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This is a free, public post from Hank Kalet’s Channel Surfing. You will continue to receive these email stories and newsletters as long as you remain a an email subscriber. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get paywall-protected posts, the ability to comment on posts and participate in discussion boards, offers to write guest blog posts, and copies of my books. If you are a $5-a-month Patreon patron, you already are considered a paid subscriber.

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For the Labor Movement, There Is No Substitute for Activism

Workers Can Expect Little Help from a Divided Government, So We Must Organize

Hank Kalet Feb 15 ∙ Preview

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Todd E. Vachon, a labor professor at Rutgers, speaks during a December rally. Organizer Sherry Wolfe stands to his right.
This is a much longer version of my next column for the Progressive Populist, which should run next month. Read my current column here.

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Temple University has retaliated against its striking graduate workers, cutting off “free tuition” and demanding these students pay up or, in the words of the Associated Press, “face sanctions.”

As the AP reported,

A notice from the bursar’s office posted online by a striker said students involved must pay their spring tuition bill in full by March 9 or face a $100 late fee and a financial hold on their account, which would bar them from registering for more classes, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Striking workers at Temple. (From the Temple University Graduate Student Association website.)
The strike by Temple graduate student assistants — which is ongoing as I write this —  is part of a broader wave of labor activism that I wrote about last month, and that cuts across job titles and class distinctions. Academic workers, Starbucks baristas, and warehouse workers at Amazon all have used or are using their labor as leverage to win better wages and working conditions. As the activist Medea Benjamin writes in The Progressive, “The U.S. labor movement caught fire.”

In 2022, we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks Workers United reached nearly 7,000  members and unionized close to 300 stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58 percent in the first eight months of 2022. Labor is back and fighting the good fight. 

Yes, we have been witnessing a strike wave: Municipal workers in Portland are on strike. Alaska bus drivers have walked. HarperCollins, hospitals in New York, academic workers around the country — strikes and strike threats have forced management to negotiate truly revolutionary contracts.

This militancy coincides with an increase in union members: Union membership was up in 2022, ending a four-year slide that cost the labor movement about 600,000 members. It’s a datapoint that should generate some good feelings — even if it is nothing more than an uptick, an increase of 200,000 union jobs or 1.2%. Unfortunately, it failed to erase the losses of the last four years and accompanied a big increase in employed workers, the majority of who are not union members. (Data compiled from the Department of Labor). Overall, 16 million workers in the United States were represented by a union last year, while the union share of the workforce fell from 11.6% to 11.3%. As the Economic Policy Institute writes, “More jobs were unionized, but nonunion jobs were added at a faster rate.”

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Fighting Back Against the Neo-Liberal University

Strikes and Strike Threats Are Winning Transformative Contracts for Workers Across Academia

Hank Kalet Feb 9 ∙ Preview

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Temple grad students are on strike. Photos from the Temple University Graduate Students’ Association.
This is a longer reported piece on the same topic as this op-ed, published by The Progressive magazine’s Progressive Perspectives project.

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American higher education is experiencing a wave of strikes and strike votes from contingent faculty who are tired of being treated as disposable cogs in the larger Neo-liberal academic system.

Faculty teaching in the University of California system — the nation’s largest — and at The New School in New York struck in the fall and won significant raises and changes in working conditions, and Temple graduate students are out on the picket now. At Rutgers, we are holding a strike pledge drive and will kick off a strike vote in several weeks

These strikes and threats are part of a growing movement among workers across the economy to take back control of their work lives. Workers at Starbucks, Target, Amazon, and elsewhere — companies that have evaded unionization in the past — are now organizing, seeking to move the service sector away from its exploitative scheduling and pay practices and toward a more sustainable working environment.

The new militancy is having its effect. Earlier strikes and strike threats by the University Council-AFT, which represents 6,500 lecturers in California, helped win what they are calling a historic contract, while both the graduate student union at Columbia University in New York and faculty at Howard University have won new pacts.

The wave of strikes and strike threats are part of a growing movement among contingent or “casual” faculty at both major research universities and smaller two- and four-year colleges to end the disparate treatment and disregard we — I teach at Rutgers — have experienced. Adjuncts, grad instructors, and contract employees are demanding significant increases in pay, job security, health care, and changes in scheduling that will end what Emily Raabe, a 12-year New School adjunct, told Nick Pinto in Hell Gate is “a culture of disposability that is the opposite of what education is supposed to be about."

Donate: RU adjunct union Strike Fund

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This is a free, public post from Hank Kalet’s Channel Surfing. You will continue to receive these email stories and newsletters as long as you remain a an email subscriber. Consider becoming a paid subscriber and get paywall-protected posts, the ability to comment on posts and participate in discussion boards, offers to write guest blog posts, and copies of my books. If you are a $5-a-month Patreon patron, you already are considered a paid subscriber.

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