Armbands,
Arguments, Op-Eds, and Banner-Drops: Undergraduate Participation
in a Graduate Employee Strike
Andrew Cornell
The
picket line on the first day of the 2005-2006 graduate student employee
strike at New York University was massive, loud, confident and jubilant.
Immediately adjacent to an information table the union had erected
for strikers, members of the student group Grad/Undergrad Solidarity
(GUS) staffed a heavily-trafficked strike center for undergraduates
that offered a petition and email sign-up sheet, literature and
picket signs geared specifically to students, and piles of free
pins, stickers, and screen-printed armbands to wear. By noon the
picket line had swelled to nearly a thousand participants, and strike
captains decided to lead the assembled crowed out of the wooden
barricades erected by police for a march around Washington Square—the
historic Greenwich Village park that the NYU campus has grown to
engulf. As the march passed the NYU student center, two members
of GUS unfurled a massive banner bearing the demand “Contract
Now!” from a second floor balcony. As cheers rose from the
marchers below, security officers seized the students and the banner.
When, moments later, strikers spotted the student activists inside
the building’s first floor windows, apparently being detained
by the guards, members of the crowd crossed the street and began
pounding on the building’s glass façade, chanting,
“Let them go!” Some union leaders, fearing the situation
might spin out of control, quickly moved to calm the crowd. The
confrontation and eventual release (with no repercussions) of the
undergraduate supporters provided an emotional flashpoint during
the first week of the strike. Their contributions on Day One made
it clear that undergraduate activists would play multiple—sometimes
audacious—roles in the unfolding job action. Their attempts
to educate and organize fellow students, on the one hand, and to
use their bodies to increase pressure on the administration and
inspire strikers, on the other, indicate two related aspects of
undergraduate involvement that I examine at length below. Furthermore,
the differing reactions on November 9th to the undergrad banner
drop and its repercussions—the impulses to “heat up”
or “cool down” the strike—held in microcosm tensions
and strategic differences that would play out repeatedly over the
next six months.
The active participation of undergraduates in the NYU strike should
come as no surprise to those familiar with student activism in recent
years. As universities have become important sites of labor struggles
over the last two decades, students have assumed significant, highly-visible
roles. The late-1990s saw the emergence of United Students Against
Sweatshops, an organization linking undergraduate activists at over
200 schools, which has carried out successful campaigns to improve
conditions in the collegiate apparel industry (Featherstone, 2002;
Ross, 2004). Students have since taken up campaigns to expel Coca-Cola
from various campuses in response to the company’s abysmal
labor and environmental record, and have launched the Student-Farm
worker Alliance which targets fast-food franchises in solidarity
with immigrant vegetable growers (Blanding, 2006; Berkowitz, 2005).
In these efforts, activists support workers who are not directly
employed by the universities, but rather by industries that universities
hire to provide products and services. Universities are seen as
strategic sites to push for industry standards and accountability
by these multi-school, nationally coordinated campaigns due to the
size of the universities’ institutional contracts and their
susceptibility to student and community pressure urging renegotiations
of their commercial relationships.
Students have also played decisive roles in campaigns to force their
educational institutions to negotiate union contracts or pay “living
wages” to clerical, custodial, food service, and other campus
workers employed by the schools themselves. At some colleges and
universities, such efforts have extended to support for graduate
student instructors, adjuncts, and permanent faculty members attempting
to unionize or improve the conditions under which they perform academic
labor. Student efforts in support of university workers date back
to the earliest campus-organizing drives, but have garnered increased
attention since activists at top schools like Georgetown and Harvard
have scored significant victories after turning to confrontational
tactics such as hunger strikes and building occupations (Williams,
2003; Krupat and Tanenbaum, 2002).
While contemporary campaigns in support of campus employees are
often comprised of the same, or many of the same, students that
engage in anti-sweatshop struggles, they depend on somewhat distinct
contributions from undergraduates and require a different type of
relationship between students and workers. In campaigns supporting
low-wage production workers who live in other states and countries,
student organizations play the leading roles on campus. They typically
have autonomy to determine the details of their local campaigns
assuming they remain within general guidelines established in concert
with the workers whose interests they claim to represent. In campus-employee
union drives, on the other hand, students are in closer and more
continual contact with the aggrieved workers and their unions. They
collaborate with student activists at other universities less frequently
due to the local nature of the campaigns. In such efforts, workers
play the leading role on campus and, through their unions, determine
campaign strategies, which sometimes include requests for or appreciative
acceptance of certain forms of support from undergraduates. Though
the forms of solidarity differ, in both modes of struggle universities
have proven vulnerable to leverage brought to bear by progressive
students who have joined the fray of labor disputes whose outcomes
may have real impacts on their lives, but which do not directly
affect the students’ own conditions of employment. Among other
factors, the combination of consumer power, race and class privilege,
willingness and ability to take risks, free time, and inter-collegiate
networks that students wield has repeatedly tipped the balance of
power away from university administrators or business owners and
in favor of struggling workers (Featherstone, 2002; Krupat and Tanenbaum,
2002). Recognition of such successes, it is important to say, does
not mean that students have or will only play supportive roles in
labor conflicts on campus—in many cases they have proven apathetic
or openly hostile to organizing efforts (Newman, 1997).
Recently, scholars concerned with changes in the ways universities
operate have attempted to create a framework for understanding both
academic laborer organizing drives and student campaigns in support
of low-paid off-campus (and often off-shore) workers as part of
a larger matrix of struggles against neoliberal logics and initiatives
taking place on “the contested campuses” of advanced
industrial countries. Theorists such as Nick Dyer-Witheford, Tiziana
Terranova, and Marc Bousquet argue that the research and training
functions of universities have taken on increased importance to
accumulation and reproduction in the era of high-tech, “cognitive”
capitalism, but that conditions appear to be ripening for the campus
to once again become an important site of struggle, this time over
the various impacts of “marketisation” (Dyer-Witheford,
2004; Terranova and Bousquet, 2004). Concomitant with the consolidation
of this high-tech and globalized form of capital, of course, has
been the precipitous decline of the mainstream labor movement in
the face of capital’s withdrawal from the terms of its implicit
postwar accord with labor (Moody, 1988; Lichtenstein, 2002). The
ability of these emergent oppositional constituencies to collaborate
in support of one another’s efforts, then, is likely to be
a key factor in the success of any of their individual campaigns.
Therefore, developing a more coherent praxis of student participation
in academic labor struggles should be seen as a pressing and productive
task. While student anti-sweatshop initiatives have been documented
and analyzed fairly extensively, fewer attempts have been made to
assess the impact of undergraduate participation in campaigns launched
by campus workers.
In what follows, I examine as a case study the various responses
of undergraduates at New York University to the six-month strike
to retain union recognition waged by graduate student employees
during the 2005-2006 school year. After pointing to ways in which
both pro- and anti-union students impacted the job action, I delineate
the specific successes and challenges faced by an undergraduate
solidarity group in order to pass along organizing lessons. From
this experience, I raise questions regarding the challenges of coalition
work between unions and student activists, and outline a critique
of the union’s strategy based on the undergraduate experience
of the strike. I offer these comments as a member of the Organizing
Committee of the NYU graduate student union whose first experience
with organized labor came through involvement in the University
of Michigan USAS chapter as an undergraduate. Owing to this background,
I served as a liaison between undergraduate activists and the union
before and during the strike.
Background
of the Conflict
In 2001, graduate student employees at New York University affiliated
with a local of the United Auto Workers of America (UAW) to form
the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC), the first union
of teaching and research assistants to win recognition at a private
university in the United States [1]. When GSOC’s first contract
expired in August of 2005, NYU refused to negotiate a new agreement
with the union, citing the July 2004 Brown University National Labor
Relations Board ruling which withdrew the requirement for private
universities to recognize graduate student assistants as employees
with legally guaranteed bargaining rights. GSOC pressured NYU to
negotiate throughout the summer and early fall of 2005, organizing
a massive Town Hall meeting, a rally, an act of civil disobedience,
and a campaign urging invited guest speakers and performers to boycott
NYU sponsored events until a settlement was reached. These tactics
having proved insufficient, GSOC members struck their teaching,
research, and administrative responsibilities on November 9, 2005.
Though GSOC was never able to mobilize its entire membership, a
majority of the bargaining unit struck their work at the outset
of the job action. In late November, NYU issued an ultimatum to
strikers, threatening the suspension of teaching assignments and
payment for two semesters to those that did not return to work.
The threat prompted some strikers, especially international students
concerned about losing their employment-based visas, to return to
work. Reduced numbers of graduate employees continued to strike
throughout the entirety of the spring semester, but GSOC became
increasingly fractious as members raised serious criticisms of decision-making
practices, strategy, and the union’s ability to deal with
social differences among members—notably, those of race, immigration-status,
and sexuality—in a radical fashion. Union members voted to
“recess” the strike as classes ended in May 2006. While
divided over what tactics to use and what sacrifices were deemed
acceptable to win, a majority of employees in the bargaining unit
did, nonetheless, again affirm publicly their desire to belong to
a union at the conclusion of the emotionally taxing six-month strike.
Preparations
Though unable to reach its ultimate goal of recognition and a contract
in the 2005-2006 school year, GSOC’s considerable achievements
should not be overlooked. High among these is the substantial level
of undergraduate support the union was able to establish during
the first semester of its strike. GSOC was unable to sustain this
support as the strike rolled into the spring semester, however.
NYU senior Sarah Dell’Orto recalls that “towards the
beginning of the strike there was an incredible amount of undergrad
support. As the year wore on, some undergrads got bored, while I
think others were either alienated or simply annoyed with the strike.”
Understanding why and how such broad undergraduate support swung
rapidly towards apathy or hostility towards the union not only helps
to illuminate the successes and limitations of the undergraduate
component of the campaign, but also raises important questions about
the union’s overall strike strategy.
Undergraduate activists had made important contributions to the
GSOC’s 1997-2001 campaign to win recognition and a first contract
by organizing fellow undergraduates to support the cause and encouraging
hesitant TAs to throw their hats in with the union (Jessup, 2003;
Eaton, 2002; Krupat and Tanenbaum, 2002). GSOC leaders and staff
members, then, could and did draw on tactics they and their predecessors
had deployed in collaboration with undergraduates five years earlier.
Unfortunately, they could not tap the actual students who had participated
in those previous campaigns. Even undergraduate activists entering
their senior year in 2005 had cut their teeth on anti-war organizing
in 2002 and 2003 and had little institutional memory of the array
of progressive campus organizations that had contributed to the
union’s historic victories in 2000 and 2001. Since winning
recognition, GSOC organizers and staff had utilized their contract’s
grievance procedure to advocate on behalf of members facing problems
related to their work. However, the union did not maintain a significant
presence in broader campus life as an organization that initiated
programming or worked to support other progressive efforts [2].
GSOC, therefore, had to start nearly from scratch in developing
awareness, credibility, and political capital among undergraduates.
Regardless of these setbacks, as its first contract neared expiration,
GSOC organizers sought to relate to undergraduates on two levels.
First, member organizers worked to provide information to, and win
the support (or at least neutralize the opposition) of the student
body as a whole. Secondly, they sought to develop close working
relationships with undergraduate social justice activists who were
eager to participate in the campaign on a deeper level and who viewed
the success of the fight as tied to their larger political goals.
Burdened with the huge task of quickly organizing and mobilizing
its own membership, GSOC looked to these undergraduate organizers
to take on much (but not all) of the work necessary to build union
solidarity among their classmates. GSOC took a similar approach
to working with faculty.
Grad/Undergrad Solidarity was initiated in the spring of 2005 when
GSOC members, including myself, contacted undergraduate student
activists who had participated in other labor campaigns on campus.
GSOC members knew whom to contact, and undergraduate leaders respected
these requests to meet, due in part to the contributions GSOC organizers
had previously made to the undergraduate-led campaigns. These collaborations,
though often minor and short-lived, provided name recognition and
a general sense that members of the union shared basic political
commitments with the undergraduate groups. Initially GUS consisted
of a half-dozen activists already engaged in a campaign against
Coca-Cola company labor abuses who saw support of GSOC as intrinsically
linked to their ongoing efforts to support worker rights and to
expand student power at NYU. Students with little or no labor activist
experience joined this core in September and October, after being
recruited by their teaching assistants, professors, or members of
GUS. The group ranged in size from ten to thirty active members
over the course of the campaign, and included a few law students
and graduate students who fell outside of GSOC’s bargaining
unit. Basing the group on an existing student club had considerable
benefits—GUS had access to student activity funds which members
had applied for the previous year, and it followed a loose set of
operating and decision-making procedures developed in previous campaigns.
Not surprisingly, however, the established friendships and working
relationships between some members of the group also created challenges
for integrating new members, which I return to below.
As GSOC organizers worked feverishly to establish support for a
strike among its own membership in early autumn, union members also
interacted with the undergraduate student body. Active teaching
assistants discussed the conflict with their students in recitation
sections, union spokespeople constantly communicated with campus
media journalists, union activists distributed written materials
through leaflets and emails, and GSOC helped organize teach-in style
events. However, GUS members took responsibility for a number of
key tasks in the period leading up to the strike. In the month prior
to the launch of the strike, GUS members worked to educate the student
body about the causes and stakes of the dispute, and to publicize
ways to support the teaching assistants. They wrote editorials for
the student newspaper and collaborated with GSOC and Faculty Democracy,
a group of more than 200 pro-union professors, to produce and distribute
leaflets targeted at undergraduates. In mid-October GUS organized
a well-attended event aimed at explaining why GSOC was preparing
to strike, and situating the action in relation to the history of
U.S. labor struggles and to the broader economic agenda of the Bush
Administration.
GUS’s most significant pre-strike contribution came in the
form of class visits. GUS members developed a “rap”
with GSOC organizers that concisely made the case for supporting
the strike. After delivering this short presentation in classes
taught by faculty supportive of the strike, GUS members answered
questions, signed students up to a GSOC supporter email list, and
distributed pro-union buttons and stickers. Students visited more
than 60 classes, many of them large lectures, resulting in conversations
with over a thousand students. Typically, presentations lasted fifteen
minutes, but in a handful of classes they pre-empted the planned
lecture for the entire class period.
In class visits and elsewhere, GUS members argued that that having
a graduate student union improved the quality of education undergraduates
received. GSOC’s first contract had mandated paid training
for all first year teaching assistants, limited the workloads expected
of assistants, and provided health care and a salary substantial
enough for graduate students to be able to focus on their teaching
and research without needing to work additional jobs. GUS revived
a slogan from earlier campaigns that encapsulated the argument:
“TA’s working conditions are our learning conditions.”
Furthermore, GUS members argued, the graduate student union was
an institution that helped to make the university a more democratic
environment responsive to its various constituencies [3]. As GUS
member Canek Peña-Vargas had it, “We kept alive an
alternative to the message that the administration was pro-student
in the process of being anti-union.”
When meeting their colleagues to discuss the strike vote, GSOC organizers
often found that teaching assistants' strongest reservations about
striking arose from concerns that their students’ education
would suffer. Knowing this, GSOC encouraged supportive undergraduates
to extol the benefits for undergraduates of TA unionization to each
of their teaching assistants as well. Peña-Vargas was proud
of this contribution. “I think we helped pump up a lot of
the grad students,” he explained. “I think our presence
in classes and [later] on the picket line reminded strikers that
they were not victimizing their students, that they were in fact
struggling with their students for a cause that would benefit them
both.”
Strike!:
The First Semester
The question of what its picket lines would look like and how it
would treat undergrads and others who decided to cross them were
two of the many tactical decisions GSOC had to make after its membership
voted 85% in favor of launching the strike. The challenge of gaining
the support of as many members of the campus community as possible
and minimizing the active opposition of the rest, while taking actions
disruptive and costly enough to force the university to cede its
position, is perhaps the most fundamental issue at stake for any
campus-based union attempting to craft a winning job action strategy.
Such decisions require a calculus that attempts to determine what
tactics will place the most pressure on the employer: highly disruptive
ones (e.g. a call for and attempt to enforce a complete cessation
of campus activities) that smaller numbers of non-union members
are expected to engage in, OR less disruptive ones (e.g. moving
classes off campus, holding large rallies) that relatively more
people are expected to participate in. Decisions also rest on assessments
of what members themselves are willing to do and what restrictions
on sympathetic job actions are included in the contracts of other
unionized employees at the institution. At NYU, other unionized
employees were contractually prohibited from engaging in sympathy
strikes. When setting strategy, organizers must consider the degree
to which the potential unwillingness of other constituencies to
accept a difficult “ask” will impinge on the morale
of strikers and bolster the administration. When some members of
its Organizing Committee argued that GSOC had to attempt to shut
down as much of NYU as possible, staff and other members asked,
“And when just about everyone on campus crosses the picket
line anyway, how will we feel? How successful will the strike be
then?”
When the strike began, the GSOC Organizing Committee, counseled
by UAW staff, urged undergraduates and faculty members to show support
by holding and attending classes off campus as a means of honoring
the picket line, but did not attempt to shut down the university
or to physically restrict access to the buildings it picketed. GSOC
asked faculty to petition and lobby the administration, urged undergraduates
to display their sympathies using pins, stickers, and armbands,
and encouraged everyone to join in the daily pickets. The union
continued urging non-NYU guests to boycott campus events. Although
undergraduate activists and union staff alike knew that obstructive
acts of civil disobedience undertaken by students had proven effective
in recent campus-labor conflicts, the possibility of actions of
this sort were never directly discussed.
During the early weeks of the strike, more than a thousand students
signed a pro-union petition, and hundreds wore union pins, stickers,
and armbands. Students encouraged professors to move classes off
campus, and attended classes that were moved without complaint.
GSOC staffers found off campus locations for more than 500 classes
during the fall semester. A week into the strike, campus opinion
appeared to lean heavily in favor of the union. The Washington Square
News, NYU’s student newspaper, editorialized that “[i]ncreasingly,
[a] gulf exists not only between the administration and the Graduate
Student Organizing Committee, but between the majority of our campus
and the administration, which is supported by a vocal minority”
(“Ignoring GSOC,” 2005). Such support was visible when,
two weeks into the strike, students packed one of the largest lecture
halls on campus beyond capacity for a faculty organized pro-union
teach-in. In the days that followed, hundreds sent postcards home
to parents encouraging them to view a union-created web site before
taking sides in the matter. Kristin Campbell, a GUS member who had
been involved in numerous student activist efforts in her four years
at NYU later explained, “I had never seen so much undergrad
involvement, support, and general non-apathy about an issue. It
was empowering that people were coming up in droves, trying to figure
out how to help.”
Despite consistent efforts to clarify what the union was asking
of undergraduates, many students were confused about the significance
of picket lines. Campbell sensed that early in the strike “a
lot of undergrads were scared of the picket line.” Based on
previous experience with or knowledge of labor strikes, they assumed
pickets were meant to prevent access to buildings. While visiting
a class that had been moved off campus, a student told me, “I
thought it was going to be way more intense—that the picket
lines were going to be everywhere and it was going to be pretty
much impossible to get around campus.” While many students
were relieved not to face a “hard” picket line urging
or preventing them from entering buildings, others found they could
not contribute to the strike in as sharp a fashion as they had planned.
GSOC certainly did not discourage individual undergraduates from
refusing to cross picket lines, but staff members insisted that
it was folly to organize students to collectively refuse to do so.
However, it made less strategic sense and was considerably more
risky for undergraduates to refuse to cross picket lines individually
than as an organized collectivity—even if that collective
was a small section of the student body—since the impact would
have been largely invisible, and no plan had been established for
a group defense against the academic repercussions likely to be
incurred. In the event, no undergraduates are known to have refrained
from using campus buildings.
Student support, of course, was not universal. Although members
of GSOC and GUS approached the College Democrats on multiple occasions,
the student club refused to take a stand regarding the strike. It
is hard to know how many students concurred with WSN opinion page
contributor Matt Lutz when, in late November, he wrote, “When
my educational experience — something I place a lot of value
in — is disrupted, I don’t feel sympathy for those doing
the disrupting….Every time a blast of yelling and whistling
comes in through the window during class, I hate GSOC a little bit
more.” If Lutz did voice the sentiments of a substantial number
of undergraduates, student opposition during the fall semester remained,
on the whole, non-confrontational and not particularly vocal. Resentment
never hardened into an organized anti-union student group or campaign,
as happened during previous academic labor strikes [4].
After the strike began, members of GUS consistently walked the picket
line, staffed the undergraduate information table, distributed leaflets
to classmates and talked-up the strike during classroom debates.
GUS members also worked to create a powerful visual presence for
GSOC on campus. They were the only ones to make GSOC specific t-shirts
throughout the strike. Their events had more attractive promotional
materials than most GSOC events; they made many of the banners that
were used, and they created spoofs of NYU advertisements and wheat-pasted
them across campus. GUS created a half-dozen sticker designs, and
made them ubiquitous on lampposts, bathroom stalls, and advertisements
in the vicinity of campus. More than union leadership and most GSOC
members, student activists recognized the need, in today’s
mass-mediated political landscape, to create what Steve Duncombe
describes as “ethical spectacles” (Duncombe, 2007).
Perhaps most significantly, however, a week into the strike GUS
began to organize a large-scale “Day of Action” that
would provide a forum for undergraduates to demonstrate their support
of the union collectively. Eric Prindle, a law student who worked
with GUS says, “The ‘Negotiate Now!’ Day of Action
had the highest profile of everything we did and I think clearly
represented a high point in our level of organization and creating
a distinctive student presence in the overall GSOC campaign.”
The Day of Action turned out to be the closest undergraduates came
during the strike to implementing obstructive direct action tactics
as a means of heightening pressure on the administration.
Organizers called for a class boycott, a lunch-time rally at the
center of campus, and a joint teach-in and concert to follow. The
class boycott proved a flop, but hundreds of students made their
way to the rally, many arriving with large groups of classmates,
as morning lectures let out [5]. Rather than pack the podium with
a stack of stock speakers, organizers made the rally open mic (or
rather, open megaphone) in order to give students the opportunity
to express whatever opinions they had about the then three-week
old strike. This was a gamble that paid off, as those who chose
to speak were overwhelmingly supportive of the union, but spoke
from their experience and opinions, which made their comments qualitatively
different from those that had been offered by strikers and guest
labor leaders in rallies over the preceding weeks. A GUS member
closed the rally by explaining that the group had a letter to present
to NYU president John Sexton, and a banner they planned to unfurl
inside the university library. (NYU administrative offices are located
on the 11th and 12th floors of the Bobst Library, a large rectangular
building housing stacks on all sides of a huge, open-air atrium.)
GUS members led the assembled crowd to join hundreds of graduate
student picketers in front of the library. Then, instead of sending
a small delegation to present the letter as planned, GUS members
called for the entire crowd to enter the library—“to
tell the administration how we feel.” To the astonishment
of many, security guards allowed anyone brandishing an NYU ID card
to enter for nearly ten minutes, and hundreds did. Some GSOC leaders
were initially wary of this escalation and discouraged members from
participating. When GUS members unrolled a massive banner across
the floor of the library voicing the simple demand “Negotiate
Now!”, security guards began to block the entrances and disabled
all of the building’s elevators. Undeterred, a half dozen
GUS members climbed the stairs to deliver their letter, while others
led the crowd in chanting. After administrators claimed Sexton was
unavailable to meet with the students, the delegation returned to
the floor. Adopting a tactic from large outdoor anti-globalization
protests, the assembled crowd read the letter aloud in unison, led
by a GUS member requesting for everyone in the library to “repeat
after me.” The demands of hundreds of students indignantly
ringing throughout the sacred, usually hushed space of the library
was a powerful, even transformative event. Still energized afterwards,
the crowd climbed ten flights of stairs to demand a meeting with
the president. An hour long sit-in ensued when security guards blocked
demonstrators from continuing past the 10th floor. After debates
about what to do next, with participants beginning to trickle away
amid the confusion of the (somewhat) impromptu action, the group
decided to leave the library, chanting “We’ll Be Back!”
Many moved on to the planned teach-in and hip-hop performance held
a few blocks off campus. Elevators in the library remained disabled
for a week afterwards and additional security guards were posted.
Immediately after the library action, GUS considered carrying out
a better-planned, longer-term building occupation, but decided to
wait until after the semester break due to organizing fatigue and
concerns about missing final exams. Moreover, GSOC members’
reaction to the Day of Action had appeared fairly ambiguous. While
staff members conceded the action’s positive impact and those
members closest to it were visibly excited and thankful, others
seemed to have hardly noticed and began calling for a vote to return
to work. Though the motion did not pass, GSOC chose to ride out
the semester rather than try to build on the momentum established
by the library takeover. After a month of noisy, disruptive picketing
by strikers with no perceptible movement towards resolution, the
WSN noted that some students seemed to be tiring of the conflict.
Still, the editors sought to reverse the trend, composing an editorial
headlined “GSOC supporters, stay true” (“GSOC
supporters,” 2005).
Strike.:
The Second Semester
The second semester of the GSOC strike was experienced nearly unanimously
as a very difficult time for union members and allies alike. The
month long break between fall and spring semesters came as a welcome
respite from an emotionally and physically taxing semester to strikers
and those organizing alongside them. However, the fact that most
staff and member organizers used the time to recuperate rather than
to reorganize left GSOC under-prepared to resume the campaign as
classes began in late January. During this period many graduate
students returned to work and the enthusiasm of those remaining
was put to the test by an apparent deadlock with the administration
and grey, frosty mornings on the picket line. Frequently, no more
than a half-dozen picketers represented the union where forty or
more had before the break. After the holiday recess many faculty
members moved classes back to campus with little opposition from
students. Undergraduate support diminished sharply, sometimes turning
to bitter resentment. GUS member Kristin Campbell recalls, “People
got frustrated within a month or two months. Grades suffered substantially
because they didn’t have a TA. They became angry.” It
is hard to know if students would have maintained enthusiasm if
GSOC appeared as vital as it did in the early weeks of the strike,
but undergraduates made it clear that the decline in members’
morale had a negative impact on the morale and the patience of would-be
allies in the student body. Not surprisingly, this deflation of
spirits was circular. GSOC organizer Susan Valentine senses that
“support from undergrads meant a great deal to members of
GSOC as a whole. Conversely, our members were often disheartened
to see apathy or opposition from undergrads.”
Sensing the shifting mood on campus, and recognizing that significantly
fewer members were available and willing to dedicate time to the
strike in the spring semester, GSOC leaders chose to shift attention
away from campus organizing and mobilizing (of members and other
constituencies) and focus energy on activities that often fall under
the rubric of a “corporate campaign” or “comprehensive
campaign.” Staff and active members sought to develop and
expand pressure tactics such as targeting NYU trustees at their
workplaces, lobbying state representatives, and developing connections
with religious and community organizations that might “put
the heat” on administrators. While it appears that these tactics
put some pressure on NYU, these efforts were largely invisible on
campus, adding to the sense of lost momentum for strikers and other
campus constituencies alike. The focus on off-campus constituencies
indicated to members who supported the union but felt they could
not continue to strike that they no longer had a role to play. Even
some of those who continued to strike felt there was little they
themselves could do to forward the strike, since hopes seemed pinned
almost entirely on elected officials and others with “connections.”
Statements on the Op/Ed page and comments made by undergraduates
indicate that students saw themselves as a party to the conflict
that demanded constant, concerted attention. A January 23rd WSN
editorial titled, “Move it along, GSOC,” described the
union as floating in “a stagnant pool” [6]. The editors
claimed, “If GSOC wants to consider itself a viable, active
organization, it needs to show the undergraduates that it is. Right
now, GSOC appears weakened and complacent, self-assured that its
cause is self-explanatory” (“Move it,” 2006).
Reflecting on the strike months later, GUS member Anne Rudnick concurred
with this diagnosis. In her opinion, “Undergraduate support
wasn't earned in the second semester and was often taken for granted.”
Such sentiments led GSOC to question the degree to which it needed
to “perform” its strike for undergraduates. While members
felt that having large boisterous picket-lines every day was not
their top-priority—since energy spent by members on other
aspects of the campaign would likely do more to pressure the administration—they
understood that many students (as well as faculty and other employees)
judged the strength of the union solely or primarily on vibrancy
and consistency of the picket-line. The willingness of many to support,
or even tolerate, the union was dependent on how strong they perceived
it to be, based on this criteria. Dave Hancock, a member of GUS,
states, “I know that folks got tired of the withering picket
lines, tired of the same old arguments and tired of tactics that
seemed less to affect the administration and more to just bother
and inconvenience students. Schlepping to a different class site
off campus in the name of a campaign that really seemed to be going
nowhere just didn't seem worthwhile for most students, even the
progressive ones that I knew in my classes. It also, frankly, didn't
seem too much fun to most people to go and march around with a sign
in the freezing cold in the same place everyday.”
Undergraduates also grew increasingly frustrated over the course
of the spring semester with the union initiated call for speakers,
performers, and other guests to boycott NYU events. Though the boycott
began months before the strike began, it required the publicity
of the strike for it to gain traction and substantially disrupt
campus extra-curricular activity. From the outset, the scope and
purpose of the boycott were unclear to many students. The call to
boycott public events held on campus seemed to be at odds with the
union’s “soft” picket line policy. Furthermore,
GSOC was unclear as to whether it would target only high-profile
events organized by the administration and academic departments,
or whether it would also discourage events initiated by student
clubs from being held on campus. Even student clubs supportive of
the union felt placed in a bind by this request since they were
only allocated student activity funds for events held on campus.
Honoring the boycott not only meant losing the ability to host events
for the year, but potentially for future years as well, since unspent
funds were grounds to lower allocation of activity fees to their
organizations in the next budget cycle. The issue came to a head
when the College Democrats organized an internship fair at which
members expected to be interviewed by local elected officials or
their staff members. GSOC picketed the event after club members,
given short notice, refused to move the fair off campus. Recognizing
the importance of the labor vote (in a way their aspiring student
protégées did not), few staffers chose to cross the
picket line. Although the action was considered a victory by some
union members and staff, infuriated College Democrats heaped scorn
on the union in person, in the newspaper, and over the internet
at a time when undergraduate support was already in decline.
The second semester of the strike was also hard on Grad/Undergrad
Solidarity. The group had, until this point, focused its energies
on educating and mobilizing other students on campus. When GSOC
all but abandoned campus organizing, members of GUS found themselves
at a loss for how to usefully contribute to the campaign. Some GUS
members also felt less valued personally by GSOC members when their
work was no longer seen as central to the campaign. Feeling the
flagging morale on campus, members of the group thought strong concerted
efforts were needed to demonstrate that union members and their
supporters were still committed to winning the strike. GUS members
remained willing to engage in an action such as building occupation
but worried their group lacked enough members to do so alone (almost
half a dozen stalwarts had departed for prearranged semesters abroad)
and they expressed doubts about the efficacy of such an action if
GSOC members themselves were unable or unwilling to take actions.
To solve this dilemma a group comprised of GSOC and GUS members
interested in rebuilding the campaign on campus through direct action
met to hash out plans. When GSOC staff members found about these
efforts, however, they moved to quash them.
Disappointment with having its action rebuked was compounded by
other frustrations for GUS members. GSOC faced mounting criticism
from its members for its non-transparent decision making process,
its inattention to the specific concerns of international students
and students of color, and its unsatisfactory handling of complaints
about sexist and homophobic remarks made by members. These criticisms
filtered down to undergraduate supporters through picket-line conversations
and other informal channels. For a group of students who had decided
to dedicate time to the campaign because they viewed it as part
of a larger constellation of efforts fighting for radical democracy
and against all forms of oppression and exploitation, the disheartening
news of these internal conflicts seriously tested their will to
continue. GUS members began to feel disillusioned about the “structure,
secrecy, and hierarchy of the union,” as one member put it.
This collective sense of marginalization led to resentment over
the fact that GUS members had never been invited to participate
in Organizing Committee meetings or other forums where strike plans
and policies were decided. After floundering for more than a month,
the group nearly dissolved. “It was hard to be an ally when
GSOC wasn’t helping itself,” explained Annie Rudnick,
a third-year student and member of GUS. “When GSOC fell, we
really fell.”
In mid-March, with the strike at its lowest point, UAW leadership
decided to shift staff and strategy, and dedicated additional resources
to the campaign. After spring break, twelve GSOC members (including
myself) were hired as researchers and organizers. The organizers
prioritized one-on-one meetings with each member of the bargaining
unit to reestablish consensus about the need to continue the fight
and to demonstrate majority support for the union. Hopeful that
this new direction would revive energy, GUS members cautiously rededicated
themselves to the cause. They decided to produce a zine—a
homemade, photocopied magazine—which both recounted high points
of the strike and attempted to refocus discussion and commitment
to the continuing fight. Although the drive to reorganize the bargaining
unit raised hopes to some degree among graduate students as the
spring semester wound down, undergrad support never rebounded to
any significant degree. As the semester ended, GSOC members voted
to call a “recess” to the strike and resume teaching
during the summer and fall semesters, understanding that the tactics
it had placed faith in had proven insufficient to force NYU to recognize
and bargain with the union.
In all, it seems that undergraduate support for the strike declined
in the spring semester because 1) the negative effects of the strike
in their lives and studies were dragged out and piled up over a
long period without visible signs of progress in winning the strike,
2) they were not sufficiently organized, and 3) they were not inspired.
The
Challenges of Organizing Undergraduates
A few months after the strike recess, GUS members reflected on their
experience. They celebrated the positive contributions they had
made—class visits, the Day of Action, the zine—and tried
to assess the mistakes or shortcomings in the undergraduate aspect
of the campaign that they felt contributed to the inability to win
to date. They placed some of these mistakes on their own shoulders,
and some they saw as outgrowths of decisions made by GSOC.
It was very difficult to get many undergrads to participate
in picket lines. GSOC and GUS were never able to establish
mass picket line participation, even though they tried several tactics,
including publicizing a specified time for undergraduates to join
in each day and giving out free food on certain occasions. This
may indicate a reticence among undergraduates to involve themselves
with the union itself, or the discomfort of undergraduates to interact
with graduate students outside the bounds of the prescribed teacher-student
role. Dave Hancock believes a number of issues were at play. “An
undergrad doesn't feel uniquely empowered when he or she is invited
to step into a pen of shivering grad students. No undergrad wished
they were fighting the GSOC fight as a GSOCer. They wanted to fight
it as an undergrad.” One apparent reason for the success of
the November 30th Day of Action was that it was billed as an opportunity
for undergraduates to participate on their own terms. Hancock wishes,
in retrospect, that GSOC and GUS had created other opportunities
of the sort. “I feel like there should have been less conventional
ways for undergrads to get involved designed to demonstrate that
we had unique power as unique stakeholders in the community—power
that could be exercised unlike any other folks on campus through
alternative channels and mechanisms.”
GUS activists regret that they did not continue class visits
after the strike began. Doing so could have helped to counter
the administration spin and keep other undergraduates informed about
the prospects for the union winning. Class visits, however, required
a substantial time commitment and a pool of undergraduate activists
who had enough experience with the campaign and confidence in their
speaking abilities to be able to adequately convey a pro-union perspective
to fellow students. The challenges of recruiting and developing
the skills of new members posed a substantial challenge to regularizing
rounds of class visits. While core members chose to sacrifice personal
interests and commitments to dedicate time to class visits and other
GUS work initially, many found it hard to continue to do so as the
strike continued month after month.
It was challenging for GUS to retain members. “We
were weak on expanding active participation by non-union members
beyond a core group, especially after the Day of Action and generally
as the strike wore on,” admits Eric Pringle, a law student
involved with the group. Part of the difficulty lay in finding ways
to involve newcomers which quickly instilled a sense that their
time and energy was valuable. GUS was most successful at integrating
newcomers during the build-up to the Day of Action. This was a large,
tangible effort, controlled by students, that required a number
of different skill sets. Students organized themselves into a variety
of sub-committees, including ones that drafted the letter to be
delivered to the university president, a publicity committee that
created and wheat-pasted original artwork, a committee to create
a guerrilla theatre skit for the event, and a committee to recruit
speakers and help with the logistics. This variety gave newcomers
a choice of activities where they could best use their skills, and
having the larger tasks broken down made it possible to see how
individuals’ contributions were important to the success of
the whole project.
The undergraduates did not have a solid organizing orientation.
In the lead-up to the strike GSOC and GUS viewed the group’s
main task as educating their fellow students about the union and
strike in hopes that they would decide to support the campaign.
Less attention was paid to expanding and solidifying GUS itself,
and implementing an organizing model was never strongly considered
by members of either group. While organizing undergraduates to act
in solidarity would necessarily take different forms than a drive
to organize new union members, certain skills could be transferable.
GUS members were not encouraged or trained to methodically pursue
and develop the interest, participation, and skills of potential
activists. While GSOC offered some GUS members training in how to
deal affectively with media, it never offered training in face-to-face
organizing. In a campaign with more resources, the union might offer
a weekend-long organizing institute for students, or even consider
hiring some to work part-time as paid organizers.
However, the reticence to organize more systematically also stemmed
in part from issues raised by GUS members. Some expressed concern
that the group could get too large, and that union-style organizing
techniques were authoritarian. As discussed above, GUS initially
took shape around a core of activists who had worked successfully
as a small group in past campaigns. Kristin Campbell explains that,
“From the beginning, most of the core-members of GUS were
serious about creating a non-hierarchical, anti-authoritarian structure
based on a modified consensus decision-making model. Most of us
entered into organizing at a moment where this kind of model was
deemed the only acceptable model, and was seen as the most liberatory.
The global justice anarchists take responsibility for this model
as their own, but some of us recognized and deeply respected its
history in earlier feminist and anti-racist movements” [7].
At one meeting some members of the group argued that working with
substantially more members made it difficult to make decisions using
the consensus process, which privileged extensive discussion and
attempts to incorporate the perspective of everyone involved. They
believed the group could get more done if it remained a small unit.
The idea that decisions are harder to make with a large group might
have been seen as a counterweight to the advantages of consensus,
and a factor used to evaluate the technique’s overall success,
rather than a reason to shy away from greater participation.
This hesitancy to grow seemed to stem from the experience of previous
campaigns where student groups could only garner a handful of dedicated
participants. In those campaigns, the members of the core group
had to assess whether their time was best spent recruiting or taking
on lots of work themselves and getting down to business. They were
caught off guard, then, by the flood of volunteers in the first
week of the strike. In some ways the structure made it difficult
to incorporate and empower these new recruits. Campbell explains,
“spouting terms like ‘non-hierarchical’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’
came to stand in for many organizing basics like tactical outreach,
making real connections with folks, providing responsibility to
others, and solidly building with other groups. At some point, as
substantial numbers of new folks started flooding into GUS meetings
a nominal cry of non-hierarchical/anti-authoritatian/consensus didn't
hold water when it came to actually plugging unfamiliar folks into
meaningful and empowering tasks, work, and responsibility.”
Campbell also believes that GUS had an “ambiguous and implicitly
seniority-based structure” that resulted from the fact that
some members had worked together previously in the Coke campaign.
Combined, these issues “made it hard for GUS to keep up its
momentum.”
The Student-Group/Union Relationship
The relationship between members of GUS and GSOC began amicably
amidst a shared sense of dedication and excitement about the campaign.
Not surprisingly, frustrations and divisions developed over the
course of the year of collaborative action. The relationship that
developed between GUS and GSOC can be used to discuss more generally
the nature of partnerships between unions and student groups.
The dynamics and quality of personal relationships between
union members and student allies are important. Ageism
and sexism are important forms of oppression that unions need to
deal with. Members of GSOC were generally glad to have the support
of undergraduates, and many found their fierce dedication and excitement
for the campaign endearing. A few members began affectionately calling
GUS members “the kids,” “the children” or
even “the babies.” The use of such terminology replicated
the way many teaching assistants refer to their students privately
and reiterated the difficulty for some of operating outside the
mindset of the teacher-student relationship on which most prior
graduate undergraduate relations were based. However, because of
the closer working relationship necessitated by the strike, it wasn’t
long before GUS members caught wind of this language. Not surprisingly,
they found it fairly insulting and regarded it as example of paternalistic
age discrimination. On the other hand, the closer than normal relationship
that arose between some graduate and undergraduate students raised
the question of the appropriateness of dating across the differences
of age and life experience. This raised the specter of sexist power
dynamics magnified by age differentials. Neither group established
an official policy on dating. While “picket line crushes”
became a regular topic of conversation on cold morning picket shifts,
members of GSOC and GUS, with a few exceptions, refrained from adding
romantic or sexual relations to the already charged inter-personal
dynamics at play.
Unions and student organizations have different organizational
structures. During its strike, GSOC functioned similarly
to a union in an organizing drive. It was organized on a three tier
approach with staff and a small, shifting coterie of members driving
planning, an Organizing Committee that elaborated and attempted
to carry out organizing, and the general membership which the OC
sought to motivate. Neither organization clearly elaborated its
organizational structure to the other, sometimes leading to confusions
about how decisions were made and by whom. Campbell explains that,
for most of the campaign, “We never had any real idea about
the specifics of how decisions got made.” This made it difficult
for GUS to bring ideas, suggestions, and concerns—especially
about interactions with undergraduates—to the union.
These different approaches to creating organizations are not necessarily
irreconcilable. They reflect two attempts to organize collective
action in a way that balances values of participation, equality,
and effectiveness. Over the course of the campaign, each group had
to face shortcomings of its approach, and ended up recognizing the
valuable aspects in the other’s structure. It seems clear
that a discussion at the outset of the collaboration clearly outlining
the organizing and decision making principles of the organizations
would have created more clarity and common ground. The groups would
not have to fully endorse each other’s structure, but they
would have a much better sense of the terms on which they were entering
into coalition. These terms of collaboration, or the principles
in which the groups interacted, also became a site of tension.
GSOC leaders seem to have held somewhat contradictory impulses towards
the amount of independence GUS should be given. One of its goals
was to send a clear and consistent message to the broader undergraduate
community about why it was striking and what students should do
to support the strike. GSOC also worked hard to control its “messaging”
to the press in order to win the support of politicians and the
public, and bruise NYU’s image. To achieve these goals, GSOC
sought a significant amount of control over GUS in order to keep
student activists “on message.” In this regard, GUS
members were envisioned as auxiliary organizers of GSOC itself.
Yet GSOC also hoped for and was happy to reap the benefits of independent
actions taken by undergraduates (the library occupation being the
prime example) that it didn’t feel its members could be involved
in planning. In these instances, undergrads were more usefully portrayed
as wild cards inspired by the struggles to take action outside the
union’s hands—a symbol of the unknown and uncontrollable
forces sure to break out in reaction to the campus crisis caused
by administrative intransigence.
This tension played out in questions of resource allocation. GUS
depended on use of the UAW’s copy machine to produce leaflets
and the UAW staff required they approve all materials that were
being run-off on their dime. This is understandable, but it delayed
turn around time on written materials and led to a reduction in
student voice; after copyediting undergrad communications took on
the tone of union communications. The UAW also controlled the large
email list of undergraduate supporters (overwhelmingly collected
by GUS) who wanted updates from GSOC. Members were often too busy
to write these, and so the list was underused. When messages were
sent out, they again originated from graduate students or union
officials, rather than other students.
Students were not offered a place in the strategic planning
of the campaign. Viewed as auxiliary organizers or as wild
cards, GUS members were not offered significant input into GSOC’s
overall planning. Rather the plan was established by the union,
and undergraduates were asked to help out or plug in. One, and sometimes
a few, GSOC members attended all GUS meetings and reported back
to the union organizing committee. The link between the groups for
most of the campaign consisted of one or more GSOC members attending
GUS meetings, and acting as informational conduits. GUS members
often came to the union office to carry out work, but were not invited
to attend union OC meetings. This structure was not limited to undergraduates.
With a few exceptions GSOC members agreed that no outside groups
or representatives should attend OC mtgs. Also, no other group,
including Faculty Democracy, asked. It wasn’t until late in
the campaign, when student activists were feeling disillusioned
that they had a formal meeting with the lead organizers of the strike.
Kristin Campbell now feels strongly that undergraduate activists
had a right to help establish strike strategy. “First of all,
we had been through fighting the administration in an earlier campaign.
We had experience. We also had an understanding of why we were there.
Our mentality was, ‘We’ve been working on labor for
a long time, it makes sense for us to be working on this.’
We were putting in a lot of hard work and energy—more than
many members of the union who were able to attend meetings. On top
of that, we had a much better sense of undergrad opinion on campus.
I really feel that since we were willing to put ourselves on the
line so much, and commit so much to the strike, that gives us the
right to be in there strategizing and helping to make decisions.”
Campbell explains, however, that this perspective developed over
time. “At the beginning, we didn’t really feel like
it was our place, since we were a solidarity group, not the group
actually fighting for its issues.” Campbell related the question
of leadership to lessons she had learned from studying points in
the civil rights and feminist movements when organizers had insisted
that those directly affected by the injustice being confronted had
the sole right to determine the course of the struggle. Such organizers
argued that the most affected should lead, since they had the most
to gain or lose, and because organizations needed to develop the
political skills of formerly marginalized people and groups. However,
when GSOC members began to voice serious misgivings about how democratic
union decision making actually was, how respectful and welcoming
union events were to women and queer people, and whether the union
accounted for the ways in which race and citizenship affected how
members could participate in the strike, the analogy with these
earlier movements no longer held as much water for GUS activists.
Again, it seems that inventive thinking could establish structures
that value the unique insight of undergraduates and other allied
groups, while emphasizing the prerogative of the striking group
to lead its own struggle. Certainly, undergraduates never asked
for complete control of the strategy—rather they wanted to
be involved in conversations whose outcomes affected how they spent
their time. The place where undergraduate opinion about strategy
diverged most sharply from GSOC leadership’s was over the
importance of increasing levels of obstruction and confrontation
on campus through civil disobedience and direct action tactics.
Should allies take more risks than members? Staff
members were reticent to undertake actions such as banner drops,
building occupations, and hunger strikes for multiple reasons. This
limited the union to using only the tactical playbook expected and
prepared for by NYU and the union-busting law firms it hired. When
they first took on the campaign, many members of GUS assumed that
direct action would play a significant role in the campaign. “We
were all affected by GSOC blocking Bobst before the school year
started,” explained one member, referring to the symbolic
act of civil disobedience GSOC members and their allies engaged
in on the day the first contract expired. GUS members with years
of experience challenging NYU policies were “coming from a
perspective where direct action seemed like the only way to get
things we wanted.” To win anything, they felt that direct
action “had to be part of the conversation, at least be on
the back burner.” The group was surprised then, when it began
to “seem like direct action wasn’t on GSOC’s mind,
or something that was wanted.”
During GSOC’s original campaign for recognition, undergraduate
labor activists planned to occupy a campus building shortly after
the strike began with the knowledge and support of the union (Jessup,
2003). In 2005, however, the possibility of direct action tactics
was not discussed. Why was this? As Charlie Eaton, an undergraduate
student leader in the 2001 campaign, saw it, a student building
occupation formed one aspect of a strike strategy that put a premium
on shutting down NYU. In 2002 he wrote, “The threat of a strike
was unquestionably what forced NYU to recognize the union. However,
grad union leaders insist that undergrad organizing was essential
to the campaign. NYU knew it could not win, because most undergrad
students would refuse to cross GSOC’s picket lines along with
the five major unions at NYU. In addition, a large core of undergrads
would actually disrupt university operation on top of the strike”
(p. 53). Since NYU caved hours before a strike vote was taken in
2001, it is impossible to know how a strike at that time would have
played out. It is clear, however, that GSOC approached the 2005
strike believing that most students would cross picket lines if
it asked them not to, and anticipating very little support from
other campus unions. The No-Strike clauses in their contracts were
seen as sacrosanct; any form of work disruption, therefore, was
off the table. GSOC leaders reasoned that if they could not ask
other workers not to cross picket lines, it would be unfair to ask
undergraduates to refrain. On these grounds, GSOC abandoned the
possibility of fully or partially shutting down campus. In this
situation—where it was assumed the strike would not be won
through disruption—direct action by undergraduates was not
actively discouraged, but neither was it encouraged or viewed by
GSOC leaders to hold much potential to significantly influence the
struggle. When members raised the possibility of such actions, staff
members made it clear that they should not be discussed in the union
office or in any official capacity. One intimated that student direct
actions had contributed to the union’s past victories at universities,
and that similar efforts could benefit GSOC’s campaign. “There
are things that others will do, that we won’t even know about,
and that’s fine,” she said. By implication, GSOC members
were not to be involved.
It is interesting to note that even in 2001, when undergraduate
direct action was supported by GSOC organizers, the possibility
of involvement by union members themselves was apparently never
seen as a possibility (much less a necessity). When, during the
2005-06 strike, GSOC members, including myself, suggested members
engage in direct action tactics in the face of declining momentum,
leaders rejected them firmly on a number of grounds. Dissecting
the logic of each of these claims is important, if we are to fully
evaluate the logic that bolstered GSOC’s failed strategy.
Many union leaders conceptualized disruptive actions as “student
activist” tactics rather than “labor” tactics.
Since NYU based its refusal to recognize the union on the assertion
that graduate employees were students, not employees, the UAW thought
that any actions that might lead potential allies (presumably politicians)
to associate union members with college students could undermine
the legitimacy of graduate employees’ claim to “worker”
status. Secondly, leaders claimed the potential repercussions of
such actions were too high—members could be arrested and further
disciplined by the school. Besides, it was argued, graduate student
workers had already taken a militant action that demonstrated their
commitment and bravery—they had struck their work. Leadership
and staff members repeatedly advanced one final claim in debates
over direct action: “No one action is going to win this thing.
It’s going to be a combination of pressures that eventually
convinces them it’s in their interest to settle.” Disruptive
actions, they worried, might appear as desperate, last-ditch efforts.
The insistence on using “labor” tactics rather than
“student” tactics demonstrates a shortness of vision
and is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary dichotomy. Labor has
historically won significant victories when it has pioneered new
tactics. The UAW only had to look to the invention of the sit-down
strike by its own members in the 1930s to recognize this fact (Fine,
1969). Furthermore, tactics are not inherently linked to one type
of social movement or another, but depend on how they are framed
by the people engaging in them and publicizing them. To extend the
analogy, the occupation of administrative offices at a university
could be framed as a sit-down strike in the academic workplace.
The fear that “non-labor” actions could lead supporters
to question the “worker” status of graduate students,
and thereby withdraw support, implies that the power needed to win
the strike rests more in the hands of a nebulous public or well-connected
politicians, than it does in the strikers themselves. In the GSOC
strike it required members to place faith in outside pressure that
in the end proved insufficient. It is hard to evaluate whether some
potential allies actually would have been demobilized by escalated
tactics. The assumption, with no proof, that it was an either/or
tactical choice prevented GSOC and undergraduate supporters from
mobilizing bodily pressure at the same time others excerted political
pressure. Finally, graduate student unions have consistently argued
that teaching and research assistants are BOTH students and workers,
and they have effectively conveyed this message to the media. There
should be no reason, then, why the union should shy away from tactics
that could be seen as indicative of that dual nature. Tactics should
be chosen according to what is known to be most effective at beating
the institution being targeted, not according to which are most
recognizably linked to the type of movement taking the action.
The fact that GSOC encouraged students to engage in such actions
in 2001 and celebrated the brief undergraduate building occupation
in 2005, and yet actively discouraged its members from engaging
in further direct action, raises another important question. Is
it fair to encourage allies to engage in actions that members of
the union won’t? An affirmative answer to this question has
to be based on the assumption that such actions involve fewer repercussions
if carried out by non-members. Either the allies will be punished
less severely by authorities or the actions will not reflect (as)
negatively on the credibility of the union. Union members don’t
have to be willing to undertake the exact action the students are,
but they should demonstrate that they are still fighting to the
best of their ability, given the different risks and forms of privilege
associated with their social position (as immigrants, women, people
of color, etc.) In the GSOC case, grad students had most of the
same privileged protection that undergraduates did (though considerably
more were international students with fewer protections). Graduate
students depend on the university for a paycheck which constitutes
their main source of income, while most undergraduates don’t.
However, both groups face a lower risk of being dismissed from the
institution as punishment than most workers do from their jobs.
Campbell explains, “We were not going to be the forerunners
of some kind of occupation if the constituency that is actually
striking isn’t even thinking about doing something like that.
We were waiting for the energy to come from grad students on strike.
We felt that’s where the energy needed to originate and then
we could jump in and be a help in any way that we could.”
While in other aspects of the campaign, undergraduates were expected
to follow the lead of union members and leadership, they were expected
to take on the risks of direct action on their own accord. When
asked if the situation would have been different if the people striking
were, for instance, older service workers with families and a higher
chance of being fired, Dave Hancock said, “Definitely. I think
we wouldn’t have expected them to take the lead in that situation.”
Even in that case, however, Hancock believed the group would not
have engaged in risky actions without clear consultation ahead of
time with the union and workers in question. Here again, clearer
conversations about what GSOC and GUS expected of each other would
have been productive. This was hindered by GSOC’s disinclination
to have undergraduates attend OC meetings, and the insistence that
potentially illegal actions not be discussed openly at union meetings.
The final claim that “no one thing” will win the strike
is hard to argue with, but should be seen as an argument for rather
than against direct action. Such a conviction should only be seen
to deter direct action if it is assumed that engaging in direct
action will prevent other actors from exerting pressure, and that
pressure is assumed to be more effective than the pressure resulting
from the direct action. It is impossible to know which form would
have been more effective in the GSOC strike, but the outcome of
that strike proved definitively that the amount of economic and
political power the UAW was able to leverage was not enough.
Assessing
Strategy from an Undergraduate Perspective
The union didn’t consider strongly enough the expected
timeframe of undergraduate support. Throughout the strike
union staff members encouraged a strategy of “holding-out.”
They reasoned that if union members demonstrated their resolve and
staying power, the university would eventually concede rather than
continue to deal with the annoyances and embarrassment of the strike.
But as the second semester wore on with no caving by the administration
in sight, GSOC found itself without a clear strategy. After spring
break and under new leadership, a similar idea prevailed: if we
rebuild “momentum,” the administration will understand
the strike is on an upward trajectory, becoming more powerful and
disruptive rather than less so, creating the rational incentive
for them to cut their losses and negotiate.
In a campus strike, the union not only has to organize and keep
organized the entire bargaining unit, but also needs, to some extent,
to keep students and faculty organized. At NYU this meant maintaining
the determination not only of its 1,000+ members, but also of a
substantial number of the 40,000 or so other members of the NYU
community on whom it depended for moral support and supplementary
action against the administration. Sustaining all these people over
a long period of time is incredibly difficult. Semester breaks kill
momentum even more than the groups involved expected—they
do so not just for strikers, but for student supporters as well.
In formulating this strategy, the union decided to request a certain
kind of sacrifice from striking graduate students and their supporters.
GSOC asked them to make a low-risk sacrifice of time and energy
for a long period of time. An alternate strategy, such as one that
sought to quickly and continuously escalate pressure on the university
through confrontation and obstruction, would request a different
kind of sacrifice—risking potentially greater personal consequences,
but having to devote considerably less time.
One serious, perhaps overriding, problem with the first strategy
is that it does not marshal excitement, energy, and passion. There
is no potential for people to be swept up, to take risks, to be
carried by the moment if the principle is “staying the course.”
Such thinking made it extremely difficult to build a sense of real
momentum on the ground and in the hearts of union supporters. The
priorities and strategies of the union seemed to squander chances
of building momentum, an energy that is crucial if maintaining undergraduate
support for the union is considered an important goal.
Direct action gets the goods. Once it becomes clear
that an institution is not going to take direction from the majoritarian
sentiments of its various constituencies, the role of those constituencies
in working to achieve a goal is to raise the costs of the institution
retaining its unjust policy. This means that the central role for
undergraduates to have played in the strike was to help make it
impossible for NYU to carry on with business as usual. To have done
that, undergraduates would have had to do more than the union asked
of them since it only requested for them to attend classes off campus,
participate in picket lines, and express their support of the union
to the administration. However, even the biggest picket lines, and
hundreds of classes moved didn’t interrupt the work of the
university sufficiently. The strike proved that the union has to
be more obstructive than the total conceivable interruption of the
withdrawal of labor of the portion of the workforce it represents.
Union strategy vacillated but ended up seeing the act of withdrawal
of labor and picketing as symbolic rather than truly obstructive.
These acts enacted the concept of “strike” but didn’t,
in themselves, exert the decisive power in the conflict. That work
was transferred in large part to politicians and union staffers
carrying out struggle on economic and image fronts. Further evidence
of the usefulness and perhaps even the necessity of actions to immobilize
campus can be seen in the recent victory of student organizers at
Gallaudet University. Students there staunchly opposed the candidate
selected by trustees as new president of the university because
her perspective on the politics of deaf-culture strongly diverged
from those of most students. The New York Times reported that in
order to win their demands, “protestors locked down campus
for several days and turned the university’s entrance into
a tent city of the disaffected. Last week, the protestors had seized
overnight an administration building that houses the office of the
president.” Eventually, the trustees relented, “surrendering
to months of widening and unrelenting protests by students, faculty,
alumni, and advocates” (Schemo, 2006; my emphasis).
Democratic campus blocs are essential. If the Gallaudet
example lends weight to the claim that unions need to be tactically
flexible, creative, and bold during campus-based labor disputes,
it also reinforces the need for unions to build and actively maintain
permanent coalitions with as many other progressive constituencies
as possible. During the strike at NYU, undergraduates and faculty
supporters of the union began to frame their support for GSOC as
part of a broader fight to create a more democratic and inclusive
university. Relationships of this sort, that build unity between
students, staff, and faculty based on political principle are likely
to prove essential not only to labor struggles on campus, but also
to the broader struggles against marketization highlighted by Dyer-Witheford,
Terranova, and Bousquet. Universities offer fertile grounds for
such coalitions. Due to the close and long-term nature of the relationship,
students typically harbor conflicted feelings about their institutions.
They can appreciate and feel loyal to particular teachers, yet be
displeased with the administration for myriad reasons (high tuition,
bureaucratic headaches, limited housing options). These outstanding
frustrations can be tapped by the union, which can try to harness
resentment towards the administration, and use it to build support
for the union. This can be done instrumentally, at times when the
union is in need of support. However, it can—and I believe
it should—alternately be done consistently and as a matter
of course, not only when contracts are set to expire. That is, the
union must present itself as an ally willing to devote resources,
strategic suggestions, or its endorsement to campaigns that, among
other things, seek increased student power, fight against cutbacks,
demand curriculum or resources be devoted to the interests and needs
of marginalized groups, or work to repel renewed right-wing attacks
on course content, funding, and hiring decisions in higher education.
GSOC did not know ahead of time that its strategy would not work,
though the experiences of Yale and Columbia provided considerable
cautionary evidence. The graduate student employee union movement,
however, cannot afford to ignore the strategic lessons learned by
GSOC over the course of the 2005-2006 school year. Member and ally
organizing is fundamental. Issues of members’ privilege, oppression,
and difference are ignored at the cost of disintegrating faith in,
and commitment to, the organization. Tactical creativity and variety,
boldness, and a willingness to escalate are necessary not only to
tighten the vise on administrators, but to maintain the attention
and support of non-strikers whose support helps to maintain striker
resolve. On a larger scale, the GSOC experience lends further weight
to the notion that mainstream unions are stuck tactically in the
era of Fordist compromise. Capital has taken off its proverbial
gloves in dealing with unions but unions have not responded by reclaiming
their right to tactical obstruction, property destruction, and even
violent defense of picket lines. Therefore, radical, historically-minded
union members and other politicized constituencies, including undergraduates,
need to raise the stakes and drag unions along if they are to avoid
being beaten, and badly so, every time they engage in a job action.
I hope these reflections contribute to strategic conversations that
move us towards more wins, and a stronger left presence on campuses
and elsewhere.
Endnotes
1. For a history of the initial GSOC organizing drive see (Jessup,
2003).
2. The Campus Democracy Network, documented by Krupat and Tanenbaum
(2002), that GSOC and nine other campus organizations had formed
in the spring of 2001 to sustain labor and other progressive efforts
on campus, sadly, was non-existent and almost totally forgotten
by 2005—a casualty of the high-turnover and organizing fatigue
that frequently beset campus efforts of its kind.
3. Framing teaching assistant unionism as beneficial to undergraduates
education is certainly not a novel organizing tactic. Daniel Czitrom
recalls a pro-union undergraduate group named Students for Quality
Education active at the University of Wisconsin in 1975 (Czitrom,
1997).
4. See, for example, Kathy Newman (1997) regarding undergraduate
resistance to graduate student unionization at Yale University.
Clearly GSOC and its allies should claim some responsibility for
winning the support of a majority of students and creating a climate
where anti-union voices were restrained. In evaluating divergent
reactions of students to union campaigns on different campuses,
however, it is clear that multiple other factors need to be accounted
for. Student demographics, the influence wielded by student government
structures, and the level of pre-existing conservative student activity
need to be assessed in the planning stages of campaigns and in the
evaluation process afterwards. Conservative student groups at NYU
are less active than their counterparts at many other schools. There
is no conservative NYU student newspaper and conservative student
groups host right-wing speakers infrequently. Student government
at NYU is accorded a narrow mandate, and according to GUS activists,
“has very little influence on how students think.” These
institutions and others have provided a base in which students at
other universities have organized against labor unions. GSOC was
fortunate to not have to devote a significant amount of time and
resources into minimizing their negative impact.
5. In a post-action evaluation GUS members acknowledged that facilitating
a class boycott by undergraduates on the scale they had imagined
would require a more direct and comprehensive organizing strategy
implemented over a longer period of time than the two weeks during
which they had built support for the Day of Action.
6. In January editorship of the Washington Square News was handed
over to a new committee that was noticeably more ambivalent towards
GSOC than its predecessors. Though it is difficult to gauge the
degree to which this dampened editorial sentiment was reflective
of or constitutive of a broader undergraduate discontent in the
first weeks of the semester, it does reiterate the value of having
the support of campus media, and the importance of encouraging progressive
students to fill decision making and editorial positions whenever
possible.
7. For history and analysis of the challenges and benefits of such
models for a variety of U.S. social movements, see Epstein, 1991
and Polletta, 2002.
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