Sinister move..

A university’s sinister move is unfortunately part of a familiar story

Opinion by Heather Ann Thompson

Here we are again.

It’s not 1913 and 1914, when John D. Rockefeller worked to ensure that all of employees daring to ask for better wages and safe working conditions in the coal mines of Ludlow, Colorado were evicted and ultimately looked on as scores of them, including 11 children and two women, were killed by private guards and the National Guard.

Nor is it 1892, when Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie called in Pinkerton guards to rough up those striking families at a major steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania – or 1937, when Henry Ford’s security force used violence to try to stop autoworkers from gaining basic rights on their jobs.

It’s 2023, but the sense that anything goes when it comes to a company’s desire to break a union has not been relegated to history. Union membership is in long-term decline, something a majority of Americans say is bad both for the US and its working people, according to the Pew Research Center.

The harms of the past are echoing loudly in Temple University’s recent decision to undercut the efforts of its graduate students to secure better wages and health care by suddenly demanding full payment for their tuition and then threatening that not paying would result in them being barred from taking classes to complete their degrees.

Graduate students at Temple have been on strike since January 31. In response, the university stopped paying the strikers, deactivated their health care accounts and on February 8, notified them that they no longer were “entitled to tuition remission,” and had until March 9 to pay.

This may seem like a matter of concern only to academics, albeit one that could prevent these striking students from completing their education and keeping a roof over their head. This latest move by Temple University, however, has much wider implications. It is a most serious anti-labor action by a major American employer, and it sends an ominous signal to other employers everywhere.

It’s also serves as a most unsettling reminder that not remembering, or worse, never knowing, our nation’s labor history has had dire costs for ordinary people who go to work each day in this country.

From New York to California and Nashville to North Dakota, so many today just assume that some of the best aspects of being employed are a given and sacrosanct. From the ability to get health care for one’s family when getting hired, to the right to go home from work after an eight-hour shift or be paid overtime, to the right to refuse to work with dangerous or faulty equipment, to the right to stay home when ill, this is what it means to work a job in America. And yet, not only are those very same “rights” hard, and only relatively, won, but while too few working people have been paying attention, a most ugly attempt to erode them has been gaining momentum.

It hasn’t always been the case that those who worked for a living could count on the right to safe workplaces or could enjoy employer-provided health care. And it has only been since 1938, and thanks in this case also to the efforts of the labor movement despite brutal employer opposition, that Americans could imagine having a minimum wage and any serious limitation on child labor.

Today, all of this is in jeopardy. Ordinary people who go to work each day at Amazon, Starbucks and Uber, have endured brutal, often utterly illegal, and ultimately successful efforts on the part of those companies to prevent them from availing themselves of their right even to join a union, let alone work collectively secure better wage, benefits, and working conditions. All who work meanwhile also suffered a crushing setback to their right to decent pay and safe workplaces thanks to the recent Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. AFSCME.

In fact, many companies across the nation have been slowly, quietly and most determinedly chipping away at the very organizations and laws that have allowed people to pay their rents and feed their families. To increase their own profit margins, a number of businesses today even seek to take us back to the days when child labor was perfectly legal.

To be sure, unions themselves are hardly blind to this insidious effort to take this country back to the Gilded Age – and have been doing their level best to combat it on behalf of all who do or will have a job in this country. But the American labor movement and the ordinary working people they represent face a most uphill, battle against not one, but two, formidable enemies.

First, they face employers that are highly mobilized and unified in their commitment to sacrificing the rights of ordinary people to make higher profits. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) recently broke down how much money is being spent today on whittling away the wages and benefits of their employees—either by preventing them from unionizing or by seeking to break the unions their employees have already voted for. According to journalist Tyler Walicek, even with the EPI’s caveats about what spending they couldn’t fully account for, it concluded that “total spending on the union-busting industry amounts to at least $340 million a year.”

But today’s labor movement is also being hampered by something perhaps even more troubling: our collective amnesia about this nation’s long history of, and deep commitments to, economic inequality and injustice. We have failed to train our nation’s next generation of policymakers and thought leaders about this brutal past. We have also failed to insist that our news programs and popular media – the information consumed daily by those who work to pay for their housing, food and utilities with ever-greater difficulty – shine a clear and bright light on the needs of all ordinary people.

Corporations may say that unions will make them less flexible or competitive in the marketplace, but the bottom line is that corporations are the ones who benefit when Americans remain unaware of this nation’s ugly history of exploiting people who must work for a wage without collective bargaining. Those who command most of America’s wealth are likely grateful that few have ever stopped to consider why they have the most basic rights they do enjoy when they go to work in the morning.

This is the context for this most recent strike called in the city of Philadelphia by graduate students employed to teach, advise and grade the papers of undergraduates at Temple University, a public school. Both private and public universities have seen increases in recent decades in union organizing – at the same time as those institutions have become more and more reliant on the labor of teaching assistants and adjuncts. Universities that have opposed unionization have argued that treating graduate students as workers and allowing them to collectively bargain somehow devalues the specialized nature of their training and the individual mentorship they receive from faculty.

But the truth is that while the graduate student unionization movement isn’t new, the teaching and grading they do is labor, period – and no university has yet made the decision to go right for the jugular of its employee union in quite the sinister the way that Temple University just has.

Why sinister? Consider the implications of this move just for Temple and in the city of Philadelphia, where it is located. Temple’s striking graduate students are demanding higher wages because they say their current wages don’t allow them to make ends meet. Now, those same students, many of whom currently cannot even put their own children on their health care plan as dependents, must pay many thousands of dollars in tuition because they dared to take this collective stand. Those students who continue to strike now face the possibility of having to forego the degree they have already put time toward earning, to seek another non-union and thus low wage jobs, or even to land fully on public assistance.

According to Temple, state law stops the public school from paying those who refuse to work. In a recent statement, the school said, “Because striking workers are not entitled to tuition remission, they have been notified of their obligation to make arrangements to pay their tuition, consistent with how the university treats other students who have unpaid tuition obligations.”

Imagine this sort of new no-holds-barred union-busting strategy being adopted in similar forms at other universities, other companies, in other major American cities with their own large populations of already struggling citizens.

This how the rich get richer and poor get poorer in America. And it is a most familiar story, it is a story as old as the nation itself, and it is a story that we can’t afford not to know.

Do say, the many hundreds of graduate students currently negotiating with the University of Michigan, or the more than 30,000 custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, special education assistants and other support staff who are voting whether to strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District, have to fear a similarly draconian response from these employers? Perhaps.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if all of us resolve to reckon not just with this nation’s long history of letting businesses work their employees for the least pay and the longest hours, but also to take inspiration from the equally long and determined history of ordinary people’s efforts to achieve and then to defend the labor movement’s most basic gains over the last two centuries.

Then and only then will this nation fully grasp, and all fully benefit from, the fundamental truth of the historic labor saying: “An injury to one, is an injury to all.”