“Subterranean Fire: The Percolating Currents of Graduate Labor Activism in Rhetoric and Composition”
by Andrew Bowman and Bruce Kovanen | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020
Our Organizing Model and Collective Action
Like most of our new colleagues, both authors had little experience with labor activism before joining our union. Both of us signed our union cards when we arrived at orientation, but we did not get heavily involved with the union until the spring semester. The Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Coalition (NTFC, our sister union in the Illinois Federation of Teachers) was going on strike to secure their first contract, and they needed our help. NTFC wanted to shut down the English building where we both taught. To show support for our non-tenure-track colleagues, we joined them on the picket lines. The NTFC and our union, the GEO, continues to work together to ensure academic labor is respected on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus. This initial experience was instructive and demonstrated to us the power of collective action.
Since then, our own union has won a two-week strike, even in the shadow of the Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, which placed pressure on public-sector unions across the country. In that decision, the court held that “fair share” fees, paid by non-union members to the union to compensate them for bargaining and enforcing a contract, were unconstitutional (Semuels, 2018). While this sudden cut to union budgets represents an existential threat to organized labor, many unions have responded by shifting their culture and renewing their focus on organizing.
Following in the footsteps of many other union locals, the GEO has begun to shift to an organizing model away from a service model. In an organizing model, instead of seeing the union as an external source of help with workplace issues, workers are encouraged to see themselves as active parts of both the union and its work. We see this organizing model, and the work of organizing more generally, as the first steps toward making the changes to our labor conditions that all workers deserve.
The organizing model “places the agency for success with a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mass of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all” and uses “specific injustice and outrage [as] the immediate motivation, but the primary goal is to transfer power from the elite to the majority” (McAlevey, 2016, p. 10). We wouldn’t have defined ourselves as activists when we began our organizing work. For Bruce, the specific injustice was the exploitation of international students in a Master’s of Computer Science program that was forcing students to pay to work at the university, despite having guaranteed tuition waivers (Kimutis & Kovanen, 2017). While those students were eventually made whole, we both continued to fight for tuition waiver protections in future contracts, leading to a two-week strike over the issue, among others. While the university tried to frame striking graduate students as disruptive and overcompensated, which further fueled organizing efforts (Gaines, 2018), graduate students themselves highlighted that their working conditions were their students’ learning conditions. Fighting to improve them wasn’t just a fight for higher wages or better workplace protections; it became a struggle for ensuring that education was accessible for all, not just the wealthy elite (Johnson, 2018).
While these examples from labor union work demonstrate the power of collective bargaining, the true power comes from direct collective action. Organized workers, regardless of union recognition or contract status, can make tangible improvements in their workplaces and communities. Workers, including graduate students on our own campus, have organized to improve their conditions without contractual protections; in 2004—before GEO gained union recognition—the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided graduate students with vision and dental insurance after a sustained drive for improved graduate student benefits. While less commonplace now, historically, workplaces operated without contracts as we understand them today and operated more informally, requiring organized workers to make sustainable change (Cartwright, 2018). Organizing both within and beyond a union context is necessary in order to make the changes we want to see in the field.