By Ian Gavigan, HELU Executive Director.
HELU’s vision of higher ed organized wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast rests upon the idea that union locals are the starting point for an organizing strategy that builds power at the sectoral level in order to wage a national fight against our broken system of higher ed finance and governance.
On any given campus or in any metro area, locals are where workers actually come together on a regular basis. Locals are diverse. They are made up of clerical, IT, student, service and maintenance and all tiers of faculty workers. Further, they are affiliated with more than a dozen national unions.
When local unions on a campus or in a metro area work together, the local-to-local worker-to-worker relationships they build across occupation and union lines can be formidable. Together, they can move us towards sectoral power. Only by achieving that kind of power can we imagine winning an affirmative vision for the future of higher education.
Our focus on sectoral power reflects HELU’s core analysis that the crises we face – of neoliberalization, contingency, downsizing, outsourcing, curricular narrowing, and much more – all flow from a larger social and political process. Higher education is shaped by political decisions about funding and governance, and these political decisions reflect the broader balance of class forces in our society.
If we want to transform the sector into a public good, then we must gather the strength necessary to fight not only our bosses on the shop floor but also our bosses in D.C., our state governments, and the wealthy people they represent. With the broader labor movement, we must contribute to transforming who has power in our country.
As a labor organization focused on a specific sector, we begin to implement these insights by looking to the places where we have density.
Different targets for different regional coalitions
As of April 2026, HELU has regional coalitions emerging in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Mexico, and the broader Northeast spanning the states from Maine to Pennsylvania. HELU-initiated groups have also formed in some higher ed-centric metropolitan areas around the country like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Chicago, and Portland, Oregon
A regional coalition depends on local leadership. This is not a top-down organizing process. Unions in some states are obvious coalition partners because our history has brought them to a point where they are economically or politically similar, like the states around the Great Lakes in the Chicago region, or the states of the Southeast even if, between the regions, there are substantial differences.
Each coalition also needs something to work towards, but that will vary widely. Nearly every institution takes public funds in the form of student aid, including loans and grants, direct funding, research grants, subsidies for public services, and more. There is a wide range of governance structures, from those considered fully public to those considered private–and many gradations in between. Some parts of U.S. higher education depend on funding as small-scale as parcel taxes. Other parts depend on major grants or big philanthropies. Not surprisingly, the people who work in the sector do so under or in spite of a legal framework that varies from state to state. They carry out their work in extremes of wealth and poverty. The same extremes apply to the people who learn in it and the society that it reproduces. This is something we unite around.
The target for some of these coalitions is the state government, where a campaign might bring a proposal around just funding and support for higher education. In other states, the issue is enabling legislation for unionization of higher ed workers. In the example of the Amherst compact, the setting of a common floor for wages and working conditions would be a bargaining goal. Cooperation around upcoming demonstrations on May Day forms a kind of structure test. Regional coalitions have held events, supported by HELU, to consolidate efforts around these targets. Local unions that are not already HELU members send people to attend. A local doesn’t have to be a HELU member to be part of a coalition. HELU will, of course, work to bring unions whose members and leaders participate in shared activities into our organization
As far as the vision goes, HELU put out its vision statement at the very beginning of our formation, in 2021. It explicitly lays out what we want to make happen: a system of free higher education as a public good in which workers, students, and the communities that higher ed serves are at the center. HELU member local unions and non-HELU member locals that come together to form these coalitions buy into this vision and help refine it as we work together.
What is HELU’s role in a regional coalition?
In a more practical sense, HELU provides the organizational framework for the coalition. This includes staff-intensive work like record-keeping, mailing list, reporting and communications. The Outreach Committee becomes the central contact point for follow-up for bringing on coalition participants as solidarity pledge-paying HELU members. We help staff in-person and online gatherings that launch coalition formation processes. We send HELU staff and elected leaders to meet with local coalitions when it seems important to be there in person. In addition, because HELU is integrated into a number of national labor coalitions, we connect local unions with these coalitions. For a local union, which may already be affiliated with a national or international union that includes many different workforces, this is a way to be part of a movement that is dedicated specifically to higher ed.
In addition to our full and part-time staff, HELU also has a very active all-volunteer elected Steering Committee, many of whom are Committee Chairs. These committees engage the delegates that each HELU local union appoints. They have created tools that these regional coalitions use. For example, a candidates’ questionnaire came from the Politics and Policy Committee (P&P) which has also produced the College for All federal policy document. Communications that are hopefully being used to prepare campuses for a May Day action are coming from the Media/Communications Committee. The Amherst Compact, which proposes setting a bargaining goal floor for wages and working conditions, was actually an outcome of a big meeting of people from the Northeast regional coalition. These are living documents that have been produced in response to an expressed need. They are used and further developed as we work.
Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast is a horizon, not a road map
Regional higher ed labor coalitions have emerged and are going ahead because leaders of local HELU member unions have grabbed the opportunity to get something done towards our goal. So far, it appears to be a strategy that is both stable and in motion, replicable and adaptive.
Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast is a horizon, not a road map. We have to build that road on the ground, wherever higher ed is happening and in whatever ways our leaders can use our support. Place-based, regional organizing is helping us move in that direction.