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WORCESTER — On October 24, the Clark University graduate workers union, affiliated with Teamsters Local 170, organized a panel of grad worker union activists from universities in Worcester and Boston to speak about their organizing experiences. Contract negotiations for Clark University Graduate Workers United (CUGWU) are set to begin in January, and the panel was held on Clark’s campus as part of CUGWU’s efforts to prepare its members.
The hosts of the event – two CUGWU shop stewards, including one Worcester DSA member – introduced the panelists, started with opening questions, and then fielded questions from the audience on the successes and failures panelists have experienced in their respective unions’ contract campaigns.
Represented on the panel were CUGWU and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Graduate Workers Union (WPI-GWU), which have bargaining units of around 150 and 600 members, respectively, and the grad worker unions at Boston University and MIT, which have upward of 3,500 and 5,000 members.
Building and Activating Membership
In large units, it’s not possible for a small group to form personal relationships with every grad worker. At MIT, for example, a large Organizing Committee (OC) breaks the workplace down into groups so individual OC members can focus their agitational efforts.
One-on-one organizing conversations are an integral part of this work, and they need to build trust in the union. They must center the struggles of the worker themselves, and should feel casual. The current president of MIT’s union, told the audience, “Don’t be a robot. If you go point-blank into union issues, people will struggle to come up with an answer. Ask how they’re doing, how classes are, what their advisor is like. You’d be surprised at how much people will reveal to you.”
These conversations are a constant necessity throughout a contract campaign and must continue after the contract is won. A founding member of CUGWU stressed the importance of continuing to have deep connections with the bargaining unit even after the contract is ratified. The contract will eventually expire and bargaining will begin again; organizers can’t lose that connection with their coworkers between contract campaigns.
Making these conversations empowering and educational for members can be a challenge. Jake, a member of Worcester DSA and an organizer in WPI-GWU, stressed that “People need to know that the union is not a service that is done for them, but a membership organization that they should engage in if they have an opinion on what the union should do.”
Bargaining Tactics
The panel shifted focus to the different democratic styles and bargaining tactics that their units have utilized.
A Boston DSA member who is an organizer in the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) described not only the deep, ongoing work to build participation, but also unique structures in BUGWU that placed more power directly in members’ hands. In BUGWU, membership meetings, rather than the elected bargaining committee, have the authority to create proposal language.
Open bargaining can also be a tool to strengthen member democracy if wielded properly, but organizers can’t rely on an open invitation alone to draw in members. Negotiators at MIT needed to consistently go out to the membership themselves to collect feedback to bring back to the table.
Jake discussed the challenges of a brand new shop uncritically accepting the advice of union staff. Staff are great resources and are not enemies of the membership, he said, but their livelihood is dependent on the union, which has its own political dynamics. “They may be receiving pressure from their boss to do things a certain way,” and the merits and drawbacks of those methods might not be clear to new organizers if staff aren’t able to give them a complete picture.
Jake also commented on a breakdown of organizing practices, wherein practically all organizing work became concentrated in the bargaining committee. “This was easier than developing the membership, but you really need to diffuse the work to be effective.”
Strike Force
Panelists made clear that the withdrawal of labor is a union’s ultimate tool to win concessions from the employer.
When asked by the audience, “What are the most effective negotiation styles?” a panelist from BU quickly chimed in with one word: “Striking,” which received applause. She elaborated, saying that “the words exchanged during negotiations don’t matter. We had people be aggressive, and eloquent, and kind… but bargaining with the employer is not a dialogue. If you are trying to get the university to give up something that will meaningfully change your life, you have to force their hand.”
To that end, empowering and preparing the membership to strike is of primary importance. Organizers at MIT entered negotiations without an escalation strategy, but when the university showed skepticism that they could activate a unit of 5,000 members effectively, they soon realized strike readiness required thorough coordination. They created a six-month plan to convince members of why striking could be necessary and how strikes work. To build and test organizational strength, they ran 12-hour informational pickets, which stoked fear in the administration that thousands of workers were indeed ready to fight.
At WPI, on the other hand, the bargaining committee found itself ill-positioned to push a strike campaign forward late in the negotiation cycle because the proper groundwork had not been laid.
Successes
The panel concluded with panelists recalling the joys of standing in solidarity with their coworkers, knowing that they had fought together for the same purpose and won serious gains.
Some grad workers at Clark made as little as $15,000 per year before they won their first contract in 2022, and a CUGWU panelist recalled “bursting into tears on the picket line when word came down that we had gotten a contract… All that preparation we did from July into October was the hardest work I ever did as part of the organizing committee… the sheer joy of when it was finally over and we won; it was all worth it.”
Jake ended the final round of questions by noting that “There’s a long socialist tradition of posing questions about the American working class and whether it is capable of being activated in a revolutionary way. Antonio Gramsci had that good quote: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’”
Trade unions are not inherently revolutionary or socialist in character, but the challenges of moving layers of the working class into struggle overlap, and it may often seem like nothing is working. But the satisfaction comes “when my two labmates say they’ll be on the elections committee… or when I talk to a first-year who says ‘I had no idea what this thing was until I heard you explain it to me and it made so much sense.’ These things do work, and this is why we do them. It’s a long process… but it’s supremely satisfying when you realize that you are doing this for a reason. It is going to work, and you just need to have faith that it’s going to work.”
Ivy Elliott is a member of the Worcester DSA Steering Committee.
Featured image credit: Shane Levett/Working Mass
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