The File is a publication by and for rank-and-file academic labor organizers. In response to the depoliticization of academic labor and the stale orthodoxy of business unionism, our mission is to support grassroots, member-driven organizing within the academy while linking it to struggles beyond the campus.
The university is a key node of wider systems of power. Academic systems hobble new generations with debt, reproduce violent racial caste systems, concoct weapons for the military industrial complex, and concentrate wealth in elite enclaves. Hence we underline the potential for bottom-up academic labor movements to escape the confines of the university and link with broader initiatives, such as those against austerity, structural racism, patriarchy, and the general violence of class society.
We welcome reports, (coherent) theoretical interventions on the changing nature of academic labor, and ideas for the steps needed to go on the offensive, win, and keep winning.
Editorial board: Jonny Bunning (Web Design). Danielle Carr, Alexander Kolokotronis (Social Media), Jarrod Shanahan, Sonam Singh (Print Design).
Four University of California graduate workers – who themselves went out on wildcat grading and teaching strikes in 2019-2020, and are now members of the Rank and File Action (RAFA-UC) caucus in the UC Student Workers’ Union (UAW-2865) – talked to members of C-AWDU to get a frank assessment of the dynamics at play, and some of the prehistory, of this ongoing, important strike.
A year ago, we were holding rallies across the university demanding pay equity for adjuncts, but today we are fighting for our very lives and our livelihoods. The crisis has only made those injustices worse, and only made the need for a rank-and-file class struggle union more necessary. This context has produced these five demands that are powering our movement.
The pandemic has dissolved the sustaining myth of grad school itself: that if you play along for long enough, you’ll get yours. The COVID crisis demands that we think bigger than a return for the “Golden Era” of universities, or concessions to extend the status quo. How do we want to imagine what the university could look like in the 21st century, after so many years of defunding and corporatization? If the crisis has introduced the certainty that the university will be transformed, how can we bend its potential toward a fundamental reversal of its long neoliberal course?
Mass eviction from university housing in the coronavirus crisis has shown students what communities being gentrified have known for a long time: in most cities, the university is first and foremost a landlord. As student tenants, it’s up to us to organize towards collective actions that reflect the interlinked realities of work, tuition, debt, and rent.
In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action.
A wave of militant action has swept across UC Santa Cruz, based on the demand for a cost of living adjustment. Danielle Carr spoke to the wildcat strikers to learn more.
The recent wildcat action at UC Santa Cruz arose out of a long history of organizing against concessionary contracts. Shannon Ikebe gives a history of the strikes in terms of the 2018 University of California contract.
Jarrod Shanahan recently sat down with two strike organizers to discuss their experiences at Rutgers and why they needed to found the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus.
Nick Caverly reflects on Rubin and Bobroff’s pamphlet and the struggles of rank and file union members at the University of Michigan in the 1970s.
Gayle Rubin and Anne Bobroff distributed this essay in a pamphlet during a graduate student strike at the University of Michigan in 1975. In it, they argue that bargaining must be underwritten by strong rank-and-file power.
A former Cornell Graduate Students United Organizing Committee chair reflects on the union’s narrow recognition election loss, transactional unionism that instrumentalizes workers, and the challenge to build enduring democratic structures.
For years, CUNY’s two tier union system has colluded with public austerity to sell out adjuncts. A new militant movement has emerged to change that.
The File is free, but we do have web and printing costs. Help us out with a couple of dollars here.
