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UCW
intends to bring a social justice unionism model able to push for
higher education that is consistent with the expansion of democracy,
and opens a discussion on what it means to unionize the South, and
how public sector unions can fight against white supremacy.
VCU
is one of Virginia’s 15 public universities. Public workers in
Virginia lack collective bargaining rights, a legacy of Jim Crow
segregation. But “that does not preclude the VCU administration
from collaborating and being responsive on an issue by issue basis.
It is our hope to have a fruitful relationship built on shared
commitment to making VCU the best university it can be,” the
union wrote in its letter to the administrators announcing its
formation. UCW-VCU includes faculty, staff, and graduate student
workers. It formed as a non-majority union, a bottom-up organizing
strategy with a
long tradition in the South.
This allows it to organize, advocate, and build strength instead of
starting with the difficult and often bruising National Labor
Relations Board election process.
Kelsey
Huelsman, a member of the steering committee of the University of
Virginia chapter of United Campus Workers, welcomed UCW-VCU to the
statewide union. “Just as we are stronger when we’re
united across departments and classifications at one university, we
are also stronger when we unite workers across campuses in order to
beat back those who seek to under fund and privatize higher
education,” Huelsman said. “Together, we’ll win a
Virginia public higher education system we can be proud of.”
COVID-19
TRIGGERS UNION DRIVE
UCW-VCU
founding member Kristin Reed, an associate professor in the
Department of Focused Inquiry, noted the COVID-19 pandemic was the
trigger for forming the union. While she has benefits and has felt
lucky, Reed realized many faculty lack healthcare, and long term
organizing was the only to change things. “Over the past 12
years I have become more aware the feeling of luck is manufactured by
the low conditions of our faculty workforce. I’ve had to
wrestle that faculty with children don’t have maternity leave,”
Reed said. “Faculty have had to leave because of cancer, and we
have to cover their classes without pay. The fact we have to do it
off the books… We don’t have leave, we don’t have
short term disability benefits and that’s really precarious,”
she added.
The
Amazon union effort in Alabama brought home to Reed the necessity of
change. “I don’t believe there’s any more important
area to do labor organizing than the South. The South has the largest
Black workforce, a large Latinx force, and because of that some of
the worst worker conditions in the country,” she said.
The
VCU union has positioned itself to challenge white supremacy in
public policy, anti-Black racism in Richmond, and neoliberal policies
promulgated by the university. An urban university, VCU is located in
the middle of Richmond. While the city leadership understood the need
for the institution to serve the needs of the working class, Reed
noted that the priorities have pivoted from meeting the needs of
local students to becoming a world-class national institution
recruiting students from out of state. Tuition rates have increased,
putting a VCU education out of reach for young people in the
community. On top of that, the university has contracted out food
service, maintenance, and other work done by hourly workers of color.
This has forced many Black Richmonders to live with poverty wages,
stripped of their pensions, benefits and security.
Under
the banner #TheVCUWeDeserve, UCU-VCU invited Richmond Public Schools
Senior Lux Aghomo to its April 26 rally. Aghomo, a Black student
activist, noted the connection between VCU’s failure to do
right by adjuncts and failure to do right by the Richmond community
as a whole. In particular she challenged VCU for having a Black
student population at 17% – far lower than 45% of Richmonders
who are African-American.
“I
want students to be in my classroom. It won’t happen with
adopting corporate models of governance,” Reed said of the need
to make higher education more accessible, and the work of the union
to create a dedicated admissions pipeline. Students will be able to
join the union to build solidarity and conjoin worker and student
advocacy.
UNIVERSITY
DISPLACES COMMUNITY
“We
cannot have any good faith discussion about racial justice without
talking economic justice, and shared community governance,”
said Reed, citing the highly paid VCU administration, and the
displacement of Black Richmonders as the university buys up land.
“Acquisition of land reflects the power of the real estate
industry, not the needs of students. As it displaces residents, “the
administration is rolling out initiative after initiative that
purports to address racism on campus. Structural racism will not be
solved by individualistic interventions like anti-bias training. We
need really significant policy changes and structures until people on
the ground level have more power,” Reed said.
“It’s
about worker issues, but really it’s bigger than worker
issues,” says Rose Szabo, an adjunct faculty member and union
organizer at VCU. Szabo characterized VCU as “a university
gradually expanding to fill a city and then no longer serving the
city it now occupies,” and connected the dots between
university land development and low pay for adjuncts, wage theft,
classist and racist treatment of contract workers, and exploitative
practices such as paying staff with gift cards. “The expansion
and privatization of VCU are things the union can push back against.
We wouldn’t be just serving our interests, better pay and
benefits, we’d also serve our community and Richmond at large,”
they said.
“These
things are so closely related. [The administrators] say they can’t
pay adjuncts a living wage but purchased a night club and just shut
it down. They have money for these expensive land grabs to sanitize
the adjacent area, and doubled the salary of the president, but can’t
pay a living wage to their workers,” Szabo added, noting that
although they have two masters degrees, their salary is more in line
with a dining hall worker than with VCU President Michael Rao.
According
Szabo, the union is fundamentally about their community, the city of
Richmond. “I’ve lived here on and off for 10 years. I
went to VCU for undergrad, and I see how it’s changed the
community and not for the better.” The union offers “the
ability to build real power and make VCU the VCU we want it to be,”
they said, emphasizing that everyone deserves an affordable,
high-quality education.
Szabo
shared a story of a dining hall worker who was frustrated that VCU
had no tuition benefit. “He was working on campus and he
couldn’t use it. He was taking a bus to community college five
or six miles away when he was right there. That’s what we can
do better to advocate. Students become workers, workers become
students,” they said.
The
defeat of the Amazon workers’ union drive in Alabama hit Szabo
hard. “We were deeply sad to see the Bessemer union defeated by
the aggressive and hostile efforts by Amazon to bust the union, but
it is not over. We cannot go back to pretending things are OK in the
South,” they said. “I think the South’s history of
these deeply racist right to work laws that are made to bust
multiracial working-class unions can’t be ignored when looking
at the South.”
UCW-VCU
PART OF A WAVE OF CHANGE
Change
is coming to Virginia, driven by young people and dedicated activists
of color. There are many factors at play. For example, as Rose Szabo
mentioned, Gen Z is coming of age, millennials realize they cannot
afford a house, and there is a growing sense of discontent among the
college-educated with their jobs and working conditions. “The
pandemic was a catalyst for things that were already untenable and
now unsustainable. A lot of reasons why these movements are emerging
right now on college campuses is because college campuses became
radicalized by the Movement for Black Lives,” they said.
Progressive
political leaders are celebrating the UCW-VCU effort, including
gubernatorial candidate Jennifer Carroll Foy and Sam Rasoul, who is
running for lieutenant governor. Their bonafides have earned them
both endorsements from groups such as Richmond
For All,
CASA, Working
Families Party
and Sunrise
Movement.
Rasoul attended Monday’s rally in person. Carroll Foy released
two videos in support. Sean Perryman, another progressive candidate
for lieutenant governor and the former president of the NAACP’s
Fairfax, VA chapter also released a statement in support. Even State
Sen. Jennifer McClellan, a gubernatorial candidate whose hesitancy to
support full repeal of right-to-work laws has hampered her campaign,
released a statement on Twitter in support.
Carroll
Foy described the union as “a giant step forward for true
democracy.” Rasoul agreed, saying that “the unionization
effort at VCU is not only historic in its own right, but will be a
model for organizing everywhere by showing the power of unionism as a
force that can challenge our public institutions to live up to their
true democratic potential.”
A
TIME OF PROMISE AND CHALLENGE
The
formation of UCW-VCU and a renewed, growing interest in labor unions
in the South and beyond come at a time of promise and challenge for
the union movement.
“What
we have been seeing is unions receiving higher and higher
favorability ratings in polls. This is due to the impact of
neoliberalism and the wealth polarization, power polarization,
relocation of industries and businesses,” said labor activist
and author Bill
Fletcher
Jr.
“On
the other hand, we are facing an increased level of anti-union
repression. They can be public sector and private sector. We saw an
example of that in the Amazon case,” Fletcher noted.
The
UCW-VCU can be seen as part of the resurgence of teachers’
unions that has taken place over the past decade. Cities such as
Chicago,
Milwaukee and Los Angeles witnessed “a new reform minded,
progressive, left-leaning leadership emphasizing a new form of
unionism, social justice unionism, where they were reaching out to
communities” and bringing
student and community issues into their bargaining,
Fletcher said.
This
approach, also called “bargaining
for the common good,”
can be just what is needed. “Workers live in communities. Wages
and hours may not be the principal concern of the workers,”
Fletcher said. “In the South, you realize if the union says
they’re fighting for better wages, that might not be enough.
Some people think that’s a pipe dream. If $15 an hour is a high
wage in Bessemer, why do they think they can do any better than that?
“If
you’re making an argument about unions, you have to be more
comprehensive than wages,” Fletcher noted. “Certainly
working conditions, maybe the role the company is playing in the
community, the issues of potential advancement in the company, maybe
health and safety issues. It could be about what are the challenges
you face on the way to work.” The union needs to offer an
inspirational vision of what the union stands for, and what makes it
different. “People can be inspired to do exceptional things if
they are captured by an extraordinary vision…
“Virginia
is fertile ground,” Fletcher said, and UCW-VCU provides a
vision of labor organizing where workers unite across
classifications, and unions fight not only to improve their own
conditions, but for justice and equity in their community.
This
commentary was originally published by OrganizingUpgrade.com
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