From Jesús Fernández, TUGSA-AFT Local 6290, HELU Steering Committee Member and Outreach Committee Chair
During the last weeks of the Fall 2024 semester, the HELU Outreach team met with several members of United Steelworkers Local 1088. USW Local 1088 represents academic and staff workers in colleges and universities around the Pittsburgh area. After the meeting between HELU leadership and Local 1088, they will be the first local of the United Steelworkers to officially join our coalition. This adds another union to our efforts and sets a starting point for a Pennsylvania-centered campaign for fair and democratic higher education in the Commonwealth and across the country. While HELU continues campaigning for federally-funded higher education, our member unions across Pennsylvania are organizing to increase the State’s funding of higher ed. By joining us, USW Local 1088 sets a starting point for this campaign to become a great success.
USW has served the people of Pittsburgh, PA, and the whole U.S. for over ninety years; delivering for them contracts that made the American Steelworkers the best paid and most secured steel workers of the world. As our economies changed, so did the USW; bringing to colleges and universities the same wall-to-wall industrial unionism inspired by the first years of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which also informs HELU’s core strategy. Recently, Local 1088 has brought massive victories to the USW and the working class by helping faculty, staff, and grad workers unionize at Pittsburgh University, becoming one of the biggest higher education unions in Pennsylvania.
HELU keeps growing thanks to locals like 1088 who agree with our theory of change and also carry it on their workplaces to build a higher education system that works for all. Our strength and coalitional capacity increases thanks to the engagement of members within their locals carrying our strategic vision and program. HELU welcomes the USW 1088 and its members to the fight that will define the future of Higher Education for the next decade. More than 50 locals have decided to make a clear statement: without the workers, our institutions are just empty shells devoid of any significant mission.