[Everywhere you look this spring, you’ll find evidence that
campuses are becoming sites of labor organizing and struggle. ]
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MAKING CAMPUSES PLATFORMS FOR LABOR RENEWAL  
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Joseph A. McCartin
March 16, 2023
Counter Punch
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_ Everywhere you look this spring, you’ll find evidence that
campuses are becoming sites of labor organizing and struggle. _

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Everywhere you look this spring, you’ll find evidence that campuses
are becoming sites of labor organizing and struggle.  In recent
months, faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago staged
recently a successful week-long strike
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adjunct faculty at the New School won a three-week strike
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50,000 graduate assistants staged a six-week strike across the entire
University of California system, staff at American University struck
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and undergraduate workers at a growing number of campuses
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begun organizing unions and, in some places, even preparing to strike.
  And this is just a small sampling of what has been afoot.

Now, just as the labor question is bubbling to the surface on campuses
across the country, a movement is emerging to connect that energy
across multiple campuses: Labor Spring
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campuses in 30 states and the District of Columbia are hosting
teach-ins and related educational and organizing events under this
banner.  On February 28, the AAUP chapter at Rutgers University held
a rally that included Chris Smalls of the Amazon Labor Union; Sara
Nelson, of the Association of Flight Attendants; and Rutgers faculty,
graduate assistants, and students, educating the campus in advance of
a strike vote for the AAUP chapter
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whose members have been working without a contract for over a year. 
On March 1, Georgetown University students held a teach-in on the
conditions face by food service and maintenance workers there. On
March 3, the non-tenure track professors of Howard University joined
with their allies to host a panel featuring long-time race and
economic justice advocate Bill Fletcher, Jr.  The Duke Graduate
Student Union was featured in an event at Duke University Law School
on March 7.

Similar events will unfold non-stop in coming weeks.  United Students
Against Sweatshops will lead a teach-in at the University of Maryland
on March 14 in which students will engage in a mock collective
bargaining session.  Georgetown Law is hosting one on March 20
featuring Starbucks workers and leaders such as Erica Smiley of Jobs
with Justice, Sara Steffens of the Communications Workers of America,
Elissa McBride of AFSCME, and the general counsel of the National
Labor Relations Board, Jennifer Abruzzo.  Many other events are still
being planned. The Labor Spring website has a complete list
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their events.

These events are reviving the teach-in tradition that was forged in
the 1960s by civil rights, students’ rights, and anti-war
activists.  In some ways, the Labor Spring teach-ins can be seen as a
reprise of labor teach-ins that were held in 1996, following reformer
John Sweeney’s election to the presidency of the AFL-CIO.  Sweeney,
who won the first contested election in the labor federation’s
history, made it a priority to heal the lingering divisions that had
developed between unions and student activists in the era of the
Vietnam War. In the summer of 1996 Sweeney’s AFL-CIO launched Union
Summer, an effort patterned after the rights movement’s 1964 Freedom
Summer, appealing to young people to get a taste of labor organizing.
That fall, a series of labor teach-ins were held at Columbia
University, the University of Virginia, and eight other campuses that
built on Union Summer’s appeal.  The 
[[link removed]]_New
York Times_
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the Columbia teach-in to a rock concert. As Steve Fraser and Josh
Freeman, two of the organizers of that Columbia event, recently
recalled
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those teach-ins helped overcome the by then decades long estrangement
that had developed between organized labor and the left.

The 1996 labor teach-ins planted important seeds. They led to the
formation of Scholars, Artists and Writers for Worker Justice (SAWSJ),
which in turn helped create the Labor and Working Class History
Association (LAWCHA [[link removed]]) in 1998. The teach-ins
also helped propel organizing efforts by graduate assistants in the
University of California system, paving the way for a system-wide
strike in December 1998 which led to the union’s successful election
of graduate assistants at UCLA, Berkeley, and six other UC campuses in
1999.  It also contributed to the formation of United Students
Against Sweatshops (USAS
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the Worker Rights Consortium [[link removed]], and
even the 1999 Battle of Seattle, that brought together the
“Teamsters and turtles” alliance of labor, environmentalist, and
anti-corporate-globalization movement against the World Trade
Organization.

Unfortunately, the labor revival that began to coalesce at that time
was short-lived.  The Supreme Court’s December 12, 2000, decision
handing the presidency to Republican George W. Bush followed nine
months later by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, threw
these nascent efforts into disarray.  The crash of 2008, the Great
Recession, and most recently, the COVID pandemic made it difficult for
the movement to recapture the energy that has been coalescing among
labor and young people in the late 1990s.

Now, however, abundant evidence suggests that the obstacles that had
delayed a resurgence of campus-based labor activism are giving way. 
Just how much present conditions favor the revival of campus-based
labor activism is demonstrated by the breadth of support for Labor
Spring.

While the 1996 labor teach-ins focused on a small group of mostly
elite campuses, the teach-ins taking place this spring are happening
on a broad cross-section of campuses across the nation. 
Geographically, Labor Spring will take place on dozens of public and
private campuses from Massachusetts to Hawaii.  Teach-ins will occur
in states of varying political character, from the union-dense blue
states like New York and California to anti-union red state bastions
such as Idaho and Alabama.  Public institutions both large and small,
from the University of Michiganto New York’s Dutchess Community
College, will host events.  So will small liberal arts schools like
the College of the Holy Cross and HBCUs like Tuskegee University.  A
range of law schools — including the City University of New York,
Harvard, Yale, and Stanford—will host events.  So will Vanderbilt
Divinity School and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

That such widespread interest in labor is coming to such a broad
spectrum of campuses at precisely the moment when so many who work on
campuses—including undergraduates— are beginning to identify as
workers and recognize the value of organizing is a potentially
momentous development. Higher education constitutes one of the
“commanding heights” of our present day economy.  In many places
campuses serve as “anchor institutions” in their communities:
their practices broadly influence local labor markets for good or ill.
They can act as engines of economic development, job creation, social
mobility, and inclusivity. Yet they can also exacerbate the worst
tendencies of 21st century capitalism: they saddle students with
ballooning debt, they contract out an increasing number of services to
lower-waged workers, they rely increasingly on the precarious labor of
adjunct instructors, and they are too often ruled by boards of
trustees and regents who have benefitted the most from the trends of
financialization, tax evasion by the wealthy, and surging inequality
that are weakening higher education overall.

If Labor Spring can coalesce and magnify the interest in labor
organization that we’ve been witnessing both on and adjacent to
campuses over recent months, then we are bound to see an exciting year
of organizing ahead.

_Originally posted by Working-Class Perspectives
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* Campus Organizing
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* Campus Teach-ins
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