United States
In 1996 a National Labor Relations Board declared that graduate student teaching assistants at Yale University are, in fact, employees of the Yale Corporation not just professional "apprentices" as Yale had claimed.
Yale had waged an assault on its own students, coinciding with a campaign to outsource and eliminate the jobs of unionised food service workers on campus. In both fights the University displayed unwavering commitment to its corporate mission: No less than the rest of corporate America, Yale wants an institution that is a lean, mean profitable machine.
Since the 1960s, student activism -taking different shapes at different moments - has incorporated an analysis of the university's relationship to the imperatives of global capital. In the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of 1964, the most elementary right to collect money in support of the civil rights movement collided head on with the "mission" conceived by University of California President Clark Kerr.
That mission (a far-sighted one, in its own reactionary way) was to directly serve the needs of corporate capital through a wellstructured hierarchy of educational institutions. The "multiversity" (Kerr's term) produced elite "thinkers" at the top and trained technicians at subordinate levels. All knew their place in the machine.
Subsequent struggles around the country targeted universities' boards and with military research during the Vietnam War; the bulldozing of low-income and African-American neighbourhoods for university expansion; the universities' paternalist and exploitative relations with their own cafeteria and maintenance workers; and university endowments' investments in apartheid South Africa.
The same period also saw demands to expand the culture of the university beyond the highly restrictive adulation of select. elite. Eurocentric patriarchal culture. These struggles have performed a valuable service by broadening the intellectual context—internationally and in insisting that women's voices receive a hearing and place in the "canon" and by demanding inclusion of plebeian culture. It is no surprise that these gainsalong with affirmative actionare among the first to come under assault in a period of reaction.
Today, the combined trends toward educational downsizing, the bleak choice that students confront-total surrender of body and soul to the demands of the corporate world, or a jobless future-and the declining activism of the social movements of the 1970s and '80s, are pushing many toward the labour movement. This represents both the natural channel for students' idealistic aspirations, and a means of self-defence. The Academy as battlefield
The Yale Teaching Assistants' bitter struggle for recognition of their association marked a turning point. Similar battles are underway across the country.
Of course, institutions occupy different niches in the educational hierarchy. The graduate students at Yale and other elite institutions, while exploited as Teaching Assistants, retain a preferred status as apprentices and future tenured faculty. Those from lesserprestige universities are more likely to become the wandering adjunct professors, paid hourly or by the semester with no benefits. Some PhD holders finish as cab drivers.
Their experiences highlight the insidious nature of the re-engineered, lean university: As funding disappears and tuition skyrockets, most students find themselves working harder and acquiring more debt toward a future which becomes less certain every day. It is a far cry from the free tuition City College of New York of the 1930s, or the California state system as recently as the
At the University of Arizona, graduate students or part-time faculty teach 87% of undergraduate classes for a fraction of what it would cost the school to hire full-time professors. At the University of Florida a full professor makes $60,000 teaching two classes for two semesters, while teaching assistants are paid $16,000 for double the
"Flexibilisation" on campus reflects the trend in the rest of the economy, where some people are working too muchmultiple part-time jobs and overtime-while others are under-employed or unemployed. Students and the New AFL-CIO
More and more graduate students are becoming active in defence of their interests as campus workers. At the same time, undergraduate students are being introduced to unions and recruited to become the "next generation" of union organisers through initiatives like Union Summer and "teach-ins with the labour movement," featuring the new Sweeney-Trumka leadership of the AFL-CIO trade union confederation. This student interest in revived labour activism will shape the future of education
Yet this new generation of activists must also rely upon another traditional component of student activism: healthy distrust of authority. A dialogue of organised labour with students and intellectuals is undoubtedly positive, but doesn't the labour leadership need a dialogue with its own membership? Why, students may ask, are they-rather
The Americas * than millions of unionised workers- -being
"teach-in with the labour
Can't the union movement recruit organisers from among its membership? Doesn't it trust them? Indeed, why do some older candidates going through the AFL-CIO's Organising Institute find themselves rejected due
"previous organising experience"? Students may also wonder how it has come about that only 14% of the work force is organised; why some workers and not others are the focus of the "new" organising drive.
Graduate student organising, service sector organising and several unions' fledgling campaigns to organise "workfare" workers are important initiatives. But why is the United Auto Workers leadership (for example so backward in trying to get the non-union parts sector, to which so much work is subcontracted, organised into the UAW? And why does the UAW endorse a two-tier wage system, where parts workers and new hires receive substandard pay?
Student/labour activists will also do well to consider the poor track record of the union movement on internal democracy. Why has Teamsters for a Democratic Union never been accepted (let alone praised) as a model for union reformers?
Quite the opposite: In the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), janitors in Los Angeles hotels (mostly Central American immigrants) waged a heroic and successful organising drive, then had their local thrown into receivership when they organised a slate that displaced the old-guard white-dominated leadership.
Nonetheless, a new generation of student activists are being drawn toward the labour movement for all the right reasons, both off and on their campuses. And many of the same principles that apply in organising around graduate students' rights as workers apply to a broad range of struggles. [ATC] * Current #70
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