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Hard Carding
and Soft Funding: How to Organize
Ourselves and Our Unions
James Thompson 1.1. In a prior contribution
to Cogs in the Classroom Factory, I described what I believed
then were the salient features of a union of contingent academic workers—the
three sister chapters of Graduate Assistants United (GAU) at University
of Florida (UF), University of South Florida (USF), and Florida A &
M University (FAMU).1 In that article, written on the eve of the
2002 statewide merger among all education unions under the Florida Education
Association (FEA) umbrella, I argued that understanding our joint affiliations
and merger structure would help explain the character of our individual
chapters. I was also quite positive about the possibilities for growth
in the grad union sector based on our “organizing” model. I instinctively
described our chapter as an organizing entity only because we constantly
struggled to retain membership in a contingent shop, not because I knew
what an organizing campaign looked like, or because we were involved
in what I would now describe as a “campaign” to engage in perpetual
organizing within a social movement. I described GAU, but I did not
have the tools to predict the stormy cultural and institutional changes
on the horizon. I thought I had clear answers about how to build a movement
culture, but I had never really studied or practiced methods of organizing
to achieve that culture. 1.2. What
happened after I submitted that essay for publication forced GAU,
and me as an activist, to come to terms with a new definition of organizing
and new ways of making power within the academy, our unions, and society
at large. I believed organizing involved inviting four thousand graduate
workers to a party where we would ask them to join the union. I was
wrong; this did not work. Organizing is not an event, a place, or a
single action. Organizing is a collection of strategies and methods
for bringing consciousness and power to a community of interest. It
is a lifestyle, a grand proposition about the world and humanity. Some
jokingly refer to it as a religion or a faith. If by faith one means
a pragmatic but undying belief that humanity can be reconnected by constant
engagement between thoughtful and purposeful individuals, then faith—an
upbeat and perpetually smiling faith—is an essential component of organizing.
I’m not sure our best and brightest union leaders are always hip to
these propositions (nor was I, for that matter). Part of the story of
UF GAU is what happens when they don’t get hip, but most of it is about
what happens when a few good people do. 1.3. In the following article, I will review the UFF’s
response to the decentralization of the Florida Board of Education in
the Spring of 2001, a decision that left the history of the nine UFF
bargaining units in jeopardy, with a specific focus on how the GAU launched
a reauthorization card drive and on the way developed an organizing
culture. Some portions of this article draw on my experiences working
as a contingent (in both senses of the word) organizer for the UFF’s
national unions (NEA & AFT). It was during this campaign that I
discovered and better defined my own beliefs about organizing, and that
I realized what we need to do to help other unionists come to those
important conclusions. This was my first organizing job after a long
hiatus from working as a member-organizer for GAU across the state,
and my experiences with the GAU card drive reintroduced me to disillusionment
and disbelief at the behavior of those outside my chapter and outside
the contingent sector. But in the end this negative view turned to hope
and optimism. I have done my best to appreciate the constraints under
which my colleagues worked at the state and national level. However,
if we are to build lifelong and hard-struggling coalitions between the
unions, classes, sectors, members, and staff that compose the universe
of higher education unionism, some criticism is in order. The Big
Question of 2002-2003 2.1. After a rousing
success in the 2000 gubernatorial election, Jeb
Bush decentralized the Florida Board of Higher Education and replaced
it with corporate and Bush-friendly Boards of Trustees at each of our
now independent large public universities (with the splitting off of
the New College from University of South Florida, they numbered eleven
total, and served the people of the State of Florida and the Southeast).
This was an effective punishment for the power, however slight, of the
education unions, which were and remain the only truly organized native
political structure capable of providing some fleeting opposition to
the Republicans in Florida. AFT and NEA—at this time engaged in finalizing
a statewide merger—had handpicked an anonymous conservative businessman
from South Florida to run against the more popular and progressive Janet
Reno. As a result of this poor political decision, not only did they
lose the gubernatorial election by a wide and unanticipated margin,
but they drew the ire of the Republican regime. To bust what were already
weak, minority-status unions, the Republican and conservative Democrat
state legislature adopted a decentralized quasi-private structure for
the higher education public institutions, thereby allowing them to argue
that the State of Florida was no longer the “employer” of faculty and
graduate assistants, and that all union certifications were null and
void. 2.2. The
immediate dilemma for United Faculty of Florida, GAU’s
parent organization and the union that represents that faculty and graduate
employees at eleven of the state’s public universities, was whether
to fight for our survival in the courts or in the field—with attorneys
or with organizers. Organizing campaigns would recertify each campus
bargaining unit as separate entities with separate contracts (the Graduate
Assistants Union, with some foresight, and some luck, had been negotiating
separate institutional contracts for two years prior to the restructuring).
A court victory, on the other hand, would solve the problem statewide
by forcing the Public Employee Relations Committee to recognize each
individual university as a “successor-employer” to the defunct Board
of Education. Concerns about the bottom line in our service union model
were paramount. With declining membership, a creeping insolvency, overworked
staff, internal bickering, and no visible method for regaining ground,
it seemed almost cheaper to hire attorneys to fight successor-employer
cases than to engage in a statewide organizing campaign.
It is a secret to those outside as well as inside the state,
but Florida’s high courts are bastions of moderation in an otherwise
backwards region. We believed we had a decent chance for victory if
we went the legal route. 2.3. On the other hand, as
a very small minority of UFF leaders and GAU activists argued, a real
organizing campaign would eliminate the chances of losing in the courts.
With authorization cards and successful elections we could end-run a
court loss, reorganize our unions, jettison units that simply didn’t
pass muster (thus removing some albatrosses from the neck of statewide
academic unionism), and increase dues income to rebuild the union’s
infrastructure. Florida, unlike many former slave states, has fair-to-middling
union laws which give us the right to collective bargaining in the public
sector, even among graduate assistants. Energetic organizing drives
would be a way to prove something to ourselves and to Florida’s right
wing. Winning in the courts would not fundamentally change our union
strength, and it could leave us broke. 2.4. This
debate often played out as a disagreement between those who supported
different cadres and philosophies within our now-merged nationals. Some
of the disagreements were personal, but most centered around “organizing”
methods, cost-sharing for The Project (as I will call it), and general
principles (unions as professional organizations who serve their members
in return for dues, or unions as agents for fundamental change who demand
activism from their members). While
cadres in each national organization challenge any stereotype, many
UFF members, grads included, saw the NEA and AFT as fundamentally different
organizations representing either of these approaches to unionism. One
can join the NEA without knowing it is a collective bargaining entity.
Some praised this fact, while others turned up their noses in disgust.
Even stalwarts and advocates admitted, often in support of a
hushed unionism, that the NEA promulgated a quasi-managerial culture
of professionalism, public relations, and service. This was seen as
an asset by what I would largely term an “old guard” of higher ed. unionists,
many of whom prided themselves on distinguishing
their academic work from the K-12 sector. On the other hand, an emerging
and outspoken cadre of UFF members strongly disagreed with the service
model and the polite professionalism of the NEA. To save our unions,
this would not do. 2.5. GAU had a special role
in the debate over organizing or court battles, since it is itself a
weird stepchild within the NEA. We were the only NEA grad union, and
an outspoken challenger to the culture of professionalism and accommodation
that the NEA seemed to represent. The AFT, for all of its own problems,
is clearly more devoted to an organizing culture, in part derived from
the higher rates of member activism in its dominant K-12 sector. The
AFT is also clearly in the vanguard in grad organizing, although plenty
of horror stories about local chapter relationships with the national
were exchanged when we had earlier hosted the Congress of Graduate Employee
Unions (CGEU). The fact is that both unions are driven by K-12 dues
and political concerns. Whether we accepted their help or not, caution
was recommended by those with experience organizing under both organizations.
2.6. GAU
members eventually and almost unanimously decided that this was no time
for professional pride. K-12 workers are brothers and sisters, although
we had failed to engage with them sufficiently in Florida, and it was
now time to reap the benefits of merging with the more active and more
organizing-oriented AFT national. That was part of the impetus for the
merger in the first place, we thought. In the end, the organizing argument
won the day, and a statewide grant funded by the NEA, AFT, and the merged
Florida Education Association helped UFF get an organizing campaign
under way in each of its chapters. The NEA largely donated money, while
the AFT provided in-kind and staff support. 2.7. The struggle to ensure
that graduate employee organizing was an item in the statewide grant
was monumental. Certain UFF, AFT, and NEA officials would present themselves
as strong advocates of the GAU line during negotiations over the grant, or during meetings with representatives from the powerful
collective voting block of GAU chapters. Meanwhile, their staff and
colleagues would explain to GAU activists that the opposite was true.
One moment our faculty colleagues appeared as white knights; the next
it was clear that they had waffled in order to move along the process
of getting money into the more expensive faculty organizing lines. Who
could blame them? Before we understood what real organizing was (the
kind you do for yourself) faculty and grads seemed to be at the mercy
of both nationals. If you were a grad or faculty member represented
by the UFF, there was little in the history of your union to encourage
you towards anything but mercy from the new benefactors. When one of
the principal unions said, “roll the grads,” it is easy to see how faculty
leadership would waffle. They were protecting their own hides, worn
thin by decades of inactivity, an aging membership, and declining membership. 2.8. The story of the grant
is complicated, and to tell it would reveal the kind of internal politicking
about which no democratic organization should be proud. But to the credit
of our grad chapter leadership and some faculty supporters from unlikely
places, the GAU received a newly minted National Representative from
the AFT for an undetermined period (a few months, as it turned out).
We also got temporary organizing appointments for two of our chapter
members, myself and my colleague and friend Erica Pittman. Faculty chapters
with one-third or even one-fifth the employees and membership of our
UF grad chapter would later receive whole staff organizers for weeks
at a time, and we complained about that. No one can tell me that quiescence
would have gotten us staffing for that critical summer, when we first
learned how to run a campaign. Resources only ever trickled in after
heated debates, angry demands for principled decision making, and open
requests for fair treatment. As we learned over the course of the campaign,
unions, like universities, don’t like headaches. 2.9. Our AFT Nat Rep came to us in March 2003, during which time I remained at home, largely unaware of the transformations that were about to take place in our union and my life. To be honest, the Nat Rep, was, we discovered, as much a part of the faculty organizing drive as he was part of the GAU’s drive. His long hair, youthfulness, enthusiasm, anxious energy, and his passion for grassroots organizing methodology pretty much assured that his first gig with the GAU would be a perfect fit—although I’m sure he properly dreaded much of his time in Gainesville. When he arrived, we took it as a symbol that we had won an important argument among our national colleagues. Here we saw our “elders” finally helping one of the most vibrant and energetic UFF chapters stay alive.
2.10. Soon after he arrived,
our Nat Rep offered Erica and me the job of helping to systematically
organize our colleagues and collect signatures from the majority of
our four thousand-employee graduate unit, in order to complete a deal
made with the Board of Trustees to “prove” that we represented graduate
workers at the University of Florida. GAU was bound to be an experiment
for those of us inexperienced with large organizing campaigns.
It was a mega-campaign, as I later discovered, the largest of
its kind in many ways. We decided
to do things the hard way, one card at a time, and honor an agreement
made with the UF Board of Trustees that GAU had simply to prove majority
status by having 50% + one of its graduate employees (over four thousand
workers) sign cards authorizing GAU as the collective bargaining agent.
GAU had been at UF for twenty-five years, but in spring of 2003 it was
as if we were being forced to create our chapter for a second time. 2.11. By summer 2003, the drive to reauthorize and reorganize GAU had
begun. Our non-staff fellow members
had already begun the drive, but the staff influx helped tremendously. It gave us breathing room and income to deal
with the stresses of campaigning. Erica
and I complained about a lot of important things (like not having health
benefits, or a real contract with any of the principals of the merger),
but I believe the comfort provided by the income derived from these
temporary positions helped us through some difficult moments kicking
off the campaign while many grads were gone for the summer. By the end
of August 2003, mostly through on two-on-one office visits, we had collected
almost one thousand authorization cards. Many of these were from Engineering,
Materials Science, Computer Science, and other non-humanities.
The myth of antiunionism in these fields
is strong, but it is easily punctured by actual fieldwork. These largely
male, international, and research money-oriented fields yielded no statistically
significant lower card counts than any other.
A Summer of Discontent: How the Personal Informs the Political 3.1. The cards collected
that summer don’t tell the whole story, for I was struggling with a
return to activism, a return largely driven by the need for income and
redemption. The income part is easy to explain—I had been living on
an above-the-table income of approximately $10,000/year for quite some
time. The Project was offering four times that amount.
3.2. After I wrote the first
essay about GAU, I had largely disappeared from the graduate union activism
that had given me the knowledge and authority to complete that analysis.
I had shied from unionism after an attack on my personal integrity by
a former friend among the union membership. Hailing from the trailer
park, and accustomed to the workaday diplomacy of the semi-employed
folk in the small South Texas ranch town of my upbringing, I had no
experience with the usual and customary liabilities of leadership in
an academic union. I took things personally, instead of recognizing
our union’s self-inflicted wounds as the result of our own powerlessness
and our own pretension to power. This is the bane of professional unions,
especially unions of intellectuals. Our stock in trade is argument and
debate, the two most damaging modes of discussion for nascent organizing
campaigns. Too self-absorbed to recognize that it wasn’t about me, and
too eager for an excuse to quit, I opted out of my duties as a citizen-scholar.
In other words, I quit. But what kind of example had I set for my comrades
and colleagues, for students, for activists across the country? I had
only affirmed the fleeting solvency of our graduate union. 3.3. My hiatus grew longer
and longer, even as the crisis of certification under the restructuring
process mounted daily. Given to long bike rides, dissertating, and odd
jobs, I was as involved in GAU at the beginning of the card drive in
spring 2003 (close enough to finals week that it might as well be called
“summer”) as I wanted to be—which was not at all.
I had been advising officers on an ad hoc basis, or occasionally
stumbling into statewide UFF governance meetings in Orlando. I had also
become very fast at bicycle racing and spent what I thought was useful
time adding value to myself by reading radical texts, compiling lecture
notes, working on my dissertation, and racing in the velodrome
in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania. For a while,
I even believed everything would fall into place if I only just finished
my Ph.D. When our new AFT Nat Rep approached me, on the advice of my
comrades, about taking a position in The Project, I could barely assemble
myself for a field interview. I had become a real slacker, but I didn’t
wear it well. If the promise of money had not been held out, I might
have declined. 3.4. I mention this because
it is important to know that most of us were not born into the role
of union organizer. You are in for tough times unless you have it in
your upbringing, or some deep place in your psyche, to willfully
commit to struggle. Union activism is an unnatural and unlikely role
for a lot of people, and perhaps most especially for those attracted
to the academy. With some notable exceptions, the professoriate has
traditionally shied from practicing its putatively “liberal” politics
in full view. Many faculty imagine themselves outside of politics, if only in
order to maintain some self-imagined “objectivity” from which to evaluate
history, politics, and contemporary culture. That is to say, the movement
has produced radical scholars, but radical scholarship has contributed
much less to the movement. 3.5. Our
personal stories and our Americanism also lead us away from unionism.
This is the subject of many books, but let me give a personal example. I am from the trailer park zones of our
Southern borderland with Mexico, where unions literally do not exist. Most people in my position feel lucky to be
in graduate school or to have well paying jobs, and our only experience
with unions is a sprinkling of strike stories from the long-ago, faraway
history of immigrant industrialism or Western mining. Given the new
access to the academy prompted by the post-WWII G. I. Bill and numerous
civil-rights struggles, the last half of the twentieth century saw the
emergence of a whole new “academy,” one populated by people like me—students,
faculty, and even administrators who believed their positions to be
tenuous, contingent upon good behavior, or even, perhaps, a sham. We
are not to the manner, nor to the ivory tower born. Unions require leaders,
and leadership is by definition a dangerous social proposition. No one
ever taught me how to be a leader or how to handle the struggles of
leadership. 3.6. If we are to organize
the academy, we have to let the sons and daughters of immigrants, the
small town scholars, and urban students (to name a few) define the academy,
and its unionism, for themselves. They have to be made comfortable by
the better-heeled academics (faculty, graduate, and student activist
alike) who do not mispronounce “annals” in their first graduate seminar
(I still turn red remembering that one).
There were plenty of comrades in the struggle who knew where
I was from, because I loved to tell them about it, but I never confessed
my insecurities. I bluffed my way through it all, and I suffered the
consequences. 3.7. Perhaps this is true for
all attempts at leadership and for all organizing projects. Experienced
organizers must admit that a lot of our first stabs at activism are
a confidence game we play with ourselves. If we don’t soon discover
a method to carry us through difficult moments, we quickly get lost
in the contradictions, cynicism, and self-loathing of ourselves and
of those we organize. If we don’t have the outspoken support and faith
of our colleagues, we will easily pay more attention to the arrows of
controversy which accompany any academic enterprise (even and especially
organizing). 3.8. I
was able to come around, but it took a lot of nights at the pub and
days on the bicycle. Not everyone
has this leisure. Not everyone was fortunate to have the teachers that
I had—Erika Gubrium, Candi Churchill, Marcus
Harvey, Louis Bolieux, Gainesville’s Civic
Media Center family, and Rob Callahan. But the beauty of organizing
is that when you see it taught and done well, it produces a genuine
transformation. Some people get this and some people don’t, but everyone
is capable of becoming an organizer. The eyes illuminate, tensions abate,
and uncertainties about one’s colleagues in the field are erased.
3.9. Those
of us who have organized will recognize the details of the transformation—it
plays out pretty much the same everywhere, so much that activists of
any stripe can often tell you exactly “who” it was that “organized”
them and when (Marcus Harvey, 1996). The process involves teaching people
how to listen patiently and attentively to their colleagues, mostly
avoiding the hyperrationality, argument, and
debate that are the academic stock in trade. By a sometimes Socratic
method of discovery and education (Them—“What will the union do for
me?” Us—“What can we do together?”), people who have never thought of
activism, and who many times hate unions instinctively, end up signing
a card, thanking you for taking the time to listen, and thinking about
the world in a different way. Sometimes (be patient, be very patient)
they even join. 3.10. The
GAU method was one culled from years of grassroots organizing, and specifically
from union card drives. The new organizer often cuts their teeth first
in “role plays” with “fake” colleagues (usually the teacher and other
organizers). These role plays are subjected to criticism by an audience
of co-organizers. The roles are reversed, and the “organizer” becomes
the unknowing colleague, the “target” of the office visit, phone call,
or other intimate contact. I have eliminated a lot of the criticism
from the equation, because people almost always catch the problems themselves,
and because academics have a tendency to enjoy this portion of the role
playing too much. Most of the time, people know what they are doing
wrong without much enticement. “I’m arguing aren’t I,” they typically
ask with a smile. “What do you think?” I say. The methods vary from
campus to shop to neighborhood, but they always work. Why? Because humanity
is desperate to reconnect itself to a larger purpose and to realize
a return to a community of hope and action that has been supplanted
by fear, greed, false intimacy, and cynicism. When people stand next
to other people and listen, fear is exposed, and it vanishes (albeit,
in a demonstrably and painfully slow manner). 3.11. As the GAU approached
one thousand cards near the end of the summer, I was truly elated. Not
only about the cards, but the one thousand conversations these cards
represented and the many GAU members who had come out with staff and
on their own to work in the field. People across campus were asking
questions of their advisors, administrators, and of their union that
they had not asked before. For all our attempts to hit at visceral themes,
bread and butter issues, and listen to our coworkers, it was quite the
existential experience. I learned that summer that organizing is, first
and foremost, about getting people to overcome their fear of speaking
in public. Not to an audience, but to each other. 3.12. The organizers, I think,
got as much or more from it than the organized. We had not yet offered
a pdf download or many mailing options (and
even these later innovations were built on a foundation of traditional
methods of internal, face-to-face organizing), so those first cards
represented very real interventions in the lives of coworkers. Almost
daily I am disappointed in the cynicism or shortcomings of my own organizing
work as well as that of my co-unionists. Each day I have to remind myself,
if someone or something has not already, that we are not in power. This
is an uphill struggle. But after the summer organizing of 2003, I know
I will never leave the movement again. 3.13. In the difficult position
as a neo-pro organizer of contingent workers, our Nat Rep (himself a
veteran of a graduate campaign) taught me many of these things. The
rest I had already learned from my feminist friends (who know more about
organizing than most), but until that summer I hadn’t really paid attention.
I must confess, however, that even when the promise of learning a craft
and regaining my identity as an activist presented itself, I still took
the job mostly because of the money. The work was week to week, with
no benefits, with a motley cast of supervisors and superiors running
a loose operation, but at a rate of $40,000 a year, what part-timer
could refuse? The more I realized that this was the most important job
in our union, the more upset I became at the contingency of my salary
and employment. But I was helping people help themselves, and it beat
working for Domino’s or hammering shingles to a hot roof.
Fall 2003:
The FSU Campaign and the Other One That Ran on Its Own 4.1. The fall of 2003 saw us closer to success, but it also revealed the
full force of our staffing crisis for the GAU card drive. The Project
intended to move our Nat Rep, myself, and other Project staffers across
the state, to an important faculty election at Florida State University
(FSU) in Tallahassee. While we were at FSU, my coworker and coconspirator
Erica stayed at GAU holding down the fort with the member-activists.
The FSU campaign was excruciating and dull, but we eventually won a
record authorization election. Over seven hundred FSU faculty voted
to have UFF continue to represent them. Fewer than fifty voted against.
Some saw it as an affirmation of UFF’s continued presence in the state, but it more resembled
the “Anyone but Bush” attitude that later prevailed in the 2004 presidential
election. I believe the vote was more of a no-confidence statement about
Jeb Bush’s higher-ed regime than about the
efficacy or desirability of UFF. 4.2. With ample would-be soldiers, a wizened veteran Nat Rep (Norm Holsinger, who was in charge of statewide Project organizing),
and goal-driven activists on the ground, we ran a tight get-out-the-vote
campaign. We didn’t know everyone who voted against, but almost every
single person that voted “yes” had already told us they were going to
do so. The best thing I learned from this GOTV was that it could be
done. It was a softball (no significant antiunion campaign), but it
was a valuable lesson in election engineering (as opposed to electioneering,
which is unethical and illegal). You can’t learn passion, but GOTV,
like the first stages of an organizing campaign, is pure science requiring
instruction in method and tactic. It helps to have paid staff, because
it is a full-time job. The technical, vote-oriented, and organizing-light
version of unionism we call GOTV is an excellent contrast to the real
community-building work of a long-term card drive or membership campaign. 4.4.
The FSU election spoke to some truths that were emerging in the GAU
and the larger statewide campaign, truths, I have since learned, that
plague academic organizing. The most difficult to fathom was that faculty
members at FSU seemed almost to be working at odds with the organizing
campaign. At lunches and meetings, organizing and the staff and methods
that could propel it forward were largely ignored. Faculty members did
not really meet with the staff, it was more
as if we sometimes sat in on their lunches. Discussions focused on technicalities,
on “what the merger (i.e, The Project) is
going to do for us,” or, at its worst, “what our chapter was going to
do after the organizing is over.” The concept that organizing can somehow,
or ever, be “over” is heresy to an organizer. It seemed dogma to the
FSU faculty. 4.5. From
a staff perspective the organizing had really just begun—with the help
of a strong lead staff and some stalwart departments. As a staff for
the summer GAU campaign and veteran of UFF politics, I was not naïve
about our transformative capacity at FSU. One of the founding chapters
in UFF, it had become a sleepy Southern albatross of a bargaining unit,
with a long tradition of service unionism and a barely budding infrastructure
from the recent statewide drive. Unfortunately, old leaders were running
the “new” FSU chapter. They eagerly awaited the end of organizing, a
return to the negotiating table, and the resumption of those deprecating
psychological “benefits” that accrue to those with minority status.
4.6. Because
the antiunion campaign at FSU was virtually absent, the election victory
was seen as a foregone conclusion instead of an opportunity to excite
people about the union. The card drive at UF GAU, on the other hand,
was an organizing project propped by the exigency of reauthorization
and by the serious political and personal commitment of young intellectuals
and academic workers. In a political conundrum of which I only later
became aware, resources were funneled to the chapter at FSU because
it was most intransigent about organizing. The more FSU leadership snubbed
organizing, the more staff were required to
win the election. Members simply weren’t going to do the work. In office
visits, despite some wonderfully rewarding encounters, many faculty treated the nine or ten staff like grad students. This
was, I remarked openly at staff meetings, an issue of class and status,
not just of the exigency of the GOTV campaign. Most of us—a few notable
exceptions notwithstanding—were currently or had been graduate organizers,
although we might define ourselves first as feminists or environmentalists.
The faculty treated us as they had treated grads under their employ
for decades—as secretaries or as bystanders. Like many academic unionists,
they believed activism was a necessary evil that had to be undertaken
so we could all return to the business of filling our academic resumés
and “creating knowledge.” Staff were more than
a little indignant about this attitude. We were there to help them organize
their union, not to grade papers or prepare their labs. With all respect
to the humility one should adopt when organizing, we saw ourselves as
teachers sent to teach our faculty colleagues how to run an organizing
campaign, not hired guns. 4.7. I
don’t want to paint an entirely negative picture of the fall 2003 drive.
Although most of the UFF’s staff resources
had been pirated away to a needy but unappreciative faculty chapter
in Tallahassee, we had reason to be happy in Gainesville. Cards continued
to trickle in at GAU. A giant leap forward occurred after the innovation
of authorization petitions was introduced by our Nat Rep. He had always
asked us to de-emphasize confidentiality, to ask people to proudly display
card signing, membership, and, if they desired, constructive criticism
of the union. Now grad workers had the chance to display their authorizations
publicly to their colleagues in their department and across campus.
The petitions worked, and they gave a collective cast to authorization
cards that are too often shrouded in a fetishistic veil of secrecy.
Those who desired confidentiality could still sign the other cards.
Grads from Bush’s “axis of academic evil”—students from countries like
Iraq, North Korea, Cuba, and Libya who were afraid to leave the U. S.
for fear they would not be allowed to return—were particularly vocal
about wanting to sign the cards in the privacy of their offices, away
from the prying eyes of advisors, UF staff, and even their fellow countrymen.
Little did I know that standing with our international student and worker
colleagues in the face of xenophobia would prove critical to the campaign.
The international graduate workers have risen above and beyond the call
of duty to make GAU a truly collective voice at University of Florida. 4.8. The petitions were especially useful during our fall New Grad Orientation,
which I was able to participate in as staff just prior to being sent
to Tallahassee. All new grads had to attend administration-led sessions
on classroom teaching, university rules, and the like. The university
had many years ago excised the most popular and useful portions of the
orientation—GAU-led breakout seminars on issues like student-teacher
sexual harassment and romantic fraternization (an ongoing problem in
the academy which administrators would rather sweep under the rug),
dealing with difficult advisors, and discussions of ethical problems
in research and teaching as grads. But turnabout is fair play. Instead
of teaching new grads inside the building how to better serve UF and
its constituents, we stood outside the building and engaged them in
one-on-one discussions about their hopes and fears as new academic workers.
As always, some of our organizers were more card oriented than conversation oriented, but it was hot, and
we had little time between seminars. We gained hundreds of signatures
in several days. Of course, this barely made up for the hundreds of
cards we had “lost” from spring and summer grads leaving the bargaining
unit due to fellowships, economic hardship, or much-awaited graduations.
Organizing really was a perpetual motion machine. It had to be, or we
would never even break even. 4.9. After the FSU election, I quit The Project. When I returned from Tallahassee
in late October, we still had the hardest part of the GAU drive to finish,
and I did not want to serve at the whim of the AFT (or any other national)
when my home union was in danger of decertification. In order to steel
myself against the loss of income and the inevitable self doubt which
would follow this decision, I had already sprinkled some pointed and
idealistic talk among my colleagues about the relative value of money
over principle. This was talk—it hurt to quit The Project, and
I was truly scared of being broke once again. I would be unemployed,
with no benefits, and no chance at unemployment pay (since I didn’t
get laid off). 4.10.
The GAU campaign, for its part, was facing some real obstacles. The
turnover rate in our four-thousand-employee unit could be as much as
one-quarter of all workers, many times it was more than that. Although
we would not lose as many of the 1400 “good” cards between fall 2003
and spring 2004 as we lost from spring and summer 2003 to fall 2003,
the “low-hanging fruit” had been plucked. Our organizing committee looked
strong on paper (nearly one hundred commitments to work on the campaign),
but we were learning the hard way that it takes incredible force of
will, and hundreds of phone calls, just to get twelve people to turn
out for three hours of organizing in the grad student housing. One thing
we all learned from the GAU card drive is that organizing success really
is measured one card, one conversation, and one warm body at a time.
In my sometimes volunteer, sometimes contracted staff position, working
after September 2003 for UFF and GAU, not for The Project, I discovered
that the GAU organizing drive had begun to build a new culture and structure.
That culture honored organizing volunteers and organizing staff, even
while it criticized their employers or the national unions. Members
of the new culture placed less value on debate and argument and more
on solving problems. Most important, the GAU leadership was not afraid
to speak on behalf of itself and its constituents. GAU had changed its
image from a moribund and distant humanities organization run by several-dozen
radical scholars, into a vibrant collective of engineering, education,
international, feminist, nontraditional, and working family co-unionists.
4.11.
It needed staffing and an occasional cheerleading session, but the card
drive had largely become a machine that ran on its own. Not because
of a particular strategic plan, logical argument, or computer program,
but because of the solidarity, community, and shared struggle that undergirded
it. The Underbelly
of the Organizing Beast 5.1.
This new culture thrived in spite of, and perhaps to spite the
very culture of anti-organizing and negativism which challenged it.
It didn’t help that, by that time, the statewide staff was largely composed
of activists who had entered the The Project
in hopes of ultimately working at their former and current GAU chapters.
These organizers, mostly women by the way, were becoming wary of The
Project and its methods. They had been sent to faculty chapters as lead
persons, organizing trainers, and semi-managers of critical campaigns,
but they had no benefits, no guarantee of employment beyond two weeks,
and no consistent message from any of the state or national organizations
about their value, purpose, or the viability of The Project itself.
Although our supervisors and hiring agents were AFT Nat Reps, we were
told we didn’t really work for anyone, certainly not the AFT, the NEA,
or UFF. Our supervisors on The Project refused to even sign papers saying
that we worked for them. 5.2.
One colleague called the conditions ironic. I believe “unfortunate”
is a more accurate description. We were “hard” carding at GAU, struggling
and playing by the rules of a good organizing campaign. But our statewide
staff were “soft” money employees. Indeed,
we were told, it was best not to speak to anyone about the fact that
we worked at all. Because of national union politics, too many inquiries
of that nature could jeopardize The Project and, ultimately, the GAU
campaign. Representatives from the principals claimed to be making deals
to keep The Project alive, while at the same time their colleagues told
us they were the deal breakers. Who were we to believe? Because
of competing stories and inconsistent employee policies, The Project
staff learned to trust no one but each other. As organizers of women,
workers, and student employees, we were accustomed to sticking by our
own, but we would have preferred a climate of trust among our supervisors,
the principals, and the faculty members for whom we ultimately worked.
Comrades from each merger principal anonymously e-mailed and
slow-mailed damning memorandums which confirmed our suspicions—staff,
the graduate staff especially, were not only of little concern to the
merger principals, we were often held in contempt.
5.3. More surprising, or so I thought as a new union worker, was the general
reaction to our attempts at forming a Project staff union. According to the principals, we could not organize
because no one had the authority to negotiate with us. Although many
of us felt as if we were scabbing Nat Rep and FEA staff labor, we were
told we had no right, no cause, no means, and no justification to organize
(the only cure for the “scab” syndrome, in my book). Chances are, we
were told, a staff union would end The Project,
and our employment in general. At one point, certain national representatives
refused to speak with me about working conditions and terms of employment.
Not only did I not work for the principals, they claimed, I didn’t even
work for The Project itself. 5.4. When word got out that Project staff might be forming our own union
and possibly doing a work slowdown during the FSU campaign to educate
UFF members about our conditions (a safe action, since the vote was
a wrap), unsuspecting staffers and members from the NEA and AFT were
flown in to support the GOTV in case we walked. They appeared suddenly
and mysteriously one Monday. They left after the election. We had no
need for them—the election was won. When they understood why they were
there, they were angry. They were naturally surprised to learn of our
intended actions and dismayed that they might be asked to play the scab
against our attempt to unionize. We demurred—there was an election to
be won, nerves were frayed, and, well, maybe we were just too scared.
Ever the contingent workers, we opted for employment over struggle,
however temporary and unsatisfying. 5.5.
The GAU was particularly disturbed at this turn of events in Tallahassee,
as it had immediate relevance to their attempts to get staff back on
the GAU card drive. We pointed out that, after all, it was our sector
that had proudly and gladly produced much of The Project talent in Florida.
Although some of our best allies counseled against it, our GAU officers
challenged the treatment of the people who worked for them as staff,
loudly and openly, even while they were pleading for more Project staff.
I will never forget the risks that the chapter took to stand up for
its principles and for Erica Pittman and me. Whatever the GAU won in
resources, and whatever pride I had left as a staff in the morally unstable
Project, was thanks to steadfast GAU officers demanding that the merger
principals do the right thing. Spring
2004 and the Final Drive 6.1.
When we returned from winter break to the new year of 2004, we had
lost fewer cards than predicted (fewer than two hundred). Most grad
workers on appointment for the fall are on appointment for the spring
as well. But the task was not done. Clearly, Project funding was never
coming back, and people were getting tired. Not since early September
2004 had any “merger money” come to the GAU
recertification campaign. Although occasional infusions ($300 one week,
none the next, $300 the next week) trickled in from a general UFF fund
(to help fund my position as a chapter organizer outside The Project),
the well was dry. Project staff were present,
but they were not involved in the GAU campaign. On top of that, the
more embattled faculty chapter at University of Florida was in the throes
of a crisis, not sure when or if it was having an election or a court
battle for its critical recertification, and unsure if the university
was going to be able to add two thousand supposedly antiunion agriculture,
medical, and professional school faculty to its current faculty bargaining
unit of 1800. This was yet another excuse to not give money to grad
organizing, even though it was clear that UF solidarity was necessary
across class, income, and professional boundaries between contingent
and full-time academics. 6.2.
More excuses were handed down, the general message being that GAU was
not as important as other units, and that, while faculty needed coddling,
we were expected to run a pure up-by-the-bootstraps campaign. In truth,
we were victims of our own success. Our commitment to the campaign had
moved along the largest card drive in Florida’s history, maybe even
one of the largest academic card drives in U. S. history. But our commitment
to organizing led UFF and The Project to believe, rightly so, that the
lack of resource infusions would not hurt us but propel us to succeed,
if for no other reason than to prove we could. An elected leader of
one of the merger principals sickly joked that, since I had resigned,
supposedly to return to help my GAU comrades, there was no longer a
need to actually pay anyone to do the work (thankfully, our UFF
state office and the local chapter found some money to help me get by
while doing the work of the union). 6.3.
Indeed, through all of this the principals believed that there was a
cult of personality associated with the GAU campaign. But our elders
were confusing assistance with authority—the card drive had never belonged
to me or to any one GAU activist. I was the “lead” on the drive at certain
times, but I personally witnessed no more than ten card signatures during
the last half of the campaign. The active members did all the one-on-one
work. It took longer this way. It felt better, and it is the right way
to do the business of organizing. If we had been in a pinch, I could
have turned out an eighty-hour week in the eleventh hour, but there
was no need. My colleagues did just fine on their
own. 6.4.
GAU was on its own and proud, but the realities of contingent organizing
can weigh heavily on even the most devoted union. If we didn’t finish
that spring, before April 2004, our cards would start to “die.” The
law dictates that signatures are only good for a year. At any rate,
even if the cards didn’t die, we would lose about 25% of our unit at
the end of spring 2004, and another large portion at the end of summer
2004. Few of us imagined that we could muster the strength to do virtually
the whole campaign over again the next fall. The cards had to be turned
in by April, and approval by the Board of Trustees was needed by the
end of spring. We were excited and proud of our accomplishments, but
no one has infinite energy. Over time, things fall apart, especially
in a high-turnover unit like ours. One thing that kept us going was
a new flock of activists and organizers who were committed to spending
time in the office and doing some of the day-to-day business of the
union and of organizing. Having a well-lit, clean, up-to-date, and highly
active office space is critical to winning a campaign and to keeping
contingent workers interested in the union. Having the grads on board who work in the very
building that houses the union office (the Education Building) is important
too—we finally got connected with Education grads, who seemed a natural
pro-union sector all along but whom we had not systematically organized
in the past. 6.5.
The spring of 2004 was really the denouement to the drama and disappointment
of merger funding and principal patronage. We did win. And in the final
weeks of the drive, after the cards were done, The Project did send
back a few organizers. No one can explain why—perhaps to celebrate,
perhaps out of shame, but they came. I was busy moving on to a well-paying
and full-time job (with benefits) working for a faculty union up North.
I barely had time to reflect on the magnitude of what a group of beleaguered,
adventurous, and devoted comrades had accomplished the hard way. Our
organizing committee never got to the magic ten-percent level that old-school
union activists suggest. That would have meant having four hundred organizers!
I believe the old ten-percent model just won’t hold in a nascent shop
of contingent workers. You’re lucky to get five percent, and that would
take a lot of staff and a more concentrated campus than UF, which is
spread from end to end over miles of crowded roads, temporary buildings,
viaducts, and swamp. But we did have a group of about one hundred folks
who gathered anywhere from one to fifty cards a piece. 6.6.
By the time the cards were counted in March 2004, we had a total signed
card pool of over 3600. Not all of those came about as a result of one-on-one
organizing conversations, but when they did arrive in the mail from
cutouts, Xeroxes, pdf downloads, or crumpled
petitions, they were always from a department
or building where we could identify past organizing, activism, or a
devoted union steward. Some people even signed two or three times (of
course, we only counted them once). 6.7.
We even had what I call “rogue” organizers, people who never called
us or joined the Organizing Committee, but who we knew from other sources
to be capable and outspoken advocates of GAU, or of just getting together
to do something as grads. Most of these rogues, not to mention many
of our best organizers in the middle and later parts of the campaign
(after we bothered to engage them), were international students. As
an observation, I will note that many Latin American countries and India
as well, have a civic culture in which unionism is not seen as odd,
but as necessary and normal. I also know that UF and its GAU were at
the forefront in the battle to eliminate the “security” or “terror”
fee imposed on international grads. Like many grad unions across the
country, we explored litigation on the matter. The university claimed
the fee protected us from unwanted exchanges of nuclear and bio-terror
technology, but it became clear that the $50/semester fee was a revenue-generating
device that punished international workers for not being American. The
card drive would have looked very different without the support and
networking of international workers, many of whom have large and highly
organized campus organizations that typically welcomed GAU speakers
and activists. In a globalized academy, alliances
with international groups is common sense. 6.8.
I mentioned 3600 cards, but we only needed 2100 (partly as a safety
bumper for bad cards) to make our 50% + 1 for the four thousand in unit.
This should give you an idea of the magnitude of contingency in our
workforce, for only 2100 of those were “live” or “in unit” during the
“snapshot” we offered to the Board of Trustees in Spring 2004. Throughout
the campaign, we were a little upset that so many cards would not be
counted. Many of them were from “students” and not “employees” proper.
And, although we understood the logic of the “snapshot” method—it kept
management from moving the target as much as the union from cheating—the
thought of all those “unused” or worthless cards grated. 6.9.
But that was only when we thought of the cards as cards, and not as
markers of a people on the path to an organized workplace. If you are
doing hard carding, not the kind that gets done at the last minute by
a legion of external staffers, then you can rightfully count a lot of
those little blue pieces of paper as reminders of someone’s first engagement
with any number of positive things—their colleague, a fellow worker,
a fellow teacher, unions, solidarity, and even social justice. I am
a student of commodity fetishism and of theories of the fetish. I am
all too familiar with the way objects come to represent and even replace
the humanity. But I choose to remember those cards as the embodiment
of something larger than an accumulation of signatures. I know we often
stuttered, retreated in fear, or pulled a Johnny Robot to get those
cards (“I am grad. Please sign card. Thank you. Bye.”), but we did it
ourselves. And I am proud to say that, by the end of it all, not one
GAU activist wanted to do this any way but the hard way—one card, one
conversation, one struggle at a time. We Won 7.1.
Enjoy those words, a veteran organizer told me. You rarely get to say
them in our business. Victory in contingent organizing is as fleeting
as a History M.A. on a semester-long teaching appointment at a community
college. The GAU could die tomorrow.
7.2.
True. But the people it changed are living, breathing, and still organizing.
We did win. I will take as measures of success several things resulting
from the organizing drive: the creation of an active and well-oiled
international graduate coalition and GAU International Issues Chair,
the first truly contested elections for GAU officer positions (hard
to believe so many people now want the job), the ascendancy of
an outspoken and efficient cadre of long-struggling women into the ranks
of GAU leadership and high office, a newfound respect for GAU evident
in the tone and manner of the most recent contract negotiations, and
an institutional memory and organizational culture that will outlive
the personalities and individuals who had prior defined the identity
of the union. On this last point,
I note that, whereas GAU was typically confused with graduate student
council or associated with a small band of leftist oddballs from the
humanities (myself included), we now spread
our voice, image, and influence over a larger part of the campus. Very
few people could say in spring of 2004—“Who is GAU?” To be sure, if
we don’t keep on organizing, the new grads in spring of 2006 will be
able to say this, but I think we now know better than to let that happen. 7.3.
As to those “real” gains that service unionists and especially contingent
workers rightfully value—UF GAU just bargained its best contract in
a quarter of a century. And nothing, not one thing, changed at the negotiating
table, except that we now have the confidence and leverage that comes
with a hard carding campaign. We have now, as we have had in the past,
the same high-quality, experienced, well-spoken, and eminently rational
negotiating talent. Our new strength comes from voice, struggle, community,
and organizing—tasks to which the most recent members of our negotiating team,
by the way, have been long committed. 7.4.
Minor victories are often forgotten, but they are equally important.
The devils, and the angels, are in the details. I had once believed
that building infrastructure would make the union stronger. No doubt
the improved electronic communications, database management, and newsletter
production of the GAU was important, but it was the organizing that
helped us build the service infrastructure, not vice-versa. Organizing
also created power, personnel, ideas, and a committed labor force. We
now have well-populated office and a more reliable infrastructure that
won’t suffer the long sleep of the academic summer, and, while I argued
for our professionalism in the first essay on GAU, our officer cadre
is now much less likely to fall apart from interpersonal bickering or
due to the inevitable tribulations of individual academic careers. And,
even though UFF recently decided to hire an executive director/attorney
with no union experience (I wish him the best), our statewide union
must, even more than before, listen to the GAU, its
most outspoken voting block, before it undertakes a return to service
unionism and legalistic approaches. The success of the GAU and other
organizing campaigns in the state are too important to ignore. The fact
that many of our activists have gone on to national jobs with organized
labor, especially academic labor, should suggest to UFF and its merged
principals that, at times, they may have underestimated our value.
7.5.
It is going to take a long time for many of our UFF chapters to unlearn
the staff-focused resource fetishism driven to new heights by the struggle
for merger money and affiliate support. By necessity more than desire,
GAU has taken the first steps in being self-reliant. GAU members also
proved, once again, that the future of organizing the academy lay with
those who do most of its teaching and a large part of its research—contingent
faculty. Those who do the work can define the work and stop the work
and improve the work. Those who give the grades can withhold them (even
while teaching their students a valuable civic lesson, if it comes to
that). With nothing left to lose but their pride, contingents have everything
to fight for, and every reason to develop the Next Big Ideas about how
to win the academy back from its enemies within and outside the ivory
tower. We proved with thousands of personal conversations and authorization
cards that grads know they make the university work, especially at UF
where the administration claims to have avoided the adjunct faculty
model, but only by hiring more of us. I hope that we can convince our
faculty colleagues that this is the right, and perhaps the only, way
to make our unions strong again. 7.6.
The GAU proved that it is not essential to wait in vain for any parent
organization to take up the reigns of our struggle. Use their resources,
learn from their organizing staff, thank them, argue and demand more
of what you deserve, for your cause is just. But salvation comes from
within. We have to have faith in our ability to work out problems with
each other, especially in our ability to absorb, retool, and refine
some of the pain of our weakness into a levelheaded activism which will
drive us to victory. We also have to know when to walk away, not from
each other, but from national unions or individuals who undermine us.
Jesus of Nazareth said it best—if after hearing your message of hope,
they deny you sanctuary and audience, then let no dust settle at your
feet. 7.7.
At the same time, we learned (mostly by trial and error, I think) that
it is important to respect the class and professional identity markers
that make many faculty cling to service unionism at mature chapters.
Organizing doesn’t play out in measurable gains and losses over the
short term like negotiations; litigation; or a quick, single-issue public
relations boost. And organizing takes incredible force of will and discipline
to practice, no matter if you’ve done it for five days or fifty years.
Contingents need to recognize, as those of us at GAU did not at the
beginning, that extreme patience is required to adjust from service
unionism to organizing. Even more patience and discipline is required
to become a student again, especially if your teacher is a wide-eyed
ABD with a hint of scorn for academic pretension. 7.8.
These things make organizing difficult for full-time faculty. They have
been inundated by their own and the administration’s culture of professionalism
and overwork. They have largely given up control over their work by
acceding to adjunct and graduate labor. And they have been weakened
by tiring efforts to gain tenure and status within an academy that no
longer pays the social wage of prestige. They have adopted many of the
conceits and pretenses of management in order, they believe, to survive.
In some ways, contingents present the promise of the future to them,
but we are also emblems of their failure to protect the ivory tower
from deskilling and factory methods.
7.9.
We have many tenure-line faculty allies in the movement. Some are adept
and eager to organize on the grassroots model of building relationships
through face-to-face conversations about the workplace and academic
culture. But like contingent union activists, many of them have to be
carefully taught. If current trends continue, the Florida model will
obtain, and most of them will be taught organizing methodology by former
contingent organizers. I believe that if we are patient, most will come
around. If not, then contingents must lead the work of organizing. We
are already the majority of the academic workforce, so it is only natural.
But how much easier it would be with the full and untarnished solidarity
of our tenured colleagues. 7.10.
It is an odd thing for so many people to fight so hard to understand
and improve the lives of workers who, by their own admission, hope to
get out of their part-time positions as soon as possible. It is also
a beautiful thing, and a testament to the vision inaugurated by that
strange admixture of contingency and activism. The GAU card drive really
was a small part of what most of its participants do as a part of the
large social movement around them. Many of my grad comrades no longer
seek academic employment, or at least not with the all-consuming devotion
which we might imagine for someone who has been in school for ten years
(or more). Rather, they seek edifying, full-time struggle (sometimes
even with pay) in defense of working people, public education, and other
causes. If they become wise to the energy and vision of contingents,
the big education unions will elect and hire organizers from the contingent
sectors, academic and otherwise, to the highest officer and staff positions
within the next twenty years. This will mark a true watershed in our
struggle to rebuild the house of academic labor. 1
Thompson, James.
“Unfinished Chapters: Institutional Alliances and Changing Identities
in a Graduate Employee Union.” Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The
Changing Identity of Academic Labor. Ed. Deborah M. Herman &
Julie Schmid. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
117-135.
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