United Campus Workers (CWA 2265) hosts town hall series beginning Saturday, Feb 21
To my colleagues and comrades in HELU, from Harry Szabo. President, UCWVA
We know that in states where public service workers have Collective Bargaining rights, the outcomes aren’t just good for those workers. They are also good for the community and for democracy. If the workers who are tasked with carrying out a democratic program have negotiating power they are able to enforce a more robust democracy. That, along with our desperate need for better wages and working conditions, led a group of us university workers in Virginia—graduate workers, adjuncts, staff, and full-time faculty—to form United Campus Workers of Virginia (CWA 2265) in 2020.
More than five years later, Virginia campus workers are standing on the precipice of a new future for the Commonwealth of Virginia. We have managed to champion a House and Senate bill for Collective Bargaining rights. However, our university Presidents have lobbied corporate Democrats, claiming they will have to raise tuition. As a result, we have been struck from the House bill (HB 1263) and homecare workers, another very vulnerable population, have been left out of the Senate bill (SB 378).
In the next few weeks, our organizing efforts will either lead us to win Public Sector Collective Bargaining for all state employees, with all that entails, or we will be excluded from the final version of the bill and be forced back to the drawing board.
At UCWVA, we were inspired early in our organizing by the McAlevey Model, sometimes called the 1199 Model, which says that workers are strongest when we are in alignment with our communities: when we stand with leaders in faith, community organizing, and civil rights movements. Jane McAlevey calls this relationship Bargaining for the Common Good, and it represents a strategy that has resulted in gains for communities that use it in the form of better housing, stronger unions, and deeper community ties.
We have worked to be good partners to our students and to our communities by supporting initiatives that benefit our communities: we’ve worked with students to oppose tuition hikes, and begun pushing for expansion of childcare for Virginians. Because Collective Bargaining has been granted to Virginia municipal workers on a case-by-case basis, we have stood alongside teachers in Richmond and Albemarle as they’ve fought to secure their right to bargain, and while they bargained their first contracts, and while their School Boards walked back the promises they made.
Now, we need to ask our communities to stand with us. We are still very young as an organization, and part of what we intend to ask is that our communities join us in building power through Collective Bargaining. This is a big, audacious ask to make. Our universities are not good neighbors. They often engage in land speculation, for example, driving up the cost of housing for community members, which across Virginia has a disproportionate impact on Black communities. They often take more than they give. We are asking our neighbors to work with us to bring our universities to the bargaining table, to bargain for the common good.
To that end: we are holding a series of town halls to ask the communities that surround our universities to hold our employers—and our state legislators—accountable to us. We and our neighbors will tell each other the truth about what higher ed workers face at work, what all of us face in the community when we go home from work, and how we can all help each other.
The first of these town halls will take place this Saturday, Feb 21, at the University of Virginia. We will have four more the following weekend: at VT, at GMU, at W&M and CNU jointly, and at ODU. We hope to educate and empower our communities to join in this fight for quality public services, fair treatment of those who staff those public services, and community-minded gains for all.
We hope that our friends at HELU following this story will reach out: to hear how things went, to take lessons (good and bad) for your own campaigns, and to cheer us on while we try our best to change a law that has its roots in a racist 1946 decision to bust a union of workers right here at UVA, where our first Town Hall will take place. We are fighting to build on the model that higher ed workers in states with Collective Bargaining have set: where we bargain not just for ourselves, but for the world we want to live in.
Yours In Solidarity,
Harry Szabo
President, UCWVA