[“Labor Spring” brings back a national teach-in on organizing
to campuses across the country.]
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IN 1996, THERE WAS UNION SUMMER. THIS YEAR, THERE’S “LABOR
SPRING.”  
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Cindy Hahamovitch, William P. Jones, Joseph A. McCartin
February 24, 2023
In These Times
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_ “Labor Spring” brings back a national teach-in on organizing to
campuses across the country. _

Graduate students on strike at Temple University. , Stanley
Collins/TUGSA

 

Something is stirring this spring. People in the U.S. are becoming
increasingly interested in what commentators once called ​“the
labor question,” following recent organizing victories at Starbucks,
Amazon and Apple stores; well-publicized strikes of teachers, nurses
and railway workers; and the unionization of staff, graduate
assistants and even faculty at scores of campuses, including the
recent successful strike of nearly 50,000 academic workers on the
campuses of the University of California. 

Evidence of this mood shift is unmistakable this spring as students,
campus staff and faculty, together with unions and community allies,
are coming together on or adjacent to more than 50 campuses
nationwide — including ours — to engage in a remarkable
national teach-in on worker rights and organizing called
[[link removed]]Labor Spring
[[link removed]].

It has been a long while since we’ve felt this level of energy on
our campuses around labor issues. The last such moment arguably
crested in the second half of the 1990s. Following the election of
John Sweeney to the presidency of the American Federation of Labor and
Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) in 1995, a spirit of
change swept the labor movement and attracted the attention of young
people. Sweeney’s union, the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU), had helped catalyze that spirit in the 1990s with its
innovative Justice for Janitors campaign, which won significant
victories for low-waged immigrants and workers of color through
militant bridge blockades and similar acts of civil disobedience.
Sweeney brought that spirit with him into the AFL-CIO’s leadership
when he defeated Thomas R. Donahue in the first contested election in
the labor federation’s history. His victory signaled a sea change
in a movement that had suffered years of decline. 

One of the most important features of Sweeney’s tenure was his
effort to heal the lingering divisions that had developed between
unions and student activists in the era of the Vietnam War. The
healing of that decades-old schism paved the way for Union Summer, an
effort to recruit young people to union organizing, which the AFL-CIO
launched in the summer of 1996. That fall, another significant project
took wing, a series of labor teach-ins at Columbia University, the
University of Virginia and eight other campuses that helped electrify
young people and attract them to the labor movement. Reporting on the
overflow crowd that attended the Columbia teach-in, the
[[link removed]]_New
York Times_
[[link removed]]
likened its energy to that of a rock concert. 

The 1996 teach-ins contributed to a remarkably fruitful period of
labor activism. In their wake, an anti-sweatshop movement took shape
on college campuses that gave rise to United Students Against
Sweatshops and the Worker Rights Consortium to investigate and expose
abuse and protect worker rights in factories around the globe. The
teach-ins gave birth to campus living wage campaigns and to Scholars,
Artists and Writers for Worker Justice (SAWSJ), which in turn paved
the way for our organization, the Labor and Working Class History
Association (LAWCHA), which was founded in 1998. Organizing on
campuses also took off following the 1996 teach-ins. The United Auto
Workers (UAW) won representation elections for graduate assistants at
UCLA, Berkeley and six other University of California campuses in
1999, following a systemwide strike in December 1998. Then, in May
1999, the UAW filed a petition for a representation election for
teaching assistants at New York University, inaugurating a long
struggle to bring unionization to graduate assistants at private
universities, a struggle which continues to the present day.

That period of activism was transformative. Among other things, it
helped build the bridges between unions, environmentalists and critics
of globalization that led to the ​“Teamsters and Turtles”
alliance visible in the protests against the World Trade Organization
during the ​“Battle of Seattle” in 1999 and the World Bank
protests in Washington, D.C., in 2000. It also laid the groundwork for
the AFL-CIO’s dramatic shift on immigration policy in 2000, when it
embraced comprehensive immigration reform and began championing the
cause of undocumented immigrant workers. 

Unfortunately, this hopeful surge of creative, youthful energy was
undercut by the events of Dec. 12, 2000 and Sept. 11, 2001, the first
being the Supreme Court’s _Bush v. Gore_ decision determining the
outcome of the contested presidential election of 2000, and the second
being the attacks undertaken by the followers of Osama bin Laden,
which opened the door to a ​“War on Terror” that went on to
dominate the national agenda for years. Nor would the energy of the
late 1990s reemerge in the decade that followed. The housing bubble
and financial crash of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession and the
period of austerity that followed it created trying times for young
people, educational institutions and the labor movement. 

Now, however, a new and different moment is taking shape and we are
seeing evidence of it on our campuses, in our students and co-workers,
and among our community and labor allies. Even in the South, where
most public workers lack collective bargaining rights, the United
Campus Workers, a movement seeking to organize public university
employees — graduate students, undergraduate employees, staff
and faculty — in one wall-to-wall union, has been spreading from
campus to campus.

This is why our organization, LAWCHA, has decided to promote the Labor
Spring teach-ins and actions. We welcome other organizations to join
with us in this effort. 

Labor Spring will differ from the teach-ins held in 1996, whose reach
was confined to 10 mostly elite campuses. As it unfolds through March
and April, Labor Spring will take place on dozens of public and
private campuses from Massachusetts to Hawaii, in blue states like
Illinois, purple states like Georgia and North Carolina, and red
states like Louisiana, Nebraska and Texas; it will happen at big
public institutions like Berkeley and smaller ones, like New York’s
Dutchess Community College; it will take place at HBCUs like Howard
and Tuskegee, at theological schools like the Vanderbilt Divinity
School, and in law schools ranging from the City University of New
York to Harvard, Yale and Stanford. Organizers in each setting will
convene people — workers, students, community members, faculty,
unions and allies (some of which are now overlapping
categories) — in gatherings that consider local and national
labor issues and help direct people toward actions that they can take
on their campus, in their workplace or in their community to advance
worker justice. 

The breadth of interest represented by this remarkable diversity of
settings confirms to us that the moment is right not only to reclaim
the lost promise of the labor-campus alliance of the late 1900s, but
to broaden and deepen it. Today’s young people have learned how to
organize intersectionally in Black Lives Matter and reproductive
rights protests in ways that their predecessors in the 1990s did not.
Today’s essential workers, both on and off our campuses, have
learned that while their work is essential, they are still treated as
expendable. Today’s faculty face attacks on their academic freedom
and the normalization of contingent employment. Today’s labor
movement is also different. Its leadership has never been more
diverse, inclusive and representative of the working-class it
represents. Equally important, through new initiatives such as
[[link removed]]Bargaining for the Common Good
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wall-to-wall organizing, today’s labor movement is learning to
creatively adapt the tools of organizing and bargaining that it
developed in the 20th century to the very different form of capitalism
that workers face today. 

The times too have changed in ways that create both new opportunities
and increased urgency. The 1996 labor teach-ins happened at
neoliberalism’s zenith. Today, by contrast, we are witnessing the
accelerating decomposition of neoliberalism, as the leaders of both
political parties jettison tired shibboleths of the ​’90s like
​“free trade” and struggle to respond to and channel populist
discontent, either by directing it toward the right in the form of
ethnonationalism, anti-immigrant animus and ​“anti-wokism,” or
toward the left through economic policies that serve the needs of
working people and help build a just and environmentally sustainable
economy. After declining to a historic low in 2010, public approval
of labor unions has rebounded nearly to an all-time high. Young people
will help determine which of these visions win out.

These times are also different in another way, for today democracy too
hangs in the balance in a way that was not quite so evident in the
1990s. Back then many believed that the end of the Cold War would
usher in ​“the end of history.” We now see that the dynamics
ascendant at that time — deindustrialization, deregulation,
de-unionization, financialization, the ​“fissuring” of
employment relations, a deepening international migration
crisis — have introduced increasing precarity into both
workers’ lives and our democratic institutions. Unless we reverse
these dynamics, the threats to democracy that we have witnessed in
recent years will surely grow.

So we are joining this spring with our students, co-workers and
community and labor allies to again take up the labor question on our
campuses and across this nation. We urge you to join with us. To find
out how, go to labor​spring​.org [[link removed]]

Cindy Hahamovitch [[link removed]]
is a historian at the University of Georgia and the current president
of Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA).

William P. Jones [[link removed]] is
a historian at the University of Minnesota and the former president
of the Labor and Working Class History Association (LAWCHA).

Joseph A. McCartin
[[link removed]] is a historian
at Georgetown University and the incoming president of the Labor and
Working Class History Association (LAWCHA) as of 2024.

_===_

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* Labor Teach-ins 1996; Labor Spring; LAWCHA; Campus Organizing
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