After a walkout by teaching assistants fails to achieve its goals, union leaders search for new tactics
When word got out last month that graduate teaching assistants at New York University were no longer on strike, it seemed like one of the most closely watched academic labor actions in recent years had evaporated into a fog.
“We’re not on strike right now” was the way one union spokeswoman put it — a thoroughly de-emphasized confirmation of facts on the ground that avoided any sense of conclusion, much less the F-word: failure.
And yet the strike undeniably failed to achieve its stated goals. From the moment they formed picket lines last November, teaching assistants said they would remain on strike until the university gave them a new contract. The long strike was widely hailed in labor circles as a bold move. It was a far greater show of commitment than other, briefer graduate-student strikes in recent memory, and it successfully brought national attention to the campaign for a union.
Nonetheless, the teaching assistants are back in the classroom with no new contract.
Graduate teaching assistants at NYU went on strike last year when the university declined to renew its first contract with their union. That contract had been born out of a 2000 National Labor Relations Board ruling, which said NYU’s teaching assistants were workers with full bargaining rights. And in 2001, NYU became the first private university to recognize a graduate-employee union. But by the time the contract expired last year, a newly constituted labor board had reversed the earlier decision, arguing, as does the university now, that teaching assistants are students, not workers.
In recent weeks, leaders of the union have been quick to shift emphasis from “last year’s strike” to “the campaign,” and to insist that the former was never the be-all and end-all of the latter. “The campaign is very much continuing,” says Susan Valentine, a spokeswoman for the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, the local union chapter. “Ever since they announced they weren’t going to negotiate with us, we’ve been involved in a campaign for a second contract. The strike was an element of that; there are other elements in that.”
Union leaders say the campaign may include another strike, and will certainly include more attempts to exert “economic leverage” on the university. But now that one set of picket lines has folded, the prospect of a strike may have lost its sense of tactical finality. What other stops are there to pull?
Some strikes are designed to break the will of an employer by utterly crippling his operation through a series of coordinated steps over a matter of days. The strike at NYU was not one of them. Some observers of the strike note that the effort was hampered by NYU’s dispersed urban campus, which made it difficult to block deliveries. Others say the self-professed “dual identity” of teaching assistants as students and workers interfered with forming alliances. But perhaps most remarkably, some say that the strike was limited by the very nature of the work that was being withheld.
“The withdrawal of teaching labor just doesn’t put enough economic and political pressure on the university,” says Cary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Professors. This principle, he says, is “hard for academics to accept.”
So the question remains: If the union still hopes to pressure the university back to the bargaining table, what tactics will it use? At a time when the labor movement’s traditional industrial base is dwindling, when higher education has become a major new organizing front, and when new legal decisions seem more and more to favor private-sector employers, the discovery of those new strategies may decide the fate of more campaigns than just the one at NYU.
‘Not Industrial Enough’
This summer, Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur, a graduate student in sociology at NYU, gave a research presentation at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. The subject was the NYU teaching assistants’ campaign, which she had been studying for several months as a “participant observer.”
The strike was not a failure of the industrial-strike model, Ms. Arthur said in her presentation. Rather, the strike was “not industrial enough,” she said: “A coordinated industrial campaign was not carried out here.”
Now that the strike is over and the campaign has moved toward its next, yet-to-be-determined phase, Ms. Arthur is still optimistic about the future of the effort. But the basic challenge that hampered the strike last year will continue to dog the union going forward. She says it is difficult, if not impossible, for graduate students to “cost NYU a lot of money.”
“In order for a strike generally to be successful in a short period of time, you really need to bring management down on its knees,” she says. “You need to create a severe economic disruption.”
However, unlike at a factory where workers’ daily productivity is more directly tied to the fluctuations of supply and demand, a university’s finances run on the academic calendar. When last year’s strike began, Ms. Arthur says, “NYU already had all its money for the semester.”
Interfering with the day-to-day operations of the physical plant proved difficult as well. Though the union was able to block a small number of deliveries and trash pickups, the university presented too many entrances, exits, and loading docks for picket lines to block effectively.
In addition, other unionized instructors at NYU who were sympathetic to the teaching assistants were limited in how much they could aid the strike. Part-time professors at the university, who are represented by a different bargaining unit, were barred from observing the picket line by their contract, which includes a “no sympathy strike” clause.
(During a brief strike last month by full-time professors at Eastern Michigan University, part-time professors from a separate bargaining unit called in sick in large numbers. That tactic sheltered the part-timers from recriminations, but it could only be deployed for a day or two — not so useful in a protracted strike like the one at NYU.)
The United Auto Workers, which represents the graduate assistants at NYU, counts the strike as a partial success because, it says, “the university did struggle to conduct business as usual,” and its reputation suffered some damage.
However, the university strongly denies both of those assertions. “The reality is that [teaching assistants] don’t teach a very large percentage of the classes at NYU,” says John Beckman, a spokesman for the university. “The disruptions were never very great.” By the end of the year, he says, the strike was “virtually imperceptible on campus.”
Many graduate students left the picket line over the course of the year, especially in the spring, after the university said it would withhold teaching stipends from those who remained on strike.
Mr. Beckman also says the strike had “practically no effect” on the university’s reputation. “We had our strongest year in terms of undergraduate admissions,” he says. “We had an exceptionally strong year in terms of faculty recruitment.”
Union leaders say that, even if the pickets did dwindle as the year wore on, support for the union remained strong among graduate students. In a signature drive certified by the American Arbitration Association last April, “a majority of NYU’s graduate assistants” reaffirmed its desire to be represented by the union, says Ms. Valentine. But the university has demonstrated that such numbers will not change its mind.
New Tactics
For more than 30 years, Quinnipiac University, a private institution in Connecticut, bargained contracts with its full-time professors through the American Federation of Teachers. Even when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that professors at another private institution, Yeshiva University, did not have collective bargaining rights because they played managerial roles, Quinnipiac kept its union relationship with its professors.
(The ruling effectively put a stop to new campaigns for full-time faculty union recognition at private universities, but many institutions that already had standing contracts with their professors opted to maintain them.)
Then last spring, the administration at Quinnipiac filed a complaint with the federal labor board saying that the university’s professors’ union was operating in violation of the 26-year-old Supreme Court ruling. A few weeks later, the labor board ruled that the professors had no bargaining rights, and the university stepped out of the contract.
The American Federation of Teachers took this as a gauntlet thrown down. “You’re treading in dangerous waters if you think that you can take away people’s rights that they’ve enjoyed for decades,” says Jamie Horwitz, a national spokesman for the union, “and think that there won’t be any pushback from a union with a million-plus members.”
However, because of the difficulties of staging strikes in the private sector, Mr. Horwitz says, that pushback is not manifesting itself in the form of a widespread withdrawal of labor. Instead, Mr. Horwitz says, the union is trying out some new tactics.
For instance, every time someone searches “Quinnipiac” on Google, an ad purchased by the American Federation of Teachers appears in the top right corner of the screen that says “Shame on Quinnipiac.”
The union is also trying to convert alumni to its cause, to get at one of the university’s main sources of donations. “There aren’t going to be a lot of alumni events where we don’t show up,” says Mr. Horwitz.
He also says the union has hired opposition researchers to look for points of leverage in the business affiliations of members of the university’s Board of Trustees, a tactic that is usually the province of corporate union campaigns. “It’s pretty much new for higher-education unions,” says Mr. Horwitz.
Finally, Mr. Horwitz says that if the university maintains its position, the union will contact all AFT high-school guidance counselors on the East Coast and tell them to advise students against attending the university because of the labor dispute.
The university, however, says it remains firm in its decision not to engage in collective bargaining with its professors any longer. “The faculty are really deeply involved in the governance of the university and have been for quite some time now,” says Lynn Bushnell, Quinnipiac’s vice president for public affairs. “No great private university that I’m aware of has a faculty union. It gets in the way of building toward excellence.”
Whether the union’s publicity campaign will itself get in the way remains to be seen. “I really can’t speculate what they’ll do in the future,” says Ms. Bushnell. Whatever it is, she says, the university has no plans to budge.
Union leaders at NYU are loath to discuss their strategies for the future, but they do believe the American Federation of Teachers is on the right track with its plans for Quinnipiac.
The United Auto Workers has had “very similar discussions,” says Julie Kushner, a regional assistant director at the UAW. “I do think that those kinds of tactics are the kinds of things that we need to engage in. We need to be creative.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 8, Page A10