“We’re like the United Auto and Academic Workers,” he jokes, adding that higher ed now accounts for roughly a quarter of the UAW’s 400,000 members. In December, Mancilla was elected to UAW’s International Executive Board as part of a slate of reform candidates in the first direct election in the union’s history. Union density on campus has also meant welcoming a new generation of young organizers, many of them grad students, who are leading efforts to reform and democratize their unions.īrandon Mancilla decided to dedicate his life to the labor movement after helping coordinate a 2019 strike with Harvard’s grad union (UAW Local 5118). We have to organize workers in every single university in order to achieve real change,” he says. “Transforming academia is not going to happen in one single contract campaign. The first step in realizing this vision, says Jaime, who attended the 2021 summit, is to build union density. To date, 130 unions and affiliated groups representing over half a million workers have endorsed the platform. The endgame is a unified academic labor movement capable of securing public investment and reorienting higher ed to “prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige.” Bernie Sanders’s College for All Act) to their support of student debt cancelation. At a digital summit that July, members of 75 unions and labor organizations convened to draft a “vision platform” laying out everything from their legislative commitments (like Sen. HELU was founded in 2021 in an effort to fill those shoes. “What it ends up leading to is a lack of a coherent vision and organized voice of what needs to be done given the very long crisis in public higher education,” says Wolfson. This is largely due to the fragmentation of the academic labor movement, which is scattered across nearly a dozen parent unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which formally affiliated with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) last July to form an alliance of over 300,000 academic workers. After six weeks, the union secured wage increases of up to 80 percent over the life of the contract, and expanded benefits like childcare subsidies and dependent healthcare.īut, while this connection has been clearly articulated at the campus and state level, Wolfson worries the narrative isn’t coming across as clearly at the national level. In mid-November, teaching assistants, tutors, researchers, and postdocs represented by four bargaining units across all ten UC campuses were able to pull off what was also the largest higher ed strike in the nation’s history by coordinating when each contract expired. Nowhere is this clearer than at the University of California (UC), where 48,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) members waged the largest labor strike of 2022. By challenging corporate business models and articulating the connection between privatization and deteriorating working conditions, academic workers have aimed their sights at reclaiming higher education as a public good, and they see unions as the primary vehicle with which to do so. But the surge in campus organizing is also an expression of – and response to – an ongoing austerity campaign against public higher education that dates back half a century. Outside of academia, last year saw growing union momentum across industries, attributed partly to inflation, Covid-19, and high approval ratings for unions.
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