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Workers and Academia, UNITE!
by Brishen Rogers
Why the division? The complacent liberalism and stolid bureaucracy of union leaders since the Depression era, on top of the dual blows dealt to the left by Stalinism and McCarthyism, boded ill for the historic alliance. Also, the New Left's cultural radicalism -- undergirded by Herbert Marcuse and C. Wright Mills' assertions that future social transformations would come from students and other marginalized groups rather than workers -- didn't exactly fly with the unions' rank and file. And if that wasn't enough, union support of the Vietnam conflict (and occasionally explicit racism, sexism and homophobia) flew in the face of the academic left. "Workers' Rights are Civil Rights: A Teach-In with the Labor Movement," to be held tonight and tomorrow at U.Va., aims to help tear that wall down. Over the two day event, prominent academics and labor leaders will share the same stage and confront the same issues. It is hoped that commonalities will be sought out and found, common courses of action discovered and taken, and that groundwork for long-lasting coalitions between students, academics, workers and townspeople will be laid. This event, planned since late November, is loosely modelled after a similar one held at Columbia University last fall entitled "The Fight for America's Future," and inspired by the election of John Sweeney as AFL-CIO President in October, 1995. Sweeney campaigned against the organization's old guard, promising increased membership and an end to stolid union leadership. U.Va. labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein met with his editor, Steve Fraser of Houghton Mifflin, soon after Sweeney's election. As Lichtenstein remembers it, he and Fraser agreed that it was "time to drop our left-wing fastidiousness." They did not feel that Sweeney, who had not been strongly identified with union reform movements in the past and had urged workers to vote for Clinton despite his controversial welfare "reform" plan, was the answer to working America's problems. "But look," Lichtenstein said, "there's a motion here. Let's reinforce that motion." In a letter circulated to numerous prominent American intellectuals and published in the New York Review of Books early last year, Lichtenstein and Fraser detailed their hopes that the new leadership would chart a course towards a better life for all Americans. The changing of the guard is "the most heartening development in our nation's political life since the heyday of the civil rights movement a third of a century ago." "We were, unapologetically, looking for celebrities," Lichtenstein recalls. And they got them. Among the respondents were such prominent intellectuals as Barbara Ehrenreich, Betty Friedan, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Todd Gitlin, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Michael Walzer, Cornel West, and our very own Richard Rorty. After this positive response, Lichtenstein, Fraser, and others decided to hold a "teach-in." Why the name? In the original teach-ins held in the 1960s, students and other New Lefters would research a particular topic, recruit faculty and other experts, and hold a marathon information session. Such events simultaneously attempted movement organization and subversion of classical methods of knowledge exchange. Starting in the evening and often extending through the night, they were obviously not merely run-of-the-mill academic affairs. Likewise, Lichtenstein, Fraser, and others didn't want this to be just another academic conference on labor issues -- they wanted an activist edge. So they proposed the idea to Sweeney and Trumka in a visit to AFL-CIO headquarters. Making it clear that they didn't wholly agree with Sweeney and Trumka's politics, they nevertheless said they felt it was time to move forward and begin talking to one another again. "It was a gamble," Lichtenstein says. "The AFL-CIO didn't quite trust us, and we didn't know how it would turn out." "Even the most sober-spirited could not help but feel a thrill seeing the long line of people" waiting to get into the opening session at Columbia's Law Library on October 3, 1996, wrote Fraser and Josh Freeman in the most recent issue of Dissent. "It was a spectacular success," Lichtenstein agrees. "It was packed. People couldn't get in."
The Columbia event sent shockwaves through the American progressive community, inspiring similar teach-ins at universities around the nation. It also received coverage by publications as diverse as the New York Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Lingua Franca. While some maligned it as little more than a high-falutin' academic photo-op, Lichtenstein feels that "it really seems to have signaled a change in American academic left culture." Fraser and Freeman agree. "Running through all the proceedings," they wrote, "was an acute recognition of the event's social significance, its bringing together two worlds that had been estranged for so long." So why now? The reasons -- other than Sweeney's election -- are numerous. Some are purely cultural -- last year's ridicule of the academic left in the Alan Sokel Social Text fiasco being a case in point. Others, such as Lichtenstein and Fraser's sense of "a simmering anger and a profound sense of insecurity among the American people," are more economic in nature. Although Wall Street indexes and corporate profit-margins soar, most Americans' real wages have been in steady decline for almost 20 years. Couple that with decreased job security in the name of "corporate downsizing," "outsourcing," and other corporate "reorganization initiatives," add a president who seems just as sympathetic to the international corporate-elite as his immediate predecessors, and many feel that the time is ripe for the emergence of new progressive coalitions across the nation. Why U.Va.? The effects of the recent upward-channelling of wealth have hit home here as well as in the rest of academia. Graduate student teaching assistants (T.A.s), as well as faculty in general, have seen what has been called a "proletarianization" of the academic workforce in recent years. Much teaching these days is performed by low-paid teaching assistants or part-time, non-tenure track adjunct faculty with no benefits. "The system is great for the administration," write-in candidate for Student Council President John Hardenbergh (CLAS '98) wrote in the most recent issue of Critical Mass. "They get the teaching hours without having to pay for extra [full-time] professors. It also ensures that the graduate students get screwed when it comes to negotiating salaries, which never seem to match inflation." Indeed, graduate students around the nation at universities such as Yale, UCLA, and even U.Va. have protested such policies in the last few years. Last year, for example, U.Va. English T.A.s won a $500 raise -- their first since 1988 -- after protesting a 50 percent increase in their workload as ENWR sections expanded from 12 to 18 students each. As U.Va. Associate English Professor Susan Fraiman, an organizer of the U.Va. teach-in, explained in a recent interview, the English T.A.s' actions both expressed solidarity with colleagues across the nation and asserted themselves as workers. Furthermore, this "helped create a culture" in which teach-ins make sense. Grad students are not the only members of the academic community affected by the state's appropriation of the private sector's tactics. Controversy over U.Va.'s implementation of a new payroll plan handed down by the Allen administration last year brought conflicts between the U.Va. staff and administration into sharp focus. Many feel that communication between the classified staff -- all non-faculty, non-administrative employees -- and the administration is sorely deficient and that the staff needs more say in decisions on all matters such as payroll schedules, health and child care, and the like. But as it became painfully clear from research done recently for a Critical Mass article on the topic, many staffers are leery of speaking out for fear of retaliation. This conference, and especially the panel discussion "How Can Virginia Workers Have a Voice?," scheduled for employees' lunch hour on Friday, could potentially "show that there is a lot of support for such issues at U.Va. and therefore make workers look a little less vulnerable," as Fraiman said. Many feel this event will face an uphill battle in attempting to change Virginians' opinions about the labor movement in general.
Most people believe that Virginia's status as a "right to work" state indicates that unions cannot organize here. That notion is incorrect. All that "right to work" indicates is that "closed" (union membership as a condition of employment) shops are not allowed and that unionized workers cannot lawfully refuse to work alongside their non-union cohorts. In practice, this means that unions cannot engage in collective bargaining without great difficulty. Furthermore, management frequently uses the law to its own advantage -- hiring only non-unionized workers and claiming to defend the "right to work" while fighting unions. Most importantly, "right to work" symbolizes an anti-union flag signalling employers and managers that Virginia legitimizes hostility to the growth of unions. "What we, as academics, can do," U.Va. Associate English Professor Eric Lott explained, "is provide forums in which people are free to discuss these issues." Today, he says, even the most active leftist workers feel they cannot advocate unionization without facing retaliation. The bottom line? "We need to realize," Lott says, "that some sort of collective voice for the workers is necessary." Two interrelated approaches to this issue are apparent. "On the one hand," Lichtenstein explained, "we're analogizing that workers' rights are civil rights." In 1947, he argues, most liberal faculty would likely have seen integration of U.Va. "as some utterly utopian, radical or ridiculous idea." He points to one of the most important events in U.Va. history: C. Wright Woodward's 1954 lectures that became the seminal The Strange Career of Jim Crow. In that work, Woodward argued against popular opinion that segregation had not been a permanent feature of the South but rather the artifact of a particular historical moment. "I think that this teach-in can say the same thing about workers' rights," Lichtenstein says. "The negative perspective on trade unionism or worker organization that is viewed as endemic to the south, part and parcel of the culture here, is in fact just an artifact of a particularly reactionary moment in the 1940s and '50s." The other approach to the problem involves the importance of non-union organizations in the labor movement. Fraiman points to "Organizing the South" participant Libby Lindsay of the Coal Employment Project (CEP) as a paragon of this approach. The CEP was founded to help women miners who were not receiving adequate support from the union and were subsequently hard-hit by layoffs in the 1980s. Barbara Prear, another member of that panel and chair of the UNC Housekeepers Association, has worked closely with Black Workers for Justice, a group which helps both union and non-union workers bring suits against employers. Neither of these groups are anti-union -- rather they work alongside unions, supporting and supplementing their efforts. Finally, in addition to such openly pedagogical purposes, the teach-in will hopefully serve overt political purposes, in bringing together groups of people from students and faculty to staffers and members of the community. The event may well "constitute them as an interested body that wouldn't have existed [before],", Lott said. Attendees will be encouraged to sign in on Thursday night and interact with other activists in attendance. "By casting our net so wide [with the choice of participants]," Fraiman explained, "we will hopefully draw people out of the woodwork" who otherwise never would have made contact with those of similar mind. Once such contacts are established, and once people are convinced that their rights as workers can be defended in the public sphere whenever threats arise, such networks will be prepared to rise into immediate action. The Cold War between labor and academia is not over yet, but events such as this one promise to continue the progress of Columbia. Lott is hopeful yet realistic. "This can't be a one-time thing," he says. "I'd like to see other forums, one a year on certain workplace issues, perhaps. It's going to be a long road."
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