Leadership and labor strikes
The rising presence of academic labor unions is putting greater demands on campus leaders. The past two years have set industry records when it comes to the level of organizing and work stoppages that colleges have faced.
Indeed, since 2022, unions have won 30 new higher-ed bargaining units, representing nearly 35,700 academic workers, mostly graduate students. Academic workers now make up a quarter of the total membership of the United Auto Workers, according to a report released late last year by the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies.
Union action has taken various paths to resolution. The standoff between the University of California and 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in 2022 lasted six weeks and resulted in significant pay raises. The strike at California State University last month lasted just one day before a deal was struck that included higher pay and parental leave (but now faculty are divided on whether to approve that contract).
This week, I have insight from a labor expert on what’s behind recent organizing, and what leaders should bear in mind as they consider how to respond. A strike on your own campus can feel like an attack, but a nationwide view shows how the industry is changing.
This wave of organizing and striking signifies a generational shift in the career prospects for higher-ed workers, said Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at the University of California at Los Angeles and director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
“There is much less patience with the normative way of thinking about the … salaries and career opportunities that exist in higher ed,” he said.
Economic trends are creating two realities for different generations of academics, Higbie said. Between the increasingly unaffordable cost of housing in many parts of the country, rising inflation, the weight of student loans, and the difficulty of securing a tenure-track job, many graduate students and younger faculty feel intense pressure every month just to pay bills. Combine that with graduate-student and contingent-faculty wages that have remained low over decades, and an academic career no longer makes financial sense for many people.
Many top administrators, on the other hand, spent years as professors, are likely to already own a home, and, when they recall themselves at the age of their younger colleagues, don’t remember facing similar financial pressures.
Here are six insights from Higbie on what leaders should understand about the labor trends playing out across the country.
Housing is a huge part of this equation. Home prices rose nearly 30 percent nationwide during the pandemic, and much housing in California, where Higbie lives, and elsewhere is unaffordable for the average academic worker.
Much ill will traces back to the pandemic. In the eyes of many teaching staff, the Covid-19 crisis demonstrated that institutions and governments could quickly generate extra money when needed. As post-pandemic inflation has strained personal finances, many people have grown frustrated, Higbie said. Indeed, the recent strike at Cal State has sparked a debate over whether the system is in as dire straits as it claims.
Undergraduate unions are the next wave. Undergraduate workers, including dining-hall employees and residential assistants, are increasingly organizing, he said. “It’s a generational shift completely, where young people — unlike 15 years ago — are seeing trade unions as a vehicle for potentially solving what they see as a structural crisis where education costs too much, and they don’t have hope to have a house.”
Younger generations are pushing unions to become more powerful. For a long time, Higbie said, strikes were short, and administrations tended to maintain the upper hand, keeping wages down. But that model is coming up against a new attitude about challenging the status quo, he said, and higher levels of militancy among workers.
Public institutions in particular are in a bind. State legislatures pressure institutions to keep tuition down, but workers are increasingly demanding higher wages. This puts leaders of public colleges in an even more difficult situation, he said.
Unions could be allies in building public trust. It’s tempting to view unions as outside agitators, but smart leaders should accept that they have become a stakeholder in higher ed. And depending on how negotiations go, they could help people take a more positive view of the sector as a whole — much like how unions in other industries have rallied support for political parties and issues.
“If higher ed is a public good that we want everyone to have access to … part of that is going to be the political equation of how we fund it at the state and federal levels, and unions are an advocate for higher-ed funding,” he said.