Academics and the United Autoworkers-1 in 5 UAW members are in Higher Education

UAW Local 2865 — along with other academic workers like graduate-student instructors and “readers,” students hired to grade assignments. With 19,000 members, Local 2865 is now the second-largest local in the entire union. UAW Local 2865 is the union for 19,000+ Tutors, Readers, Graduate Student Instructors and Teaching Assistants at the University of California. All graduate students are eligible to join the union, and so are all undergraduates working as Tutors, Readers and UGSIs/TAs. Why are so many academic workers in the UAW to begin with? Tracing this history leads us back to the 1970s, the dawn of academic-worker organizing. Back then, the first successful attempts at forming academic-worker unions, at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found homes in the American Federation of Teachers — a logical choice for workers in the education sector. But University of California academic workers had other ideas. Imbued with the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s New Left, they were drawn to District 65, a “renegade union” founded by Communists in the depths of the Great Depression. It had made a name for itself as a militant, grass-roots union committed to organizing groups of workers who didn’t fit the mold of “traditional” union members, particularly low-wage workers of color.... District 65 had always been a shoestring operation, and had long sought a better-resourced parent organization. In 1981, it affiliated with the UAW; in 1987, it merged fully with the larger union. This was the first step in consummating the alliance of academic and auto workers. District 65 hoped that the UAW’s ample treasury, particularly its strike fund, could bankroll more effective organizing. For its part, the UAW was already reeling from the contract concessions and plant closures that decimated its membership in the 1980s. Unable to organize in their core industry, UAW leaders hoped that the District 65 merger would allow them to expand membership elsewhere. Cultural and political factors were in play, too. While far larger and more bureaucratic than the hardscrabble District 65, the UAW still traded on its reputation as a bastion of postwar progressivism. It was a reputation largely built by Walter Reuther, who served as UAW president from 1946 until his death in 1970. Reuther’s UAW set the bar for wages and benefits for much of the U.S. labor market, transforming manufacturing jobs into decent, secure work. But it also provided funding and organizational infrastructure for the social movements of the 1960s, including Students for a Democratic Society, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The 1962 Port Huron Statement, considered the founding document of the New Left, carries that name because it was drafted at a UAW retreat outside Port Huron, Mich. Now there is a referendum allowing UAW members to decide whether they want to elect their top leadership directly, rather than via a slate of delegates. Ballots were mailed in October to nearly 400,000 members and more than 600,000 retirees, who are also eligible to vote. Votes will be counted beginning on November 29. The organization facilitating this alliance is Unite All Workers for Democracy, a movement of rank-and-file UAW members formed in late 2019. After coming close to triggering a constitutional convention in 2020, where delegates would have voted on the question of direct elections, UAWD has played a pivotal role in the current referendum. A win for direct elections would constitute the most far-reaching structural reform in the UAW’s history, and could start a reform process that transforms the UAW from a one-party state into something like a multiparty democracy. It would also signal the arrival of academic workers as a political force within the union. More broadly, the direct-elections campaign in the UAW suggests a shift in the character of academic unionism. In a world where fewer and fewer graduate students can expect to find a secure job at the end of their training, their role as a source of cheap, flexible labor for universities is hard to miss. As a result, academic workers have become more willing to identify as workers — and to make common cause with workers outside of academe. That shift has consequences not only for academic workers and the universities that employ them, but for the shape of the U.S. labor movement as a whole. Source: Barry Eidlin, "A New Force in American Labor: Academe-- One in five members of the United Automobile Workers is in higher education." Chronicle of Higher Education Noember 29, 2021.