Committees

The 2022 HELU Winter Summit charged its working committees with developing a democratic, transparent, durable, and adaptable structure that can advance HELU’s mission and build the long-term framework necessary to organize across the higher education sector.

As we look to the next two years of organizing, we seek to develop collective processes to learn and build with one another in each of the following three Program Committees:

National Coordinated Organizing Committee (NCOC)

  • What we are: The National Coordinated Organizing Committee (NCOC) aligns local struggles into a national movement to build a multi-faceted and diverse coalition to win more together through national coordination of local campaigns.
  • Why we exist: We must defeat our 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. Our perspective on the higher ed industry is bottom-up and anti-racist; we prioritize “raising up the floor.”
  • How we support the movement: We coordinate movement goals into a more powerful structure than any one organization or union alone. We support local organizing with resources and experience from campus workers elsewhere.
  • How we move forward: 
    • Build and sustain a national committee for all campus-based higher ed worker organizations to align goals and coordinate local campaigns, including recognition, contract, and issue campaigns.
    • Organize concrete solidarity assistance (including trainings, fora, one-on-one conversations, contract repositories, share-outs of victories, tactics, strategies, and tools) for local struggles, especially for those with the greatest need and in the most hostile environments.
    • Listen and communicate with those working at the local level by trouble-shooting, sharing lessons, and providing strategic as well as moral support for on the ground higher ed 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.
    • fWork 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 separate from institutional concession

Committee for Political Advocacy (CPA)

  • What we are: The Committee for Political Advocacy (CPA) organizes political, legislative, and regulatory campaigns that align with HELU’s vision and goals, and provides support for member organizations to build political and legislative organizing capacity.
  • Why we exist: Our movement must identify, prioritize and coordinate political campaigns for higher ed labor standards and education justice at a national level, support and share these campaigns at the state and regional level, and build political and legislative organizing capacity within our locals and organizations to become active participants in the democratic process.
  • How we support the movement: We build relationships with legislators, student groups, labor coalitions, community groups.To implement the policies crafted by the Policy Development Committee, we will identify key political campaigns and develop material to support our unions, organizations and coalitions to nurture broad involvement in the legislative process across our membership.
  • How we move forward: We will:
    • Power Map our national legislative allies.
    • Survey our membership about key legislative struggles, evaluate how well aligned they are with our HELU vision and goals and how impactful and winnable these could be.
    • Create and share materials to support member organizations with political organizing at the national, regional, and local scale.
    • Provide support to our member unions to build political organizing capacity, including training for members interested in political organizing or running for office.
    • Create a network of members involved in local, state, regional campaigns.
    • Be proactive as well as responsive in our political organizing.
    • Engage in coalition building with community organizations and local activist groups where universities impact communities.
    • Advocate for political organizing for the common good at the local and regional levels, including mutual aid, in concert with our national political vision.

Policy Development Committee (PDC)

  • What we are: The Policy Development Committee (PDC) develops policy language for legislative campaigns based on the needs of campus rank and file and our collective vision.
  • Why we exist: We bring workers’ expertise to bear on policy that affects us and our communities. Until now, there has been no equivalent to the Right’s policy machines, so we must build an alternative for our movement.
  • How we support the movement: We translate movement goals into operable public policy informed by our vision and principles, including legislation and regulation with an eye toward implementation at federal, state, and system levels. We work in coalition with allied formations, including student and social justice movements.
  • How we move forward: The Policy Development Committee will generate the technical language and advocacy frames we need to advance the higher ed labor movement’s agenda. In all areas, we will be responsive to and align our policy work with HELU’s core values and members’ specific needs. To do this, we will:
    • Set national priorities, using concrete policy vehicles and with movement allies, we will build out the national vision to set the labor and higher ed movements’ agendas around the fulfillment of the mission of education, research, and service to the community. An example: Develop a labor-led Higher Education Act for use during the upcoming reauthorization fight.
    • Develop novel interventions, drawing on creative campaigns and our movement’s deep expertise, we will develop regulatory interventions such as Labor, Education, and HHS departmental regulations, that can work without legislative action to advance our labor and social justice priorities. An example: tying federal grants, a key source of higher ed resources, to labor standards.
    • Partner on state and regional fights, we will build legislative and regulatory tools for local, state, and regional coordinated campaigns. An example: West Coast unions move to simultaneously advance state-level healthcare reforms that reorient the landscape for worker benefits.
    • Align best practices to create a repository of model laws and regulations.
    • Respond to a changing policy terrain, by tracking and analyzing policy developments that impact higher ed workers.

Outreach Committee

We do the spade-work to grow our movement by asking unions and allied organizations to endorse the HELU Vision Platform, participate in committees, and engage in coordinated actions.

Media Committee

We broadcast HELU’s vision and mission broadly through our website and social media, written content, and coordinated messaging.

Coordinator: Tracy Berger, United Campus Workers Colorado (UCW Colorado-CWA Local 7799)