From Daniel Bayer
GREENSBORO – North Carolina presently has the second-lowest union membership in the United States, after South Carolina. But North Carolina has a long history of union organizing. To understand the increasing activity among AAUP higher education advocacy chapters, it is important to learn something about the labor history of North Carolina on which they are building.
Following industrialization in the state in the late 19th century, the American Federation of Labor began organizing workers in industries such as textiles, tobacco, and furniture. In the 1930s and 1940s, general strikes in North Carolina led to significant victories for workers in working hours and wages, including in the textile mills of Rockingham County, home of my employer, Rockingham Community College.
In the mid-1940s, the Congress of Industrial Organizations launched “Operation Dixie” to preserve and build on the gains of previous labor activity in the South. Another goal of the organizing drive was to protect workers from bosses moving jobs from northern states to the less-unionized South. Organizing efforts were met with intense, well-organized and well-funded resistance, however, including violence such as the Greensboro Massacre in 1979. By 2023, union membership in North Carolina was at 2.7 percent of the workforce.
In recent years, efforts in the South have been directed towards organizing the increasing number of foreign auto plants in the region. In April 2024, the United Auto Workers reached a historic settlement with Daimler Truck North America for 7400 workers throughout the state. Averting a strike, the major settlement provides raises of at least 25% over four years, introduces cost of living adjustments and profit sharing for the first time at Daimler, and eliminates the hated two-tier system in favor of equal pay for equal work.
In higher education, recent union actions have included the organization of graduate students and housekeepers through UE 150 at UNC-Chapel Hill and several other UNC system campuses, and graduate students at Duke University won the right to unionize with the SEIU in 2022.
Starting in 2010, the Republican-controlled legislature in North Carolina embarked on a course of restructuring higher education in the state through the Board of Governors. At universities in the UNC system, AAUP advocacy chapters are working to stem the tide of attacks on academic freedom and faculty decision making processes around curriculum. At UNC-Greensboro, the administration began to impose austerity with the aid of the rpk GROUP consulting firm, cutting positions and programs using the debatable justification of enrollment declines.
The majority of the faculty senate, minus its leadership, and AAUP-UNCG joined with students to launch a resistance movement that included votes of no confidence in the provost and the dean of the College of Arts and Science. Other UNC universities, such as UNC-Asheville, have yet to begin similar efforts to fight extreme budget cuts on their campuses.
It has been a shock to many academics and other campus workers in North Carolina to find themselves treated as a disposable proletariat, and the awakening process is just beginning. Those who want to destroy higher education aren’t going to stop. It’s time for faculty and other campus workers to increase our organizing.
To help those in states without collective bargaining for higher ed, HELU plans to bring together higher education organizers and activists to exchange experiences, develop stakeholder dialogue, and plan strategies for higher education organizing and advocacy through our local unions.
Very good report!