Gayle Rubin and Anne Bobroff ran off copies of their leaflet “On the fetishism of bargaining” during the closing days of a 1975 strike that resulted in the first contract for graduate employees at the University of Michigan. A month-long work stoppage by graduate employees brought scenes not unlike those we might observe on our campuses today. Administration laughed at the notion that graduate student TAs, RAs, and staff assistants could identify as workers, let alone workers who would benefit from the formation of a union. Faculty prevailed upon the union, the Graduate Employees’ Organization, to call off the strike. Historical memory maintains that university administration was unconcerned when more than half of courses were left without instructors or that audio-recorded lectures were used in place of seminar-style discussions. Tuition bills had already been paid. Responses were forthcoming when thousands clogged the plaza in front of the administration building, when Teamsters refused to cross pickets to deliver packages, retrieve dumpsters, or replenish campus supplies, when the campus laundry and electrical shops were shuttered, and when campus maintenance vehicles had their tires flattened. The labors of graduate students as researchers, instructors, and department members are critical to the maintenance of universities as places of learning and cutting-edge scholarship. However, situating those labors in solidarity with those of our support staff, service employees, and trades can make their power acutely felt by upper management.
More importantly, perhaps, Rubin and Bobroff underscore how the bargaining table does not equalize or deliver results on its own. In their words, “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. […]. Behaving like good graduate students, we studiously solved each of the Administration’s objections in turn – and were surprised to have them dismissed out of hand.” This feeling is likely familiar to anyone who has sat across from management or observed negotiations. I experienced it as part of the GEO bargaining committee during our 2016-2017 contract negotiations. For instance, a proposal for twelve weeks of paid release from job responsibilities following childbirth – the minimum recommended by the UM obstetricians who deliver the majority of campus employees’ children – was panned by a university administrator as “unworkable.” They preferred the status quo of three weeks, allowing “flexibility” for employing units.
Similar fates befell proposals across the board, including those seeking to reduce mental health co-pays, protect non-US citizens from work-related visa violations, expand trans inclusive health insurance, increase minimum wages, and preserve affordable health and dental insurance. To be clear, our proposals were not half-baked. Bargaining priorities emerged from two years of discussion in membership meetings, with proposals drafted by caucuses who spent months crafting contract language that would address actual world issues experienced by our colleagues. Our arguments were accompanied with footnotes and presentations that cited academic research, peer institutions, economic analyses, university policies, and campus revenue centers among other justifications.
Still, rejection of our initial proposals was something our bargaining committee and membership had been told to prepare for. Where possible, opening arguments had been backstopped with second and third options. Nevertheless, we did not anticipate administration’s hostility to a proposal allocating Graduate Student Staff Assistants (GSSAs) to the implementation of the university’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) program. Since 2014, UM has undertaken a program to address campus, college, and departmental climates structurally biased against people of color. Velma Lopez and Jamie Tam, graduate employees in the UM School of Public Health, noted how administration’s ‘DEI strategic plans’ were unfunded and continued a practice of relying on the uncompensated labor of affected groups, principally students, staff, and faculty of color. Even when administration dedicated a budget line for DEI and hired staff, they maintained that students would not be compensated. Lopez and Tam chaired GEO’s DEI Committee in developing a contract proposal that would create 23 GSSA positions to ensure that graduate students engaged in the organizational work of developing and implementing initiatives related to DEI would be compensated with the same pay, benefits, and union representation as GSIs.
Administration’s response to this proposal was to ignore it entirely, seemingly in the hopes it would go away. Because the proposal demanded creating unionized employment, administration was legally empowered to disregard it as a permissive – that is non-mandatory – subject of bargaining. When the proposal continued to be sent across the table over months of negotiations, administration became increasingly and visibly frustrated. At one point, a member of the administration’s bargaining team threatened to file an ‘unfair labor practice’ against the union and declare an impasse in negotiations due to GEO’s insistence at discussing a proposal “outside the scope of negotiations.” This threat to penalize the union and hold the rest of our contract hostage was effective. Our bargaining team reluctantly proposed dropping the DEI proposal to the membership who narrowly approved the request. Fraught discussions ensued, with the GEO DEI Committee and other members pointing out that GEO had allowed management to divide us against ourselves, and in so doing we were complicit in perpetuating the marginalization of our members, allies, and students of color. A member-drafted proposal compelling the bargaining team to continue sending the DEI proposal across the table was approved several days after the proposal had been removed from the platform. It was nerve wracking to sit across from the administration’s negotiating team while one of my colleagues explained that membership insisted the university bargain over DEI GSSA positions. The university’s lead negotiator was clearly flummoxed, asking why we could not make our members understand the consequences of this action. As my colleague replied, “We’ve told you, our bargaining team answers to the membership, not the other way around.”
On its own, this momentary display of member power at the bargaining table did not deliver a win on the DEI proposal or any others. Bargaining had begun in November, and despite meeting twice per week for months, by mid-February administration had agreed to do little more than correct misspellings while proposing stagnant wages and increases to out-of-pocket insurance costs. People were agitated, and around that time members began discussing plans for a walkout beginning in April. Our bargaining team and other elected union leadership explained in membership meetings that this would be an extreme move. Because our existing agreement with the university terminated on May 1, the end of the semester, a walkout before then would place us in breach of contract. Furthermore, walkouts by public employees are illegal in Michigan, and the university could seek financial damages from the union and individual participants. If the university chose to pursue damages, we explained, it would likely enjoy broad support from Republicans in control of the the state house and governor’s mansion who had passed right-to-work-for-less legislation and a law that specifically sought to undermine the power of our union local.
Even with this caution, members began to meet regularly to organize for a walkout, a process that included sit-ins at administrative offices, undergraduate petitions, and a bank of picket captain volunteers. On April 6, members proposed and won a membership vote approving a strike under contract beginning April 11. Picket shifts were mapped and hundreds of picket signs delivered. Undergraduate groups notified administration of their support for GEO in contract negotiations. Local Teamsters, building trades, and other unions informed administration they would not cross picket lines to make deliveries, operate construction equipment, or otherwise work on non-essential services, even if it meant going without pay. Marathon bargaining sessions in the days and nights leading up to the strike deadline saw administrative red lines crossed where five months of sessions had not. On the afternoon of April 10, the university proposed a three-year agreement including significant across the board raises, protections for visa recipients, capped mental health costs, eight weeks paid work release for birthing parents and five weeks for non-birthing parents, expanded childcare subsidies, provisions for trans-inclusive healthcare, and six DEI GSSA positions. After a few revisions, our bargaining team agreed to take the proposal to a membership meeting scheduled for that evening. Almost one thousand members assembled to initiate the strike agreed to send the agreement for a ratification vote instead.
Obviously, the 2017-2020 agreement negotiated between GEO and UM did not deliver everything my colleagues and I wanted, but it does offer a meaningful platform for future campaigns. Moreover, our experience confirms the staying power of Rubin and Bobroff’s observations from four decades before. Administration is not simply compelled by logic, human wellbeing, or the formal figures of bargaining tables and negotiating teams. Rather, changes only occur at the bargaining table when members strategically demonstrate their power outside it. In 1975, the victories achieved through this method included an unprecedented, grievable anti-discrimination clause situating “sexual preference” alongside other protected classes. While this policy would eventually serve as the model for the university’s overarching anti-discrimination policies, in 1975 administration argued it was unlawful and potentially dangerous. Indeed, in 1976 UM administration unsuccessfully attempted to strip anti-discrimination from the contract entirely. As in 1975 and 2017, it was creative, tactical organizing – informational pickets, sit-ins, and educational campaigns, as well as the demonstrated potential for empty classrooms, deflated tires, undelivered packages, overflowing waste bins, silent construction sites, and the like – that forced managerial capitulation in the bargaining room.
“Rubin and Bobroff underscore how the bargaining table does not equalize or deliver results on its own.”
Nick Caverly is a member of the Graduate Employees’ Organization – University of Michigan (AFT 3550, AFL-CIO)
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.
