Temple University has retaliated against its striking graduate workers, cutting off “free tuition” and demanding these students pay up or, in the words of the Associated Press, “face sanctions.”
As the AP reported,
A notice from the bursar’s office posted online by a striker said students involved must pay their spring tuition bill in full by March 9 or face a $100 late fee and a financial hold on their account, which would bar them from registering for more classes, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
The strike by Temple graduate student assistants — which is ongoing as I write this — is part of a broader wave of labor activism that I wrote about last month, and that cuts across job titles and class distinctions. Academic workers, Starbucks baristas, and warehouse workers at Amazon all have used or are using their labor as leverage to win better wages and working conditions. As the activist Medea Benjamin writes in The Progressive (12/30/22), “The U.S. labor movement caught fire.”
“In 2022, we witnessed the brilliant organizing of Chris Smalls and the Amazon workers, Starbucks Workers United reached nearly 7,000 members and unionized close to 300 stores. Requests to the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections were up 58% in the first eight months of 2022. Labor is back and fighting the good fight.”
As I wrote in January, however, this surge of union strength is being met by management with increasing hostility. Stripping Temple grad workers of their tuition remission is just one example. University of California administrators offer another (https://ucsdguardian.org/2023/02/13/following-a-6-week-academic-worker-strike-the-university-of-california-threatens-major-enrollment-cuts-to-doctorate-programs/): The massive university system appears to be cutting enrollment to graduate programs by a third, just a few months after 48,000 academic workers agreed to a new contract and ended a six-week strike.
The Economic Policy Institute says this kind of “fierce corporate opposition to union organizing” is the “standard,” with employers in both the private and public sphere turning to “union avoidance consultants to coordinate intense anti-union campaigns.” The EPI found that “private-sector employers spend nearly $340 million per year hiring union avoidance advisers to help them prevent employees from organizing.” This makes unionizing difficult and undermines the ability of workers to push back — especially because management knows it has government on its side in most cases.
The aborted rail strike of 2022, in which Congress and the president stepped in to prevent a walkout, is an obvious example, but it was in many ways an outlier. Direct interference is far less frequent than the numerous under-the-radar rules government imposes.
The National Labor Relations Act may make ban private-sector efforts “to intimidate, coerce, or fire workers in retaliation for participating in union-organizing campaigns,” the EPI says, but “the penalties are grossly insufficient to provide a meaningful disincentive for such behavior.”
Then there is the US Supreme Court. In the 2018 Janus decision, the court ruled that agency or shop fees violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution, saying unions were by their nature political organizations and requiring non-members to pay dues was a violation of their speech rights. This has cost unions millions in fees and ignores a simple fact: Unions represent more than their members. They also operate as employee representatives in a number of situations — setting wages and workplace heath and safety standards, defending workers in disciplinary matters. Agency fees are meant to cover those costs — in the same way that taxes are meant to cover the costs of an array of government services. Government spending is by its nature political, but I can’t opt out even when I disagree with the government’s priorities — not without going to jail.
The court over the last nine years has attacked workers’ rights and limited the power of unions in case after case (see In These Times [https://inthesetimes.com/article/supreme-court-biden-breyer-union-labor]): Workers can be required to endure security checks without pay, forced to sign away their rights to “participate in class-action workplace disputes, and banned from worksites during organizing drives. The court is now considering whether businesses can sue unions for losses suffered during a strike.
My point is not to demean the efforts of unions (I have been organizing with the adjunct union at Rutgers), or to minimize their impact. It is important, however, that we not overstate how successful they have been or to assume that slow erosion of American unionism has stopped. It has paused, perhaps, but only because of the active and aggressive efforts of the workers themselves. They have gotten little help from government and should not expect much more. So, let’s keep pushing forward.
Hank Kalet is a poet and journalist in New Jersey. Email, hankkalet@gmail.com; See hankkalet.Substack.com; Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook.com/hank.kalet; Instagram, @kaletwrites.
From The Progressive Populist, March 15, 2023
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