By Carolyn Kube, Chair of HELU Outreach Committee, Steering Committee member for Healthcare Workers and Delegate from UUP.
HELU organizes local unions and labor organizations, not individual people, although individuals can join. This makes HELU organizing different from organizing people into a local union. The idea behind HELU is that by drawing the local unions at a campus into a coalition that reaches from coast to coast, we can build the kind of power sufficient to force a transformation of our whole higher ed system. We mean a major transformation, as big as the one after World War II when the GI Bill passed, or the one driven by the Movement in the late 1960s which changed the workforce, the curriculum and established the fields of ethnic studies, women’s studies, and so on.
The difference between organizing unions into a coalition and organizing individual people into a union shows up in how the Outreach Committee works. We are a standing HELU committee of about six people with two dedicated staff. All except the staff are volunteers. We meet every two weeks. We often begin with assessing the “lay of the land”: who is organizing, where there is leadership turnover, where there have been attacks, what campaigns are going on, and so on.
Then we review our outreach targets. We track each of these as a “conversation.” I personally cannot work without process – without one, I’m lost. Leads come in from all over, from state coalitions, people who had seen our website or heard about us at some conference, and recently from our regional organizing projects where a HELU cluster will have a conference or start a campaign and other unions will get drawn into it and want to talk with us. For example, 47 “conversations” got started out of the recent Northeast Regional Bargaining Conference. But “from all over” means a lot of record-keeping, database work. Thank heavens for our staff on this. It would be impossible without staff. We need more volunteers, by the way.
Once we choose a likely lead, we start a conversation with them. The person who contacted us may not be the person who decides, so they have to go back to their union and see if they can get them interested. Then we can continue the conversation with the local president, or the E-board, or their assembly, or whoever. If they are interested, they will ask us to send them a calculator so they can see how much of a Solidarity Pledge they will have to pay. We ask for anywhere from 0.1 to .55% of their income from dues. This is after they pay all their affiliates or any other people they have to pay. So it becomes a budget issue for them.
Usually, the biggest stumbling point is money. For a big union, it’s a big chunk of money. Smaller unions don’t have the resources to give even .1% of dues. Maybe it’s a first contract. Maybe they have had to lay off staff. We have an in-kind process. Maybe they can give us space to have a state conference. Maybe they do some graphic work. But in-kind is very hard to manage and we try to avoid it.
The Solidarity Pledge is a recommitment every year. At first, we were not getting people to renew. Unions do not send money automatically. We are now invoicing HELU members. Recently, a couple of unions have written HELU membership into their constitutions. They will still have to be reminded, but this is the beginning of making sure that HELU is around long enough to achieve our goal.
Outreach stays out of the politics of each individual union. That boundary is very clear. If they decide to join HELU, we support them however they want to decide to join. Do you want to bring it to your membership and educate your members about HELU, and have them decide? Do you want to just have your Board decide? Do you want us to come to your board? We never go as just one of us. It might be me and staff and someone from the leadership, but it’s more than one. With big unions the conversation may take a year or more. We step back and they come around in their own time. But we don’t lose touch.
Once a union or labor organization joins (we always say this because we have a few members of HELU like the Debt Collective and Scholars for a New Deal that are not strictly speaking unions, and also the various AAUP advocacy chapters and CWA Campus Workers United chapters that do not do bargaining), the local leadership chooses delegates who become the connection between the local and HELU. They are expected to come to General Assemblies, join HELU committees, report back to their union, organize the other members of their union around HELU campaigns, and so on. They are the real power base of HELU. When the General Assembly decides to do something, it is the delegates who do it.
Having these conversations and tracking them is a lot of work, but Outreach does not just meet and onboard new unions. We also do Open Houses. These are small monthly zoom meetings (see our calendar for the next one) where we tell some history of higher ed and talk about HELU’s goals and discuss HELU with people who show up. They may be just curious or they may be there specifically to help them decide if their union should join. We also support strikes and demonstrations, like the Minnesota anti-ICE demonstrations.
Right now HELU has about 80 members either on board or well along in the pipeline. Sometimes a conversation stalls. “Closing the deal” is important to us because that’s how we pay our staff and overhead, and this kind of organizing cannot happen without staff. We have a big grant right now, but we are spending it fast, mostly on staff and organizing to get up to speed. When HELU started in 2021 it was our vision platform that really lit a fire under local unions. We got over a hundred endorsements. Now we are encountering the reality of keeping that fire alive after five years, through the horrible attacks on workers and higher ed institutions, changes in local leadership, and general confusion that people have about belonging to yet another national organization. Don’t we already belong to AFT, NEA or UAW? What’s different about HELU?
We need to figure out the best answer to that question. So far, HELU’s growth and success has come from building the plane while flying it, creative-problem-solving as we go along. I know the answer has something to do with the free sharing of ideas: ideas about bargaining, organizing, academic freedom, workers’ rights, focusing on what all higher ed workers have in common. I know because I have seen this happen, seen the fire catch. US higher ed is a very complex, sprawling non-system. HELU is trying to rationalize it as labor power with a purpose.