HELU Wall-to-Wall & Coast-to-Coast Report: August 2026

From Levin Kim, HELU Chair and member of UAW 4121:

Next Thursday, August 27, HELU member unions will be coming together at our third General Assembly of the year. We’ll reflect on our work over the first half of 2026 and set our strategy for the rest of the year into 2027 and beyond. What projects have HELU members been working on in Politics & Policy, National Coordinated Organizing, Media & Communications, and our other committees? What issues and member priorities at the Local level are being surfaced in HELU organizing conversations, and how are they shaping our organizing strategies? How can we effectively leverage our collective power across the sector amidst the continued chaos of the current political landscape?

HELU is a member-driven organization. Our power to lead with a bold, progressive vision of higher education that works for workers and the communities we serve comes from delegates’ and members’ involvement. Already a delegate from a member union? Take a sec to register for the GA now – an email should be in delegates’ and individual members’ non-.edu email inbox, along with a packet of committee reports and other information about our work over the last few months. If you aren’t able to find that email, please contact Amy Zanoni at amy@higheredlaborunited.org. 

Not yet a HELU member? There’s no better time to join – become a part of a fighting labor movement today. 

See you next week! 

✨ FEATURED EVENTS ✨

October 24 | Chicago, IL

Fighting for the Future of Higher Education: Labor Organizing, Bargaining, and Policy Advocacy in the Age of EdTech and AI

HELU and our partners in UIC United Faculty AFT Local 6456 are hosting a day-long deep dive into Higher Education, EdTech, and AI. This workshop is aimed at: understanding and producing contract language that protects workers;  strategizing together to create a national organizing model against the technoligarchy; creating legislative frameworks locals can take to their state legislatures and Congress; and deepening workers’ understanding of the issue.

September 1 | 7pm ET/6pm CT/5pm MT/4pm PT | Online

Raise Hell for Pell National Town Hall
The Raise Hell For Pell campaign is about protecting the program now and winning a new affordable and accessible higher education system for the future. Join us to help open the doors of higher education for the next generation.

by Nick Temple

On June 30, Spelman changed its cleaning contractor from Aramark to Integrity National Corporation. The workers under Aramark had been unionized and covered by a collective bargaining agreement for many years. According to Workers United Southern Region, when Integrity took over, almost none of the existing Spelman cleaners were hired and Integrity did not recognize the union. Around 35 workers lost their jobs, many of whom are Black women who had worked on the campus for more than 15 years. Along with their jobs, they lost their seniority and the wages and benefits they had secured through their union contract.

by Michael Ziegler

In July, the Graduate Labor Organization at Brown University (GLO-AFT Local 6516) partnered with HELU to host a workshop at which representatives of different unions could discuss and strategize around discrimination and harassment and grievance procedures. This began as a project of HELU’s Northeast Regional Bargaining working group, but quickly pivoted to a national audience with an online option.

by Payam Barghi

Gilroy, California calls itself the “Garlic Capital of the World” and sits just thirty miles south of Silicon Valley. Close enough to be a commuter town for Bay Area workers, but just far enough to still be a farm town. Drive a little further to Hollister, and agriculture has a stronghold on the town’s economy – the same fields where United Farm Workers organized strikes and boycotts, teaching the next generation the importance of collective action. These two towns are where Gavilan College campuses sit and have many community members whose families grew up working in the fields and packing plants.

by Tessa Barber

To be a graduate student worker in Florida is to live pulled between two identities the state is actively trying to tear apart. As students, we face mounting threats to our academic freedom, our funding, our free speech, and the legitimacy of the very programs in which we study and teach. As workers, we are fighting parallel battles: to enforce our employee status when we are left out of almost every employee policy and platform on campus; to convince people that we “need” or “deserve” a union at all; and to fight back against constant institutional campaigns that squeeze every drop of labor out of us while stripping away the supports that make our labor possible. None of this is unique to Florida. But in a state where the legislature has made union survival itself a battlefield, the urgency is impossible to overstate.

by Chasidy Fisher Hobbs

Over the past few years, Florida’s higher education system has undergone an aggressive, state-led restructuring. Orchestrated by Governor Ron DeSantis, his political appointees on the Board of Governors and the Florida Department of Education, and a compliant state legislature, this campaign has fundamentally altered how public universities operate. What began as a highly publicized ideological takeover of New College – Florida’s small, highly regarded liberal arts state institution – has quietly evolved into a blueprint applied across the entire state university and college systems. It is now traveling through public higher education systems in other red states.

by Thomas Gokey

HELU member organization the Debt Collective began in 2014 with a campaign to organize students who had been defrauded by predatory for-profit universities. Fifteen people went on a debt strike and nearly 10,000 more filed claims with the Department of Education. All these debtors demanded the Department of Education enforce – for the first time – a little known provision of the Higher Education Act called “borrower defense” that requires the government to discharge fraudulent student loans.

• Stand With Spelman College’s Janitorial Workers
• Help Devion Canty Continue His Education at Johnson C. Smith University
• Sign: Withdraw All Disciplinary Charges Against Prof. Willoughby-Herard
• Donate to Support RIF’d Workers at the University of Louisville (UofL)
• Sign: We Stand with International Workers! Reinstate Tufts Grad Student to Her Doctoral Program!
• Demand Real Protections for All Brown University Grad Workers

• Dining Hall Workers Union Sues ASU, Alleging First Amendment Violations – The State Press
• Professors Challenge Texas A&M System Over Censorship Policy, Detail Violations of Academic Freedom – ACLU
• Hofstra University faculty union votes to authorize possible strike – Newsday
• Union Report Finds Oregon’s Universities Hired Administrators as Instructional and Classified Staff Lagged – Willamette Week
• Harvard academic workers vote to authorize strike – Cambridge Day
• The Trump Administration Has Been Spying on Labor Unions – Jacobin
• The Groups Pushing Back on McMahon’s ‘Call to Action’ – Inside Higher Ed

We invite you to support HELU’s work by making a direct financial contribution. While HELU’s main source of income is solidarity pledges from member organizations, these funds from individuals help us to grow capacity as we work to align the higher ed labor movement.