Emory celebrates its nominal commitment to diversity, but fails to provide the resources needed to achieve it in practice. Laney Graduate School, Emory’s school of the arts and sciences, lags far behind peer institutions in the diversity of its student body. They created an office to promote diversity in recruitment, which makes recommendations every year about the support students need to complete a Ph.D. at Emory. Dependent insurance, child care subsidies, a higher stipend and lower copays are among the things students without independent financial support need.
When students complained about these and other conditions of our employment, they were often put on committees that make recommendations to the school about how to improve our pay and benefits, only to be ignored. After years of this run around, it became clear that graduate students were a line item on an expense report to the administration. This approach to graduate workers was also reflected in the changing nature of graduate and undergraduate education at Emory. Departments have been told to steer their research toward more profitable channels for years, with some, mostly in the humanities, severely cut or eliminated entirely. It became clear, in other words, that our interests as academics and the values of the institution are contradictory, so we decided to organize.
Our union campaign began in 2016 after the NLRB ruled to recognize us and our graduate peers as employees. There was enormous momentum early in the campaign, which began with an authorization card drive that signed up almost 30% of Laney (about 400 workers) in the first semester. We faced some early obstacles. The biggest, of course, was Trump’s election; in addition to everything else, this meant that our recognition as employees was expected to be revoked. Shortly after we got the bad news, Emory hired Proskauer Rose, the same $1400/hour union-busting law firm that most other university administrations have hired to stymie the organizing on their campuses. Still, after our first year, graduate students were given dental and dependent coverage, a decision that was made in part in response to our organizing efforts.
After more than a month of deliberation by the organizing committee, and with the help of the Service Employees International Union, we formed a voluntary membership union, EmoryUnite! that has focused on issues-based advocacy. Our first campaign took up the August-September pay gap; new graduate workers weren’t getting paid during their first two months on campus. With typical disregard for our well-being, the administration did not inform any new recruits that they would not be paid for two months, throwing many workers into a precarious position. In response, We wrote a letter to admits, explaining this and other conditions of employment that Emory is not up front about, and found volunteers in most of Emory’s departments to share the information during recruitment weekend, before students had made their decisions. The administration suddenly felt the urgency of the issue and quickly changed the policy as a result of our efforts and the work of others on campus.
But the fight for a more inclusive campus is far from over. We’ve been organizing this year around Betsy DeVos’ proposed changes to Title IX, which threaten to make our campus significantly more dangerous for all those most at risk of sexual assault and sexual harassment. While the university has stated opposition to the proposed changes, several of their own policies make it more difficult for survivors to seek justice, such as a six-month statute of limitations they impose on reports of discrimination and harassment, and their limiting of grievance procedures to current students. These policies are particularly onerous on graduate students, because our close working relationships with our advisors can make it more difficult to bring a complaint while we are still in our programs. There’s plenty more to do and we’re looking forward to winning the future university that we all deserve.
“The fight for a more inclusive campus is far from over”
Jonathan Basile is a Ph.D. Student in Emory University’s Comparative Literature program, the creator of an online universal library, libraryofbabel.info, and a founding member of EmoryUnite!. His writing about the economics of academic labor has been published in Guernica, Berfrois, and Public Books. His first book, Tar for Mortar: “The Library of Babel” and the Dream of Totality, has been published by punctum books.
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.
