The Point: Summer Labor Wrap Up

9/26/2024

This week’s Point was written by Jeff Melnick, Professor of American Studies and former vice president and communications director of the FSU.

Dear Colleagues,

A couple of weeks ago, our colleague and former FSU President Steve Striffler helped us take a look a back at how busy college administrators, including our own, were over the summer—largely, it seems, figuring out how to limit free speech on campus.  Since reading that overview I also had time to read an amazing piece by Sophie Hurwitz in Mother Jones about just how widespread (and uniform) this clampdown on “expressive acts” has been across the United States.  As we begin bargaining this fall (and I was thrilled to be part of the silent observer “expanded team” last week watching our core team do its work so brilliantly) it is crucial that we continue to think about the local articulations of national trends, as this limiting of speech on our own campus surely is. 

Here at the Point we think that being a well-educated union member means keeping our eyes on regional and national stories that are of interest to all union members.  Periodically, we will try to summarize a few of these stories; the three stories below are offered in the spirit of sharing the news—good and bad—about academic labor.

1. Fall of Action, Thanks to HELU.  We start with the most hopeful and inspiring news—that HELU (Higher Ed Labor United) has announced a fall campaign for this semester, which is nothing less than a visionary “agenda for transforming public colleges and universities.”  (The story we just linked to gives a good overview of HELU’s vision and even quotes FSU’s own Professor Joseph Ramsey, who has been involved with this group from the outset.  If you have a few spare moments we urge you to have a look at HELU’s  vision statement which takes on everything from the realities of precarity to administrative bloat and much more.)  The FSU is a signatory to HELU’s vision statement, which is very much in synch with our recent history as a local that is committed to what sometimes gets called “the common good.” In addition to negotiating (hard!) at the bargaining table for our members on bread-and-butter issues, this means that the FSU at UMB is also invested in the well-being of the larger community of students, staff, and residents of the Commonwealth we serve.  HELU’s main tactic is cross-sectoral organizing—a good reminder that our work is inextricably tied up with the work of our staff unions, our grad workers’ union and so on.   It is thrilling to now have a national organization that will synergize with the work we have been trying to do on the local level.
2. Gutting of Writing Faculty on Two California Campuses. In less good news (and a reminder of why we need the kind of proactive, anti-hierarchical work that HELU is doing) we take note of the terrible news about crucial writing faculty on two very different California campuses—Stanford and UC Davis.  At Davis, as this detailed story makes clear, the entire writing program was moved out of an academic unit and into an administrative one.  The Stanford news is even worse and involves the wholesale firing of veteran non-tenure track writing instructors, with the approval—as John Warner makes clear—of tenure-line faculty.  Warner does not pull punches—this move will harm the faculty in question, of course, but also will harm students, who have benefit from the decades of experience these faculty members carry.  While “PR hacks” at Stanford are very busily offering a “master class in taking shit and selling it as shinola” the rest of us need to see this as a painful example of how employment precarity harms so many on our university campuses. And it offers us a profound reminder that our strength at the FSU rests largely in our solidarity across TT and NTT lines and into the library as well.
3. Both Sides of the River! We end with some good news.  We have been gratified to see that in recent months the resident assistants union at Boston University has remained steadfast and now has a tentative agreement in hand that seems likely to be ratified. Building on local success at Tufts last year, these dedicated young activists reminded us that there is still much organizing to do on American campuses. This was one of the lessons too, late in the spring semester, of the successful organizing of the Harvard Academic Workers’ Union, which brings together thousands of postdocs, researchers, teaching assistants and other non-tenure track workers.  The fact that these two are organized under the auspices of two massive national unions (SEIU and UAW, respectively) is a hopeful reminder that the labor movement is at a thrilling inflection point and that the kind of cross-sectoral organizing that HELU hopes to do on campuses across the United States is already happening in the labor movement writ large.

Please let us know (at fsu@umb.edu) if there are labor stories you want us to share!