About Us
A coalition for higher education
Higher Education Labor United (HELU) emerged from the concerted efforts of campus workers across the United States. Allied labor organizers coordinated a July 2021 summit with 50 union locals to plan a national strategy. Summit attendees, who included faculty, staff, and students working on all types of campuses, developed a shared Vision Platform. Members from AAUP, AFSCME, AFT, CWA, NEA, SEIU, the Teamsters, UAW, and UE, as well as many independent locals attended. Endorsers of the vision platform at that first summit became the initial members of HELU and launched the next phase of outreach and planning.
Organizing work has continued since that first summit, including a second three-day virtual summit in February 2022. Over 130 unions and allied organizations, representing over 550,000 workers at community colleges, professional schools, and major research institutions across twenty-eight states have now endorsed HELU’s Vision Platform. Many of these unions are bargaining contracts this year, and the coalition is organizing people and empowering them to join in even larger struggles. That is exactly what a progressive, cross-class, national labor movement focused on workplace rights, dignified wages, and racial, gender, and environmental justice can build.
HELU delegates and committees meet regularly to move the organization’s vision forward and coordinate work among union organizers. We welcome new participants in this work!
Our Vision
We envision a future in which higher education:
- Is treated and funded as a social good and universal right.
- Works for and is led by workers, students, and the communities it serves
- Secures our nation’s democratic future and serves as a vehicle for addressing inequities.
- Prioritizes people and the common good over profit and prestige.
- Redresses systemic oppression and pursues equity along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration status for students and higher ed workers across all job categories.
- Honors the right of all workers to organize a union and collectively bargain.
Read HELU’s full vision platform to learn more about our vision, the challenges we face, the opportunity to transform higher education, and the commitments we’ve made.
governance
General Assembly
HELU’s General Assembly meets four times per year. The General Assembly makes HELU’s most important financial, strategy, and policy decisions. It is composed of delegates representing each of HELU’s member organizations, chosen by those organizations. The number of delegates from each organization is determined by the size of that organization’s membership.
HELU Delegate Structure
The number of General Assembly delegates from any member union or organization is determined as follows:
- 2-500 members = 1 delegate
- 501-1,000 members = 2 delegates
- 1,001-3,000 members = 3 delegates
- 3,001-5,000 members = 4 delegates
- 5,001-10,000 members = 5 delegates
- For every additional 5,000 members over 10,000, member organizations are allotted an additional delegate.
Steering Committee
HELU’s Steering committee is elected by its general assembly. Read more about our Steering Committee here.
Committees
We seek to develop collective processes to learn and build with one another in each of the following program committees. Any member of a HELU member organization or HELU at-large member is welcome to join in committee work.
Description coming soon.
The National Coordinated Organizing Committee (NCOC) aligns local struggles into national movements. We must defeat administrators’ divide and conquer tactics with unite and fight tactics, overcoming constructed hierarchies and institutional structures of oppression that stand in the way of local success. We connect unions and coordinate coalition work among higher education labor organizations in a way that increases worker power. We support local organizing with resources and sharing the experiences of campus workers elsewhere.
What we (will) do:
- Align goals among unions and link local campaigns.
- Organize concrete solidarity assistance (including trainings, one-on-one conversations, contract repositories, share-outs of victories, tactics, strategies, and tools) for local struggles.
- Troubleshoot, share lessons, and provide support for on-the-ground higher education organizers.
- Support existing and emergent campus labor coalitions and campus-community coalitions.
- Craft a popular narrative for our collective struggle for higher education as a universal right and a public good that reflects and advances justice for all workers and communities.
- Work collectively to identify strategic sites of oppositional power that confront our campuses as shared adversaries and enable strategic actions otherwise beyond the scope of a single local, college, or university.
- Build strike-readiness and direct action capacity by establishing infrastructure for mutual aid.
Description coming soon.
Description coming soon.
Outreach Committee
We develop and implement strategies to build HELU’s membership and power. Collaborating with other committees on communication, priority-setting, and power-building strategies, the Outreach Committee helps grow HELU’s membership while strengthening ties with current member organizations, coordinating shared actions, and more.
Coordinators: Mia McIver, UC-AFT and Todd Wolfson, Rutgers AAUP-AFT
Media & Communications Committee
We develop communications that are timely, effective, and clear, that push forward HELU’s vision platform. We broadcast HELU’s vision and mission broadly through our website and social media, written content, and coordinated messaging.
Coordinators: Helena Worthen, National Writers Union and Evan Bowman, AFSCME 328