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The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.
BUGWU members rally for a contract – Working Mass 2024.
By Freddy Reiber
Boston University has a long history with labor organizing.
In 1979, as a reaction to the policies of famously conservative university president, John Silber, professors, clerical workers, librarians, and other workers struck. After 18 days on strike, the faculty were able to win a 32.5 percent increase in pay and union recognition for clerical workers and librarians. Unfortunately, a Supreme Court decision later ruled that private university faculty were not covered by the Nation Labor Relations Act.
When my union, the Boston University Graduate Workers Union, went on strike demanding higher wages, comprehensive health care, and childcare funding we tried to channel that same history, carrying signs painted with “UNFINISHED BUSINESS 1979 -2024”.
Graduate Workers are oftentimes the backbone of universities, with them providing more and more of the labor for the university. This labor includes conducting a large amount of the research and handling most of the instruction given to students, with much of the duties that are performed by current graduate students previously assigned to full-time faculty. At the same time, many universities have not adjusted wages while students and workers have faced significant increases in rent. A 2020 study found that 17% of graduate students experienced homelessness and 49 percent of graduated students dealt with some level of housing insecurity.
When we decided to unionize, our central demand was that the university provide us with a living wage, one free from the significant rent burden placed on us as Boston workers. Specifically, our focus was on COLA – a stipulation in our contract that ties our wage increases to cost of living calculators. Our other asks included improvements to our health care along with an actual dental or vision plan, meaningful child care stipends, and support for those with disabilities. Negotiations over our first contract stalled, and after a number of months of getting nowhere in bargaining, we voted to strike.
Organizing in a University
Organizing within a large research university is a challenge. As an organizer, you are trained to leverage social networks. Find a community and a problem, agitate over said problem, and use it to build worker power. For Boston University, the common network was the academic department. As it became clearer that a strike was needed, leaders in each department worked together to form organizing plans, hold meetings, and do power mapping around the critical workers we needed to reach. These same leaders would also communicate amongst each other, sharing data and ideas as well as planning on university wide actions and organizing goals.
One of the strengths of this leadership model is that department leaders tend to have a deep understanding of the conditions within their network. As a worker in the computer and data science departments, my rapport with my fellow workers allowed me to organize and mobilize quickly in response to calls for a strike. These included quickly developing a mutual aid network to help soften the loss pay, as well as reaching out to significantly more remote workers who had little understanding of union action. It also allowed for each department to take ownership of the strike in a highly democratic way, with workers figuring out how to respond to union-busting actions by the university as a group.
A great example of this was the Math department, which in response to having courses originally struck scabbed by university administrators, were able to organize and plan direct actions led by the workers. These actions were in turn met with union busting from university management, but due to the strong worker-to-worker organizing, the department was able to maintain its militancy and continue to hurt Boston University’s bottom line.
The issue with this somewhat disconnected network, however, is that departments that lacked a leader would often go “dark”. Unable to penetrate these almost hidden departments, many of them likely didn’t receive proper communication around how to participate or were even aware that there was a union action. This was something that my own department (a group of about 200) also suffered from.
Despite our best attempts to reach out, many workers had little interest or knowledge around union activity. Many of these workers worked remote or were masters students giving them little presence on campus. Even the university itself seemed unable to know who these workers were as the provided list of recognized workers contained numerous errors, including having a number of my co-workers as stationed in the business school.
This isn’t that uncommon for university worker and student strikes, especially when you lack a first contract and guaranteed rights for orientation. But even in places with a union orientation, the high turn-around among workers in large classes make it almost impossible to conduct meaningful organizing.
Our answer to this question was to simply force the issue and call for a strike, an answer I still stand by. Nothing was more productive in terms of getting workers involved than calling for a strike, and I suspect that any attempts to organize these workers outside of simply calling for direct action would not have actually worked, as they would have been replaced within a few months.
Our other answer to these disconnected communication networks was to use Slack, a 1500+ worker digital communication channel that quickly became the focal point for many controversial discussions around larger union actions. So often workers who hadn’t been a part of any union actions or had any background in the union would join Slack as a means of airing grievances over union discussions. More arguments occurred over Slack than I think anyone would care to admit, and none of which were productive to our organizing. Unlike traditional shop-floor organizing, important discussions happened digitally, with workers unable to properly understand each other, leading to divisions instead of solidarity. What was supposed to be a tool to help communication became a burden, with so many of my fellow organizers deleting the application as soon as possible.
In It For The Long-haul
The other main learning point for us as organizers was the long haul strategy. Adopted from strikes at other universities like University of California and University of Michigan, our strike was defined by the “long haul”. Instead of setting a specific deadline, our strike’s end is decided by the workers within the bargaining unit, with votes being held, in our case, every week. As grad workers, we see our economic and structural power as something that builds over time. Unlike strikes in manufacturing or in K-12 education, graduate workers’ work isn’t felt day to day. Instead, it is felt by the numerous grades not being submitted, the missed lectures and discussions, and the lack of feedback on work that is critical to higher education.
During the first semester of our strike, the long haul was, without a doubt, effective. The distributed and somewhat messy network of BUGWU leaders were able to channel the frustrations of our worker population into pretty wide and effective mass action. Numerous courses had to either be canceled or have substantial changes in structure. In my own turf, we ended up being able to get a significant amount of workers to go on strike, with many classes in the department not having grades, discussion sections, or even lectures for most of the remaining semester.
We also hosted a significant number of rallies, pickets, and marches all of which had great turn out. Some of these included our initial strike rally, in which congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Elizabeth Warren showed up to speak and show solidarity, as well as our May Day rally which had participants in the thousands.
BUWGU members and community supporters march through campus – Working Mass 2024.
This isn’t to say that the early strike wasn’t still a challenge. Other than our internal problems highlighted above, we also faced numerous external challenges as the university attempted to strike bust. One example of this was the bringing of academic charges against those striking not a
Oftentimes graduate students are the primary people responsible for the production of course materials, with much of this work being stored on digital repositories. To limit the potential for scab work, striking workers would often take said materials down, removing access to them. This ended up being a rather controversial tactic with the university, with many administrators falsely claiming that we had destroyed student exams and assignments. They would then use these strike actions as the basis for academic discipline that was targeted at our student status, not our worker status.
Other examples included aggressive removal of union flyers and literature, with one dean going so far as to verbally harass and chase flyering workers around a building. Still, despite these challenges, the spring semester strike was a success. No vote to end the strike was anywhere close to being contentious, and we won serious improvements in a number of critical areas.
As spring died down, and we started to plan for summer, a season in which many graduate workers are not employed by the university, we decided to treat summer like a resting period. The plan was for most of us to take time away from the fight, and then ramp back up to the large full strike when school started again in the fall.
For a few departments, like math or computer science, there was no such break. Many of the math department workers still had teaching positions over the summer, with most of them continuing to strike. To ensure that no one was left behind, I, along with other organizers in computer science and math, expanded our mutual aid network to help cover the cost to workers, many of which had not received a paycheck in over 3 months. By leveraging graduate workers’ other employment positions, we were able to ensure that workers could continue to strike, resulting in the cancellation of a number of classes.
Many of my fellow organizers have congratulated me on this work, as we really were the center of the summer strike. However, upon reflection I think it was a mistake. The limited summer strike heavily drained most of our resources and as summer moved into fall, many of us were at our financial limits. At the same time, the limited summer strike had limited impact. Although numerous classes needed to be changed, the limited number of positions we had to strike ensured the university was able to limit our damage.
For departments that didn’t have work in the summer, many of them tried but failed to recapture the same militancy that they had shown during the spring, in part due to the spatial and temporal issues discussed above, as well as just general burn out.
At the same time, the university offered us a full contract which gave significant raises in both compensation and benefits to certain groups of workers like parents or humanities, while also leaving other workers high and dry.
All of these factors compounded into a significantly weaker fall strike. Numerous departments who felt like the strike had gone on for long enough organized around ending the strike, while other workers who were still dedicated to the fight had to return to work for financial or personal reasons. Still, we pressed on, and were able to get the university to make some small, but significant moves at the table, like cheaper health care for dependents.
Discussions then turned to securing back to work protections for workers on strike, which while contentious, ensured that no worker was left without a job, which once settled, led to a pretty quick ratification. The seventh month strike was over and we had secured our first contract.
Is It Over?
When I first set out to write the article, the main question that was posed to me was, “Do you think the strike was a success?”, a question that is probably unanswerable for me, due to my close ties with the strike.
There were a number of wins, especially for our lowest paid workers, and in other in areas like child care. This contract allows for people who were originally going to need to leave the university to stay. At the same time, there were also so many things that were left on the table, like better access rights for those with disabilities or an actual dental plan.
Instead of answering this question, I have tried to highlight and share, what I think are, learning moments for other workers attempting to secure a first contract of their own. There are numerous decisions we made, like our use of digital technology to try and bridge communication gaps, our lack of a centralized leadership structure, and our use of the long-haul strike that I hope other unions can learn from.
To close, I want to briefly remind us that no single contract will ever be enough.
There will always be more left on the table, more to win, and battles over contract enforcement. As an organizer, the fight doesn’t start or end during a strike, instead it’s something that we must live for everyday. And when it comes to the Boston University Graduate Workers Union and its fight for social and economic justice, we still have unfinished business.
Freddy Reiber is a member of BUGWU and Boston DSA.
Photo Credits – Henry De Groot
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