by Helena Worthen & Tracy Berger
Higher education institutions are vast, interactive, labor-intensive systems. A problem in one part can harm or shut down the rest. “There is not enough staff to make things run” is a warning that a whole institution, students and faculty included, could falter.
Understaffing is a strategy, not just one empty desk
Keeping labor costs down by understaffing has been a basic managerial strategy for dealing with budget cuts since at least the 1980s. Understaffing should be viewed as part of a bigger story of contracting out, fighting unionization, cuts by attrition, shifts to online programs, and hiring adjunct faculty. The damage can progress slowly and be hard to identify in the beginning; imagine how the effects of understaffing maintenance workers are felt over time. In practice, job classifications often separate workers along racial, gender, and class lines. This contributes to undermined trust and cooperation across those categories and encourages workers to blame each for workplace issues other rather than recognize that our power lies in joining together.
HELU: The big story needs a bigger response
HELU (Higher Education Labor United) recognizes that organizing one set of workers at a time will not be enough. Without organizing all the people who work in higher education, the project of a re-set for higher ed as a workplace cannot happen. This led HELU to the motto: “Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast.” Wall-to-wall means industrial organizing, like the organizing in the 1930s when the CIO took on the challenge of organizing whole industries, not just the elite skilled trades like the electricians in a steel mill. Coast-to-coast means coordinated bargaining. “Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” means that custodians and food service workers, for example, will support organizing nationally, share information and coordinate contract campaigns with healthcare workers, faculty and trades workers, all so that ultimately, it will be possible to “make things run.”
Can it work? A test of concept
On July 25, 2022, 60 higher ed staff showed up for a one-hour zoom roundtable organized by HELU to test the receptivity of higher ed staff workers to the critical vision of “wall-to-wall” and “coast-to-coast” organizing. The challenge of working together across job categories, especially with faculty, showed up right away. The roundtable asked participants to talk about both the challenges and highlights of wall-to-wall organizing.
What’s hard about “wall-to-wall” organizing in higher ed?
Obstacles to “wall-to-wall” organizing were made explicit in the breakout room discussions. Here are some comments drawn from meeting notes: “It seems as if faculty always get the new funding,” said one participant. “You face enormous challenges when seeking to represent a highly heterogeneous membership encompassing everybody: surgeons, nurses, janitors, undergraduate instructors, and so on,” said another. These “enormous challenges” include traditional racialized status issues. Someone said that even where there is salary parity with faculty/staff positions there is still a sense of staff being second class citizens. “Some voices are louder than others.” More comments: “It’s one thing to become united in terms of a health crisis, it’s another to meet ongoing critical issues.” And: “What about employees who are not already involved in union issues at their college?” And how do you get around some staff union contracts that have no-strike clauses?
In spite of this, what is possible and where would we start?
Many issues are not unique to staff. Money was first on the list. However, “Money unifies across all classifications,” said someone. It shows up in many forms: not just pay increases but also promotions, merit pay, pay schedules, COLA, sick time, and premium pay. Sometimes it is disguised as incentives. It shows up in vacations and access to personal time off. Another issue that cut across categories was winning collective bargaining for workforces that have no union. Awareness of labor rights, including how to negotiate and principles about what should be the bottom line for contracts, came next. Professional development opportunities, also a primary concern for faculty, was on the list. Several participants raised the expectation that joining HELU would enable workforces to align bargaining schedules, compare contracts, and “amplify our fights collectively beyond just skill and knowledge sharing.”
What did the test of concept reveal?
Participation in the roundtable was high, with registrants from 40 locals. 60 individuals participated in the Zoom conversation. The event was planned by a group of staff union members from around the country and HELU’s Outreach Committee.
The roundtable aimed to gauge how staff (as compared to faculty or students) view HELU’s ambitious vision, as well as to understand how to best incorporate staff needs. HELU organizers are committed to growing a truly wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast organization.
There is cautious but hopeful support from staff workers in higher ed. Even more importantly, issues listed by roundtable participants are unifying issues: Money, of course, but money in the innumerable ways that it expresses the relationships between workers and management throughout the system: issues of safety, respect, dignity, sustainability and the purpose of higher ed itself. Taking a labor (rather than a management) perspective on these issues changes and has the potential to overturn the traditional hierarchy of higher ed. This is information for faculty activists, especially contingent faculty, for whom academic freedom is almost equal to money. However, it may be that “academic freedom” is best thought of as an academic term for “free speech on the job” and “tenure” is thought of as “job security and stability.”
The potential of coordinated bargaining: “Not enough staff” is a double-sided warning
Just as a problem anywhere in a system can illuminate the whole system and light up interdependencies that were not obvious before, the problem of understaffing illuminates the precariousness of our system of higher ed. But it also suggests a way forward. In this period of rising labor organizing and effective strike threats that have resulted in better contracts, “there is not enough staff to make things run” can be a warning of a different sort: a promise, but one that can only be carried out if organizations like HELU effectively organize wall-to-wall and cost-to-coast.