“Subterranean Fire: The Percolating Currents of Graduate Labor Activism in Rhetoric and Composition”

by Andrew Bowman and Bruce Kovanen | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

Introduction

Our field’s history is instructive. The struggles from our disciplinary pasts continue today but too often occlude graduate workers. Drawing on moments of labor militancy in Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp) and our experiences as union organizers, we discuss what organizing as a practice can offer graduate labor in our discipline.

Disciplinary histories of Rhet-Comp are often intertwined with the history of shifting labor conditions in the university. Where one places the beginning of the field in the academy depends on who you ask (e.g., Bazerman, 2005; Brereton, 1995; Murphy, 2012), but wherever you choose to start, you will also find academics discussing their labor conditions. As the 1970s and 80s marshalled an increase in graduate programs in Rhet-Comp, so too did conversation about Rhet-Comp’s place in the academy, especially as it relates to Literature. These discussions, perhaps best summarized in Maxine Hairston’s (1985) emphatic CCCC’s address, offer a painful picture of labor standards for writing instructors. These accounts focus on common demands also highlighted in the labor movement: working for dignity and respect on the job.

Such demands erupted in the mid-1980s with the passage of the Wyoming Resolution, which demanded better wages and working conditions along with a grievance procedure that could be brought against institutions that fail to live up to equitable labor standards (Robertson, Crowley, & Lentricchia, 1987). The Wyoming Resolution, kicked off by then graduate student Susan Wyche speaking out about her labor conditions, and collaboratively drafted by a diverse group of graduate students and faculty at the 1986 Wyoming Conference on English, has been described as a “story of cross-generational and cross-rank collaboration and the best kind of camaraderie and social action one could possibly imagine happening at a professional conference” (McDonald & Schell, 2011, p. 360). While the Wyoming Resolution did not achieve its most radical goals (Sledd, 1991), the subsequent CCCC Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing has become a flashpoint for reflection on organizing efforts and the work of composition instructors (McClure, Goldstein, & Pemberton, 2017), continuing recently with the Indianapolis Resolution (Cox, Dougherty, Kahn, LaFrance, & Lynch-Biniek, 2016) and the CCCC Labor Caucus.

Despite continued organizing across the field, issues of labor still abound, especially regarding the status of graduate students. The Writing Program Administrators Graduate Organization (WPA-GO)(2019) outlines the systemic overwork, lack of employment benefits, and lack of respect that graduate employees face in their work, concluding: “The takeaways from this report are relatively straightforward, and evident in the simple, surface-level percentages and figures: the labor conditions of GSIs are woefully inadequate” (p. 6). While organizations like WPA-GO are beginning to identify these labor concerns and new spaces for graduate students to organize are sprouting up (nextGEN), the field as a whole has still yet to address these problems. None of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Position Statements addresses graduate labor specifically. Of the statements that address “Professional Issues,” almost all of the statements focus on tenure and tenure-track professors. Only one statement addresses the professional lives of non-tenure track faculty, who are arguably the most precariously employed and least compensated people in the field after graduate instructors.¹ The failure to consider graduate labor and the professionalization of graduate students can also be seen through interactions with more senior colleagues in the field. WPA-GO (2019) begins with this powerful testimonial:

It seems a certain generation of WPAs does not respect reasonable labor practices. Our WPA expects writing program assistants to work “as many hours as needed to do the job” (her words) without recognizing what is indicated in our contract (that [sic] are to work no more than 20 hours/week). Her reasoning is that WPAs should expect to work additional hours and that experiencing this as grad students professionalizes us and will help us get jobs. These expectations and logics are and perpetuate abusive labor practices. (p. 1)

For many in our field and in the academy at large, overwork is synonymous with professionalization. This simply is not true. Working more does not teach you how to be a scholar or writing program administrator. Ignoring graduate student labor—or deprofessionalizing it as “mere” apprenticeship—further erases the material realities of graduate education (Wright, 2017). Attempting to uphold an apprenticeship model ignores the labor structure of the university.

We see our work in our graduate employee labor union, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) Local 6300, as valuable experience that refutes our position as apprentices and students only. Graduate students are workers. As union officers, we hired and evaluated staff, assessed the effectiveness of the union’s organizing efforts, helped administer a million-dollar budget, and mentored new members of the union. Through this work, we have learned much about how the university functions, and there is perhaps no better way to learn about the university and its operations than to sit across the table from its bargaining representatives as they propose a 0% raise, cuts to healthcare coverage, and the removal of tuition waivers. Our perception of union work as professionalization is not always shared by our more-senior colleagues. While many faculty at our institution have been supportive of our work with the GEO, they have expressed that this work is subordinate to our scholarship.

While the state of graduate labor in our field may be dire, we see addressing these concerns as commensurate with and a central part of our scholarship and professional identities. Graduate students like us have been fighting for the right to unionize across public and private campuses. The #RedForED movement, started in 2018, has seen mass labor actions taken by K-12 teachers across multiple states (Strauss, 2019; Reilly, 2019). Despite a recent rule change proposed by the National Labor Relations Board (2019), graduate workers are organizing in creative ways to fight for the dignity of our labor.

As the other essays in this volume show, graduate students are leading the charge to address and mitigate exploitation across multiple domains in our field. Kumari, Baniya, and Larson’s (2020) work with nextGEN and the graduate student labor in WPA-GO illustrate how graduate students in the field can build spaces of community that resist racist rhetoric and faculty dismissal and foster supportive networks based in solidarity, or as Miller (2020) states, networks of care. In the section that follows, we’ll discuss the role unions and organizing can play in securing the dignity and respect for our labor all the contributors to this volume advocate for.

[1] Non-tenure-track faculty in Rhet-Comp have their own robust history of organizing (e.g., Kahn, Lalicker, & Lynch-Biniek, 2017), which we cannot adequately address in this piece. Their organizing is another current that graduate students can learn from.