue that really effects single parents in the undergraduate and graduate communities. COGS member James Tracey founded the UI's Students Against Sweatshops movement and many of that organization's most active members are also COGS members.

Through these coalitions between COGS and other labor unions, between COGS and other campus organizations, graduate employees, undergraduates, other University employees, and members of the Iowa City community have begun to see the academic labor movement as a forum for workplace rights and social justice. These cross-campus alliances have played a major role in convincing the community of our legitimacy. They have also been strategically important to our ability to continue to fight to transform workplace conditions and protect human rights at the University. It is illegal for state employees in Iowa to strike and much of what COGS is fighting for falls outside the state^Òs definition of mandatory items of bargaining. Moreover, we are a large, geographically fragmented bargaining unit. So much of what we are able to accomplish both at the bargaining table and extra-contractually depends on our being a visible, active presence on the campus and in the community.

The Beat Goes On: Cross-Campus Coalitions of Resistance on Other Campuses and Some Final Thoughts

Students involved in the graduate student unionization movement at the University of Arizona report a similar history of solidarity between labor and a variety of progressive organizations. In recent emails to me, Danika Brown and Lyida Lester described the role that collaboration with organizations such as the AAUP, the SAS, SAWSJ has played in the graduate workers' organizing drive. Danika Brown recounts the emergence of COGS (Coalition for Organizing Graduate Students). She writes:

The major impetus and support for came from another grad. student organization. . .the English Graduate Union (not a labor union, just a g.s. dept. organization). We gained a great deal of momentum and support through another student organization: Students Against Sweatshops, as we were able to capitalize on the sort of activism that the Nike contract issues had brought into relief on campus through them. Additionally, we worked with another student/faculty/community organization on campus, students, artists, and writers for social justice (sawsj). . . Additionally, we have had a sort of surprising amount of support and encouragement from the local chapter of the AAUP. . . .So, in other words, our movement here has had everything to do with inter-organizational collaboration and solidarity. (12/2/99 email to author)

While I've been unable to garner any personal testimonial, other examples of cross-campus coalition building include the solidarity between the Michigan chapter of SAS and the GEO and between the TAA in Wisconsin and the SAS there. Of course, the most publicized example of cross-campus solidarity is the collaboration between GESO and the other locals on the Yale campus during the 1996 Yale strike. In their essay on the TA strike, Corey Robin and Michelle Stephens address the important role that Locals 34 and 35 (the unions that represent the service and maintenance workers and the clerical and technical workers at the university respectively) have played in the history of GESO. They write:

These two unions have been crucial to the formation of GESO. They have provided necessary resources and a vision of collective power. They have also trained several generations of graduate student organizers, who in turn have provided graduate students with leadership that turns daily disappointments and frustrations into powerful, collective demands. (57)

These examples suggest that ultimately the most powerful tool for transforming higher education are local coalitions of resistance forged between graduate student unions, the labor movement, and other progressive campus organizations. The continuing downsizing of faculty and staff, erosion of tenure, the dependence on an exploited graduate student and adjunct workforce, and the outsourcing of maintenance work is transforming the academy into scene from Samuel Gompers' worst nightmare. In his essay "Labor is the Key," Stanley Aronowitz argues that any hope of reversing the erosion of labor rights under Reagan depends upon rebuilding labor/progressive social justice coalitions. He states that:

There is little chance that a new politics will be born. . .until labor becomes a "movement" again. . . . No other force in society can provide the counterweight to the finances, the command over media and the sheer economic and ideological power of giant corporations and neoconservative institutions. The illusion of the Sixties that strong feminist, minority, and antiwar coalitions could displace the "labor bureaucracy" as the core of a new politics has been definitively shattered in the wake of the progressive defeats of the last decade. . . .For social movements confined to particular, albeit crucial, struggles have been unable to match the global character of the conservative appeal. (268)

Events such as the protests at the WTO meetings in Seattle and the upcoming talks between United Steelworkers and the United Students Against Sweatshops make clear that the progressive coalitions are indeed still a force for instituting change. In the face of the ongoing crisis in higher education, we would do well to follow the lead of the graduate student unions at Iowa, Arizona, and Yale and reestablish the bonds between the academic left, social justice organizations, and the international labor movement that have been so effective in bringing about major social and economic reforms in the past.

Works Cited

Aronowitz, Stanley. "Labor is the Key." Beyond Reagan: Alternatives for the '80s. Ed by Gartner, Greer, and Riessman. New York: Harper, 1984. 256-270.

Brown, Danika. Email to the author. 12 Dec. 1999.

Croteau, David. Politics and the Class Divide: Working People and the Middle-Class Left. Philadelphia: Temple U. P., 1995.

Galenson, Walter. "The Historical Role of American Trade Unionism." Unions in Transition. Seymour Lipset, ed. San Francisco: ICS Press, 1986. 39-74.

Nelson, Cary. "Introduction." Will Teach for Food. Cary Nelson, ed. Minnepolis: U. Minnesota Press: 1997. 3-34.

Robin, Corey and Michelle Stephens. "Against the Grain: Organizing TAs at Yale." Will Teach for Food. Cary Nelson, ed. Minnepolis: U. Minnesota Press: 1997. 44-80.

Smith, Jeremy. "Faculty, Students, and Political Engagement." Chalk Lines: The Politics of Work in the Managed University. Randy Martin, ed. Durham: Duke U. P., 1998. 249-263.