Many people have begun to notice that there is not a direct correlation between time spent at the bargaining table and results obtained. Often whole days of negotiations go by with nothing actually accomplished. On the other hand, there have been occasions when huge gains have been made with very little time spent at the table.
This was the case with Affirmative Action. The University refused to bargain on this issue for eight months. Then, during the first days of the strike, the Black United Front handed the U a leaflet endorsing our proposal and signed by the 22 separate groups united in BUF. First those nasty GEO picket lines at every turn—and now this evidence that the spirit of BAM was far from dead! The combination undoubtedly recalled to the Administration dread images of that earlier, less peaceful strike and, fearing a repeat, they capitulated immediately. They accepted the proposal we had on the table at that point, lock, stock, and barrel, with little haggling over the fine points.
Sexual preference, too, was a stumbling block at the table until people organized around this demand. Suddenly all the U’s protestations about the specter of homosexual rapists stalking the halls of the U of M disappeared into the dustbin of history, and our proposal was accepted. Clearly, victories won at the negotiating table are not entirely a question of how much time is spent haggling there.
Our bargaining team has learned through experience that well worked-out arguments and sophisticated maneuvers at the table are not the key to winning a good contract. It became clear that the objections presented by the U were not real ones, and that the Administration was simply not ready to concede anything on these issues.
The august assembly gathered around the table is not a community of scholars where the most sophisticated and logical argument wins the day. We answer the U’s objections and they simply think up others – unless in the meantime a show of force has compelled them to capitulate.
The bargaining table is the scene of a war of nerves. One of the tasks of the bargaining team is to undergo and resist a rather grueling battle of wits. Some of the University negotiators are trained professional bargainers, who specialize in psychological warfare.
It is their task to convince our bargaining team that various of our positions are impossible to win; it is their task to demoralize us. It is their task to try to frighten us into giving up on our positions and falling back in hopes of getting us to accept less than we wanted. It is our job to keep from being brainwashed.
Perhaps the most classic weapon in the professional negotiator’s bag of tricks is the threat of cutting off negotiations— frequently alternated with feints designed to create campus-wide feeling that agreement is just around the corner, so that we relax our efforts. We’ve all frequently fallen prey to this one.
The ebb and flow of spirits, from the RC to the picket line, has been a response, tide-like, to the U’s position in its orbit around the gamut of psychological warfare tactics. We’ve tended to assume that it’s always a bad sign whenever the two teams aren’t face-to-face across the table.
The fallacy of this view can be illustrated by contrasting some of the University’s verbal threats with their actual actions. For example, during the second week of strike, the Administration’s team threatened us constantly with a Sunday night deadline.
On that Sunday, when their chief negotiator told us not to negotiate again until we were ready to do as he told, we called his bluff and walked out of negotiations. Our leaving was, in effect, a display of confidence in our strength. It turned the pressure of a deadline back on their team and communicated to them that we would not capitulate according to their whim.
It was a positive move on our part not to be bargaining during those hours: as a result of it, their team changed its “mind” and negotiated with us on every day of the week in which they had said they would not negotiate.
When the pressure generated on the picket lines is sufficient to move the U to bargain, they will. There is nothing magic about being at the table, and it is sometimes to our advantage not to be there.
In future, we must not get caught up in the fetishism of bargaining. In keeping with the relative importance of bargaining v. action outside, we must in future give more of our energies to organizing ourselves, educating ourselves, formulating positions for discussions of contract issues, of where our strength lies, of our position with regard to other fights for goals similar to ours across the country, and so on.
Our strength lies in our membership; therefore the more educated and organized we are, the stronger we will be. The sexual preference issue is a clear illustration of this. Our first self-assessment was that we were too weak to win it.
But after mobilization and education, we gathered enough support inside and outside our union to force the U to give in. Constant discussion and organization by our entire membership will keep us strong now and also next year, when we will have to continue to pressure the U to live up to the promises made in the contract we win this year.
One element among many in our effort to further strengthen our union in future is particularly relevant to this leaflet. Often at stewards’ and other meetings, the sentiment has been expressed that “the bargaining team must have room to bargain.” While this is true, it is also true that sometimes it is better for the bargaining team to be mandated to not have so much room, to receive orders to hold firm.
If we want to win something, the bargaining team is actually in a much better position to win it if we have the clear backing of the membership to hold to a tough position. It often hurts the bargaining team to have too much room to move, for this is essentially a mandate to fall back. In the event that the membership decides that a position is not worth fighting for, the bargaining team should be mandated to fall back.
In the event that the membership really wants to win something and is willing to fight for it, it only hurts the team to have too much flexibility. We must be able to communicate the militance of the picket lines to the U in the bargaining room as well as outside. No matter how militant the strike, if our bargaining team has too much freedom to concede, the resulting contract will be weak. Conversely, a militant bargaining team coupled with a militant strike is the way to winning victory in any strike.
“Sexual preference, too, was a stumbling block at the table until people organized around this demand.”
When this piece was written, Anne Bobroff was a graduate student in Slavic History. Gayle Rubin was a graduate student in Anthropology
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.
