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Today’s universities are big business. The ivory tower has become the temple of the money changers and bean counters. They compete with one another to get first place (ranking) at the great federal and increasingly corporate research funding trough. To prove their efficiency to their funders they cut costs like an Amazon warehouse. And like Amazon it’s the workforce they turn to in order to trim their balance sheet: the multitude of service and clerical workers who keep things going; the faculty and above all the poorly-paid over-worked adjuncts; and further down the chain of labor the graduate student workers whose still lower rewards are often justified by appending the suffix “assistant” to their job title.
In addition, today’s higher education “fulfilment centers”, like their Amazon counterparts, increasingly measure “excellence” by the numbers, which means more students getting better grades, more papers and exams to mark, more data to dig up, more articles to get published, etc.
And so, like any other group of workers under pressure, those in academia have been joining unions for some time. Being part of the labor movement is something to take pride in. But, it too, has its problems. To put it bluntly, sometimes our top leaders buy into the notion that the “bargaining relationship” is a place of cooperation more than conflict, of shared interests more than counterposed goals. The needs and demands of the membership are all too often lost sight of or deeply compromised.
In this situation as union activists we might well adopt the slogan of the rank and file-based British Clyde Workers Committee of shop stewards who declared in 1915, “We will support the officials just as long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.” This is where the Rank and File Strategy comes in.
“The Rank and File Strategy” was written nearly twenty years ago, so obviously some things have changed. But the idea that the active layer of the union membership needs organization in order to “act independently” and to push the leadership when it hesitates or replace it when it gets in the way is a longstanding feature of the US labor movement and fully relevant today.
Indeed, we have a couple of recent examples of the potential power of an organized rank and file. In 2016, the Teamsters United slate, backed by the rank and file Teamsters for a Democratic Union, came within a hand full of votes of replacing the conservative leadership of that huge union. Just a month or so ago, the same rank and file groups organized to vote down the concessionary UPS contract negotiated by the old guard leaders by a margin of 54%. Although the leaders declared the contract ratified for lack of a two-thirds majority anyway, that fight is not over.
Perhaps the biggest lesson in rank and file power came this year when first the West Virginia teachers and later other “red” state teachers defied conventional wisdom and cautious officials to stage the biggest grassroots-led mass strikes we’ve seen in a long time. Once again, we see power lies in the ranks when they organize.
So, congratulations on the launch of The File to facilitate communications and coordination among rank and file workers in today’s lean and mean education mills.
Kim Moody was a founder of Labor Notes, a former adjunct at the City University of New York, and currently a researcher at the University of Westminster in London. His most recent book is On New Terrain: How Capital is Reshaping the Battleground of Class War (Haymarket Books, 2017). He is a member of the University and College Union and the National Union of Journalists in the UK.
