No other union has had as many high-profile victories on college campuses in the past three years as the United Automobile Workers, but two of its recent defeats highlight the challenge it faces in academe.
In October 2001, nearly 5,000 workers at the Nissan factory in Smyrna, Tenn., voted on whether to join the UAW. A victory would have been a major coup for the union, marking the first time workers at a Japanese-owned plant in the United States had unionized. It was the second time the UAW had tried at Smyrna, and it was the second time the union lost -- by a lot.
A year later, the union suffered another sharp defeat, this time among graduate students at Cornell University. The 2-to-1 loss was the first real setback in what had seemed a juggernaut of organizing campaigns at elite private colleges.
But consider this: Which of those two losses matters more to the UAW? Which one really speaks to the union’s future? Jerry Tucker, a former regional director for the UAW, says the leaders back at the Detroit headquarters keep their eyes focused on the auto industry. “At Solidarity House, did they pain when they lost at Smyrna? Yes, greatly,” he says. “They don’t care much one way or the other about Cornell.”
Elizabeth Bunn, the union’s secretary-treasurer and leader of its organizing outside manufacturing, says the UAW doesn’t think about what is more or less important. “We are extremely committed as a union to our core,” she says. “We believe our union and our country only benefit if a greater number of our manufacturing workers are unionized. But the economy is changing, and we are changing with it.”
After a decade of success organizing teaching assistants, highlighted by winning a landmark case at New York University in 2000, the union still faces questions about how the new workers fit into the union whose heart remains working-class Michigan. Does this academic organizing mesh with any larger strategy of the union? Is the UAW the right union to fight for the goals of academics? And will Solidarity House always care more about the thousands of workers it could have had at the Nissan plant than the thousands of graduate students it could have had in Ithaca, N.Y.?
At Cornell, those very questions became an issue for some of the graduate students. After the election, Jackie Janesk, a senior in industrial and labor relations there, made the failed campaign the focus of a research paper. She found, after interviewing dozens of students, that the union supporters had failed to educate enough voters about the UAW.
“Those who were inside the movement were very happy with the UAW and saw them as being the best union, with the most adequate resources, the most adequate staffing,” she says. “However, they didn’t do a good job of conveying that to those voting. Outside, they saw it as a union for autoworkers.”
White-Collar Workers, Too
Some at Cornell might not have realized it, but the UAW has been about more than autoworkers for 60 years. Office employees at Chrysler became the union’s first white-collar workers, in 1941, when the union itself was just six years old. Over the decades, the union’s Technical, Office, and Professional Department branched into diverse fields, organizing health-care workers, state employees, and librarians.
“All unions are doing variations of this,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “Steelworkers are organizing grocery clerks.” As jobs in traditional industrial workplaces have dwindled, unions have had to find strength in numbers elsewhere. “The UAW is going where the ducks are,” he says. “All unions today have an open hunting license, though the hunting is still very difficult.”
Over all, unions lose about half the elections run by the National Labor Relations Board each year. But higher education has proved to be among the most fertile grounds for organizing, and rarely have unions lost an election among graduate students or part-time professors.
“The UAW has always had a very strong interest at the leadership level in the intellectual world,” says Kevin G. Boyle, a professor of history at Ohio State University who has written about the union. “It’s a union very comfortable with the idea of having academics as members.”
Graduate students at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst were the first to join the UAW, winning recognition from the university in 1990. Throughout the 1990s, the union fought at the University of California, holding strikes and lobbying lawmakers before eventually winning collective-bargaining rights in 1998 and the first contract for the system’s 10,000 graduate assistants two years later.
At the same time, on the other coast, the UAW had taken on a challenge that traditional education unions had shied away from. Graduate students at New York University had approached the UAW about forming a union for teaching assistants, but federal labor law seemed to preclude TA unionization at private institutions, finding that they weren’t legally employees. “No one wanted to touch it,” says Phil Wheeler, a UAW regional director. “We evaluated it and felt we could prove they were workers.”
The union did just that, shifting the landscape so much that, during the campaign at Cornell, the question of whether graduate students should have the right to organize barely came up.
More than 16,000 graduate students are now members of the UAW. They make up a sliver of the 715,000-member union, but academic organizing has become a major source of the UAW’s new members. Last summer, the UAW defeated a traditional education union, the American Federation of Teachers, to represent 4,000 adjuncts at NYU, creating the largest union of part-timers in the nation. The union won, in part, because of its previous success with the graduate students there.
Graduate students at Brown, Columbia, and Tufts Universities have already voted on whether to join the UAW, although legal appeals have kept the ballots sealed until an as-yet-undetermined date. The union marked another first last year, when it won the right to represent resident assistants at UMass. And UAW organizing campaigns, or at least the rumblings of them, are under way at George Washington, Harvard, and New School Universities, the University of Southern California, and Columbus State Community College, in Ohio.
In Plants and on Campuses
Caroline Lund works at a joint General Motors-Toyota plant in Fremont, Calif., and publishes an independent newsletter that often criticizes her UAW local. Ms. Lund welcomes the academic employees into the union, but cautions that “it would be better for the UAW to concentrate on parts workers for automobile or aerospace.” Union officials “don’t try to organize parts workers because it’s harder,” she says, and because their top priority is simply to sign up members.
Few of her co-workers even know about the academic organizing, and those who do give it little thought. “I don’t think that’s the future of the UAW,” she says of union leaders’ push for campus organizing. “If they can’t make headway in the auto industry, they’re finished.”
Professor Lichtenstein, whose new book examines trade unionism throughout the 20th century, agrees. “The UAW should not be under any illusion that getting new TA members is a substitute for the absolutely crucial strategic job they have in auto,” he says. “For a union to maintain its wage standards, it has to organize its own industry.”
Mr. Tucker, the former regional director, confirms that most of the union’s members are unaware of its forays into other fields and unconcerned about them. “The average GM worker doesn’t even think about Ford and Chrysler,” he says.
And because the money for academic-organizing campaigns comes from union headquarters and not directly from individual locals, the rank and file don’t care, Mr. Tucker says. “Let’s say the Flint locals were being asked to put up 5 percent of their dues dollars to organize the local community college, then you’d have one hell of a meeting.”
Tom Adams started working for Buick in 1976. He has been a member of the UAW ever since. But now he is also a Ph.D. student in history at Michigan State University, where he is represented by the AFT-affiliated Graduate Employees Union. His fellow autoworkers do not know about the union’s efforts in academe, he says. “They wouldn’t care anyway, because this is a membership that is vanishing, and they haven’t been socialized in any labor-movement sense,” he says. “Hell, most of them think they’re Republicans.”
If the UAW had been the union seeking to organize Michigan State graduate students in recent years, Mr. Adams says he would have encouraged his fellow students to oppose it. The UAW, he says, should focus on its core. “There are labor organizations for educators,” he says, “and these folks have essentially raided them.”
Poaching Rivals
The UAW’s chief competitor in academe is the AFT, which represents more than 15,000 graduate students and 50,000 part-time professors. The AFT is preparing for a union election among graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania in February, and is also looking to organize at Pennsylvania State University at University Park. “The AFT rightly sees the UAW as doing a little bit of poaching,” says William Lefevre, a reference librarian at Wayne State University, where the UAW’s archives are kept.
Publicly, officials of the two unions wish their brothers and sisters in the labor movement well, but privately they complain about each other. For instance, Ms. Bunn, the UAW official, declines to speak about the relationship between the two unions. “They’re a great union. We’re a great union,” she says.
Jon Curtis, an organizer for the AFT, understands the criticisms of the UAW as an interloper in higher education. “That’s a standard anti-union tactic,” he says. “When we lost at Minnesota, the anti-union grad students there were saying, ‘Look, the AFT just represents K-12 teachers. What do they know about us?’”
Harley Shaiken, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who studies labor and the global economy, brushes aside concerns about the UAW’s focus. “The fact that its core is an industrial union is not so much an issue,” he says. “It’s whether it’s effective in the new areas that it’s organizing.”
There’s evidence of such success. In the University of California system, the union won a contract that included pay raises and increased the proportion of student fees the university paid to 100 percent from 60.
At NYU, the union reached a deal with the administration giving teaching assistants, who previously had received an average of $12,500, minimum stipends of $15,000 and guaranteed raises in later years. The contract also provided TA’s with 100-percent health-care coverage, a benefit that had varied by department. However, AFT organizers later complained that the UAW had set a bad precedent by taking too many other issues off the table. The UAW maintained it had made reasonable concessions to get NYU, which had previously refused to negotiate at all, to the bargaining table.
Regardless of the union’s name, Detroit autoworkers do not descend on campuses to control graduate-student unions. Instead, the unions are led by graduate students themselves, and most of the paid organizers are former or current graduate students. “We don’t sort of waltz in to a place and say, ‘You need a union. Come join us,’” says Ms. Bunn. “These groups have come to us.”
Because of those students’ exposure to the union, Mr. Shaiken sees the academic campaigns as fitting into the UAW’s larger strategy. “When you organize TA’s, you are really expanding your reach in the broader society,” he says. “So many of the people at Berkeley today are the professors of tomorrow, and it’s giving a whole new generation of intellectual leaders an on-the-ground feel of what it means to be part of a union. That may be useful years from now in unexpected ways. Maybe it’s writing the op-ed five years from now or being at a small Midwestern college and being supportive of an organizing drive among hospital workers.”
These higher-education drives get the union attention -- far more than the dozens of small elections held at factories throughout 2002, like the one among 28 workers who make pet-food bags in Ohio, or the one among 90 people in New Hampshire who manufacture school buses.
A campaign at an elite college “is the kind of organizing that gets in the paper,” says Mr. Boyle of Ohio State. “It gets the union profile out in college campuses like NYU or UMass, where they see allies, not simply in the faculty, but in the students.” Those drives build bridges to academe, he says. “In some ways, it’s as much coalition building as it is organizing.”
Nevertheless, moving away from the core industry creates hurdles for the union. No one at an automobile-parts factory ever asks: Do the autoworkers really fit here? Should we consider going with the teachers union? But those questions came up often at Cornell. Three months after the loss in Ithaca, union leaders are still reviewing what went wrong.
The Cornell Loss
It was, by many accounts, a campaign that moved too fast, beginning little more than a year before the election. Organizers lacked answers to many questions raised by a well-organized student group opposing the drive, and they may not have explained how a traditionally industrial union was the best choice. Finally, university officials, while encouraging students to vote against the union, decided not to fight their right to hold an election -- something every private university had done previously.
“The Cornell administration was very clever,” says Daniel J. Julius, associate vice president for academic affairs at the University of San Francisco and a scholar of labor unions in higher education. “They said, ‘Go ahead. Take a vote,’ rather than polarize the situation.” Many other campaigns, such as those at Columbia, NYU, and Temple University, have become so embroiled over the issue of whether students can be unionized that the debate over whether they should is overlooked.
Ms. Janesk, the undergraduate who studied the election, found that many voters at Cornell had been alienated by the union’s aggressive campaign tactics, which included calls to homes and labs. Others told her that they would have voted for the union had the national affiliate been the AFT.
Amanda Holland-Minkley, a doctoral student in computer science, is a leader of At What Cost?, the student-led opposition to the union. She says the UAW seemed like “a weird fit.” Some students, she adds, worried about reports of squabbling within the UAW affiliates at UMass and the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“There’s a sense that the UAW is trying to organize a lot of schools, that it’s part of a one-size-fits-all unionization effort,” she says. “The tactics were the same at every school, the arguments were the same.” But a push for more money -- a major issue at NYU -- didn’t resonate as well in less-expensive Ithaca. Ms. Holland-Minkley gets a $14,800 stipend for nine months, and pays just $380 a month for an apartment within walking distance of the campus.
David Toomey, a doctoral student in economics and another At What Cost? leader, says the UAW itself became a factor in the campaign. “There was a general concern that the interests of autoworkers may not go along with those of graduate students,” he says, noting the UAW’s criticism of some environmental regulations and opposition to the expansion of some visas for foreign workers. “If it were an independent union, I may have voted for it,” he adds.
Merely a Pothole?
In retrospect, even some of the union’s supporters have begun questioning whether the UAW was the best choice. Vivian Hoffman, a Ph.D. student in applied economics, spoke in favor of the union at departmental meetings, but she now says a teachers union would have had a better chance.
In December, when union organizers trying to regroup from the loss asked for new ideas, Ms. Hoffman told them they should consider creating a union of just TA’s, leaving out research assistants in the sciences, who generally opposed the drive. But more surprising, she encouraged the group, the Cornell Association of Student Employees, to consider dropping the UAW altogether.
That seems unlikely. The UAW already represents more than 1,000 Cornell employees, including maintenance and food-service workers. Robb Willer, a sociology graduate student and spokesman for the association, says, “They’ve shown a track record of sticking with drives. When you interview a set of unions, you immediately notice that the UAW has a lot of experience.”
Mr. Willer plays down the complaints that the UAW is out of touch with higher education. “There are specific problems that people will have with any group,” he says. “I think it’s unfortunate that the UAW’s politics have become an issue. The wrong aspects of the UAW’s positions were being emphasized. Generally it has a very progressive, very pro-international labor policy.”
Mr. Wheeler, the UAW’s regional director, like other union leaders, paints the concerns about an autoworkers union on campuses as simply anti-union tactics. “Anybody can take any organization and find ways to mislead workers,” he says. “Bosses do that in every campaign that we do.”
Nearly everyone involved, however, sees Cornell as merely a pothole in the road to greater unionization of the academic underclass. The UAW is still organizing in academe, working with 1,000 part-timers at Columbus State Community College, in Ohio, among other campuses.
Barbara A. Pletz, an adjunct instructor there, says the traditional education unions were less responsive than the UAW and offered fewer resources to part-timers seeking to organize. One even seemed to “thumb their noses at us,” she says. A large strike fund and legal expertise made the UAW an obvious choice.
Then she says something that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: “The UAW is at the forefront of this.”
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 49, Issue 19, Page A8
