I’ve had the privilege of being part of a union in my career only once, at American University. God knows I’ve been in situations that would have been easier to handle had there been a union representative to back me up, in academia, in the nonprofit world, and as a writer and (dare I say) journalist over the past 34 years. But even in my short five years of being a member of the AU adjuncts union, it is obvious that unionizing alone means nothing if the local reps, the union members, and the university administration only sees you as a bunch of disorganized eggheads. Especially ones too stupid to realize they are drowning in shit and muck, too elitist, racist, and sexist to see their privilege means nothing in the context of being sausage in a meat grinder — we aren’t even cogs too expensive to keep replacing.
I joined the AU adjuncts union five years ago. Aside from some occasional paperwork about dues or an announcement here or there, I heard nothing from my union reps for the first three years. It wasn’t until mid-fall 2021 that I received an email from them saying they had reached a donnybrook in their negotiations for the next union contract. Administrators had offered us a $25 raise over the next two years. That fucking figures, I thought after reading the desperate email.
I did not hear anything about the negotiations again until a New York-based union negotiator reached out to members at the end of January 2022. I received an email and then a phone call from Larry. He encouraged me to get more involved in the next round of negotiations, and encouraged me to get more union members to show up for these meetings. When I hedged because of my schedule and because of feeling a bit burned out, he blurted, “Wait until you’re my age!” with a chuckle. Larry almost lost me as a participant right then and there. I had just turned 52, with a kid about to go to college, years of student loan payments left, and had hit enough pandemic walls to leave me teetering on depression. And yet for the umpteenth time, a white guy who really wasn’t that much older than me telling me what my experiences are and what my energies are? If he had been sitting in front of me at that moment, I might’ve throttled him.
Instead, I allowed my better self to emerge. If I couldn’t find another teaching gig aside from AU or my even more exploitative job at University of Maryland Global Campus, the least I could do is fight together with my contingent faculty colleagues for better pay. I had already been working on my piece for Times Higher Education on contingent faculty serving as cannon fodder in US higher education institutions by the time I heard from Larry and the union. So I went for it, added a couple of AU-specific issues to the piece, and joined in on a series of meetings over the next four months.
Except for the first two meetings, my experiences with my union members was a sorry-ass waste of time. The first meeting of getting to know folks was when I learned the terrible state of the union (pun intended). Three union reps had locked us into our expired 2019-21 contract indefinitely, without even taking a vote. The power to strike or walk out, they had given away. Until we agreed on a new deal, we were stuck with our shitty contract. And AU’s administrators and union-busting lawyer knew it, too. I saw their smirks at our first negotiation meeting, and I did my level best to turn those smirks upside down. I drew from the best strikers I knew in my youth, the United Steelworkers folk I got to know while going to school in Pittsburgh, and the UAW from the days when being part of a union was something to be truly proud of. I acted like the poor-ass blue-collar workers I had worked with when I was a teenager.
AU’s union-busting team wasn’t happy, and neither were some of my colleagues, who called for “decorum” and believed there was no place for “swear words.” “They do not care about our suffering. They do not give a shit about us,” is what I said in response. This second meeting would in fact be the most I would say during seven or eight meetings in February, March, April, and May. AU had us over a barrel of shit, with barely any oxygen to breath.
Listening to my colleague attempt to appeal to administrators and lawyers with math, logic, reason, personal stories, and morality was disgusting. They rarely showed outrage. They often showed incredulity when they realized the university didn’t see us as important, as highly-trained, PhDed faculty. Whenever I did speak, this was what I harped on. “The sooner we see ourselves as working-class people with PhDs, and not colleagues working together at a university, the sooner we might get somewhere,” I said more than once.
The dynamics within our union beyond this inability of so many to unshed their educational privilege got on my last damn nerves. So did the thick veil of white-maleness in our conversations. People with zero experiences with unionists and unfamiliar with the history of unions in the US talking about what to do reminded me of many Family Feud episodes. That was when the loudest voices would groupthink a terrible answer after two strikes, then yell to each other “Good answer! Good answer!” Only to get that big third strike, yielding all advantage to the other side. The four or six white guys who dominated the conversations on next steps were so inept that I thought the union would fall apart by the end of 2022.
Things did work out, mostly because others outside our band of bloviating educated fools did the work. Larry was also the union negotiator for Howard University’s contingent faculty (adjunct and term teaching faculty), who had sought a better deal from Howard’s administrators for three years. They at least had the backbone to allow their contract to expire so they could preserve their rights to walk out and strike. And with the support of Howard’s students, they just about did. That was until Howard suddenly found the money to push adjunct salaries up toward $6,000 per class that March, retroactive to Fall 2021.
Then AU’s unionized staff went on strike in August 2022, at the beginning of the fall semester. Like university staff all over the DMV, and like contingent faculty, they suffered from the overwork of the pandemic and the high inflation that came with it. Then came the support of the Class of 2026, who walked out on AU’s president during her opening speech. Larry got the staff to add as part of their settlement the stipulation that AU would have to provide a new contract for adjuncts and graduate students consistent with market conditions — which Howard’s victory in March helped set. The union signed off at the end of August.
By then, I had started my visiting professorship at Loyola University Maryland. I was and remain part of AU, and still am a union member. But as much as I believe in unions, I don’t believe that unionization alone will ever tame capitalism and the host of other -isms it helps foster, as evidenced by my own experiences with a union full of broke-ass white people with advanced degrees.
I heard through the grapevine about criticisms of a talk I pre-taped for the Organization of American History conference in Los Angeles in late-March. I didn’t provide any solutions to the myriad of problems higher education faculty face today. That was a deliberate choice on my part. First of all, asking any individual, especially one Black or of color, to solve institutional-level problems in the US is a burden and an insult. Second, if unions are your main way to solve these problems, good luck. The white maleness, ageism, sexism, and layers of elitism I observed and experienced tells me unions are the tip of an ice shelf of problems, ones that don’t go away just because my paycheck is bigger. I said what I said back in March. These institutions need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. Karl Marx-believers alone cannot save us.