I was recently asked to be on a roundtable at SSSP called “Organizing Academic Labor in the Post Pandemic University” organized by Emily Yen, with Shannon Ikebe and Emily Fox. We all were leaders in UAW 2865 and part of the COLA Movement at UC. Here is my paper:
Problems, Pitfalls, and Potenial of Organizing During the Covid Pandemic
My name is Mick Song and I will be talking today about my time as a member of UAW 2865 the university of California student workers union that represents 17,000 workers across the nine teaching campuses of UC. Currently, I am an assistant professor at Skyline College in San Bruno California and a rank and file member of AFT 1493 the San Mateo Community College Federation of Teachers.
During the pandemic, I was a rank and file organizer with UAW 2865 in the Berkeley unit, but during my time in that union I have also served on the statewide executive board as trustee and as an elected statewide officer. In January 2020, I was organizing in the grassroots (COLA) movement that started at UC Santa Cruz and spread to the other UC Campuses. None of the UC campuses pays their workers a living wage, nor does any campus address the housing crisis in California. COLA strove to win a cost-of-living adjustment to the salaries negotiated by UAW 2865 leaders in the last contract, which fell far short of the amount required to pay rent, especially in more expensive areas of the state. As one example, a UC Berkeley grad student teaching at Step 3 would have to spend more than 60% of their pre-tax income to afford rent in UC Berkeley’s graduate student housing.
By March 2020, the pandemic had shut down UC Berkeley’s campus. This not only affected the organizing of the COLA campaign, which was gearing up for a strike at Berkeley, but also motivated workers to also organize around covid safety concerns. In my talk, I will outline how these organizing priorities interacted with each other and highlight two pitfalls that we encountered. I will conclude with recommendations going forward as we continue to organize for a safe and equitable workplace and position ourselves within the rapidly growing working class movement in the country and around the world.
The COLA campaign at the University of California can be summarized as a militant rank-and-file led campaign that started to force the University to address the housing crisis at Santa Cruz and became a statewide movement, as around 80 per cent of student workers are rent burdened on all UC campuses. Before the pandemic, wildcat strikes at Santa Cruz were retaliated against by UC, resulting in the firing of 82 workers. Workers responded by going on solidarity strikes across the UC. In response to this pressure, UC rehired the fired workers and Santa Cruz students won a small summer stipend. However, before the movement could put substantial pressure on UC, UC campuses went completely remote in mid-March 2020. To this day, UC refuses to make any public concessions to the COLA movement and rejects bargaining demands around a COLA as UAW 2865 and UC are bargaining a new contract.
There are some major differences between UAW 2865 and the unions we may currently belong to. The extremely large size across nine units of the local, the very high turnover, a demographic that leans young where people might feel more comfortable advocating for themselves, and a history of militancy and strike memory, might suggest that what was going on in Spring 2020 at UC was unique to us. However, I argue that the problems we faced organizing during the pandemic are common problems whenever workers are interpellated into a neoliberal culture of crisis and the solution to these problems requires us to articulate a vision of labor that does not fall prey to reactionary or neoliberal tendencies.
The first pitfall that we encountered was UC’s entreaty to graduate instructors to, in their words, support undergrads in a unique moment of crisis by helping make the university fully online at the start of the pandemic. This was not a problem of time or resource allocation, but rather university leadership’s attempted and successful realignment of graduate instructors’ self-identification from being an undercompensated worker to being a valued member of the institution. At Berkeley, departments that were notably supportive of the COLA demands implored workers to stop striking and start developing online material and during the COLA town halls, many workers decided that they needed to stop the strike in order to think about the students. This in turn also changed the subjectivity of the students, who were the major supporters of the COLA movement, back into a relationship of production and reception of teaching materials. The reason why we always say that our teaching conditions are our students’ learning conditions is because this crisis discourse around “putting students first” is often weaponized to continue to make the university a neoliberal institution that is bad for both teachers and students.
The second problem concerns the changing views around workers’ identification with the union during covid. The COLA movement emerged at a time when UAW 2865 had settled a contract that many workers considered unsatisfactory and concessionary, and was a rank-and-file movement that not only wanted to win gains for workers but also make the union more democratic. In short, COLA put forward the idea that the workers are the union. However, when covid shut down campus, the union leadership made a transition from supporting a ULP strike in solidarity with the COLA movement to focusing on effects bargaining. While effects bargaining during the pandemic was certainly important, making it the focus of organizing leads to two problems. One is that it is difficult to make everyone happy and the more you wait the less you get, since workers are still working while you negotiate. It is difficult to thread the needle when it comes to either the reactionary tendencies of the anti-vax pandemic is over movement and the neoliberal tendencies of the lock-down left never go back to work movement. Second is that this emphasis encourages workers to third party the union and think about what the union is doing for them instead of seeing themselves as the union—a service rather than democratic model of unionism.
Nonetheless, we have seen incredible organizing across the nation in response to the pandemic. UC AFT the lecturer and librarian union across UC won a groundbreaking contract this year. Student workers at MIT, Princeton, Columbia, Brown, and many others are made huge wins this year fighting against some of the most hostile and wealthy employers in the world. In California, a number of new education unions got certified at private institutions like Santa Clara University and the Art Center College of Design. Amazon and Starbucks workers are continuing to organize workplaces that unions had thought to be impossible to organize and have revitalized the labor movement in America. In conclusion, crises like the covid pandemic present opportunities to organize but “crisis discourse” is often reactionary or at best neoliberal. I’ll be interested in discussion with you all, ways that we can position ourselves against the organizing pitfalls encountered as we go forward into a changing landscape of organizing during crisis. Thank you.