Scientific Workers Collective Panel: CO-OPTING UNION ORGANIZING FOR RADICAL ENDS
I participated as a panelist for an event organized by the Scientific Workers Collective Panel. It is so great to see so many scientists organizing new unions across the country!
Draft of talk
What are the common challenges you would encounter while organizing STEM graduate workers? How do you deal with/overcome these challenges?
Hello, everyone. It’s great to see so many of you organizing your workplaces! I have a few opening remarks and then we can open it up to the floor.
I’d like to share some of my experiences organizing with UAW 2865 the University of California Student Workers Union and some of the lessons I learned throughout the years serving as an organizer and as an elected statewide officer.
UAW 2865 now represents almost 40,000 Tutors, Readers, Graduate Student Instructors, Graduate Student Researchers, and Teaching Assistants across the ten campuses of the University of California. Recently, the union settled a contract that had major victories including the incorporation of student researchers, many of whom are in STEM, into the union and their first contract. Nonetheless, this contract that was touted as historic only received 62% of yes votes during the contract ratification vote as there was widespread dissension among the rank and file as workers spoke out against the dropping of the cost of living adjustment demand as well as other major demands from international students, disabled students, and student parents. While the relative merits and flaws of this contract can be debated ad nauseam, I want to point our attention to two aspects of this organizing that will help us understand the common challenges of organizing STEM graduate workers and outline a path forward to overcoming these challenges.
The first challenge is a more proximate problem: How to organize workers who are not militant or may not even identify themselves as workers?
I think that the demographics of STEM departments, which are composed of many international students, especially Chinese students, are often seen as an organizing problem that needs to be solved—all of these workers being stereotyped as generally apolitical and disinterested from US politics. However, comrades such as Zhang Yueran at UC Berkeley have written about the organizing potential and strength of international student organizing—in short, the international students were the most prepared for a long haul strike because they developed a strong organizing network before the contract campaign. Everyone has an issue with their work and it’s our job to identify those issues and turn them into organizing opportunities. One of the most powerful examples of organizing that emerged during the UC strike was in fact the mobilization of international students, mostly in STEM, around the non-resident supplemental tuition fee—a racist policy that can see international students at UC paying up to $15,000 extra dollars to the university for the privilege of working for them. Even before the strike, international students were organizing around getting this policy removed and developed organizing networks that would be mobilized to great effect during the contract campaign. Organizing around issues that are shared by international and non-international students such as a cost of living adjustment and protections against sexual violence and harassment works well in concert with organizing around issues that ostensibly only affects few workers, but have meaningful ramification for all workers, such as non resident tuition fees or demilitarizing the police— if you cut or abolish the police budget and you have more money for everyone.
However, one major place of criticism that emerged during this campaign is that issues such as non resident tuition fees that mobilized thousands of international student workers were discarded immediately and seen to be simply bargaining chips and not taken seriously by the bargaining team. This led to widespread dissent among especially the Chinese students many of whom were the largest contingent of “no” votes in departments that by and large voted “yes” for the contract. In STEM, organizing won’t go far without mobilizing international students and so we must take their demands seriously. Major requests that were made include having more transparent processes to allow for democratic and informed decision making as well as having fora to create space for dissent and discussion. While there is a temptation to rush things through—especially when the leadership feels as though they have won—organizing needs to empower workers if it is to be sustainable and grow in power. To this end, we should create organizing spaces that are accessible and accommodating for disabled students and student parents and more that are publicized and that are not dominated by a cadre of union insiders.
I was the co-founder of the new Organizing Committee of UAW 2865 that we made to reinvigorate union membership in the face of the Janus v AFSCME ruling. One of my biggest regrets, is that while we were successful in getting our membership numbers up, the organizing committee became the only space where union organizers and resources were funneled into and became arguably the de facto decision making body of the union. This ended up cannibalizing other standing committees like the anti-oppression committee to the point where these committees do not exist anymore in the union, to my knowledge. These spaces historically acted as coalition building spaces and spaces where different groups of student workers could organize outside of the programs being prioritized by the leadership. It is in these spaces where union democracy lives, so we must be sure to allocated resources to spaces in our union that are not just the organizing committee, as important as the OC is.
The second challenge is a more ultimate problem: How to organize a broad coalition when material interests are at odds?
One of the points of divergence in UAW 2865 right now is the feelings of some that the gains were historic and substantial and others feeling like they were sold out for gains that leave them in poverty. One problem of organizing in STEM and higher education is that both of these are very real experiences for different types of workers. By creating a two-tier system at the most prestigious but not necessarily highest cost of living campuses, you might have a STEM student at UC Berkeley on a 12 month appointment feeling very good about making $46,692 by October 2024, while at the same time a TA at UC Santa Cruz in the humanities which are on 9-month contracts seeing their 7.5% initial raise bringing them to $25,000 a year and feeling like they can no longer stay in their program given the extraordinary increase in the cost of living in California. One point of caution would be is that while we want to realize the unique potential in organizing the STEM workplace, we do not want to fall into the same divide and rule strategy that is put forward by universities and union bureaucrats to pit humanities and STEM workers against each other—effectively amounting to an argument that STEM work makes the university function and therefore we are and should be paid more. In fact, this logic doesn’t even hold when looking within STEM departments themselves. When I was a graduate student in Integrative Biology, I was making the same 24k for a 9-month appointment as my colleagues in Comparative Literature and far less than the 35k+ that my colleagues in Molecular Biology were making. And when it came to voting for the contract, the majority of my department voted “no.”
So how can we organize across the university given the heterogeneity of workers and their interests? For one, I think that the austerity logic of the neoliberal university need not be accepted at all and especially not as a rationale for making various concessions during bargaining. What brings the most workers into the labor movement and empowers workers the most is the power for labor to transform the nature of work itself i.e. when workers feel like they can make meaningful changes to their working conditions. In the past, the fight against tuition hikes for undergraduates or for the union taking a position in support of the BDS movement were incredibly powerful organizing tools. Today, dearming and demilitarizing the police, divestment from companies such as blackrock that make money off of the housing crisis, and the fight against the sanctioned and ingrained structures that allow for bullying and harassment in persist in STEM would radically change the nature of our work. I think we need to put forward a vision for those kinds of changes instead of a technocratic vision of just more members and decent contracts in order to make the most of this current wave in union organizing and turn it into long term labor power.
Because at the end of the day, in places like Florida higher education is being radically reshaped for us in terrifying ways and we must fight against that as a part of our struggle. Strategies like bargaining for the common good where coalitions of unions, community groups, racial justice organizations and student organizations work together as partners to win bigger and broader demands at the bargaining table and in their communities must become more common. And indeed the most successful contract campaigns in recent years have involved bargaining for the common good such as the United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) 2019 strike. This strike resulted in contract provisions that expanded green space at schools, limited random searches of students, added support for immigrant students and families, reduced class size, increased staffing of on-site nurses, librarians, and counselors and maybe most importantly resulted in moratorium on future charter schools that parasitize resources from the public school system. Higher education is collapsing right before our eyes. This is a similar feeling to the one ten years ago that the charter school movement would permanently destroy public education in this country in the wake of the collapse and closure of all the public schools in places like New Orleans. However, as UTLA have shown us, we can turn the tide by fighting back in solidarity with each other. Because when we strike…