10 years

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 2005-2006 GSOC strike's first day. That strike is still the longest in the history of the north american academic labor movement (except for the 1999 student strike at UNAM.)  As any perusal of this blog suggests, the strike was a big part of my life for the better part of seven months.  I joined GSOC just over two months before the strike began, organized in the buildup to it, walked the picket line almost every day, organized throughout the strike, and kept organizing for years after it ended,  In the years after the strike ended, the organizing climate for graduate employees at private universities was a difficult one.  University administrations and the labor movement both rightly saw the NYU strike as a fulcrum.  Ten years ago, John Sexton said that GSOC was a "virus", that it could either die a quick death or a slow death.  Today there is a union contract at NYU.  Organizing drives are once again underway at Cornell and Columbia, with new campaigns at Harvard and the New School, alongside new unions or organizing campaigns at the University of Connecticut and the University of Missouri. A quarter-century into its own struggle, GESO is revitalized and holding enormous and energetic demonstrations.

While in many ways the strike was a defeat for the union, it was a testament to the tenacity and dedication of GSOC's membership and its organizers that the union emerged from the strike battered but also infused with new understandings of what it meant to organize and how to do it. The tragedy of the strike was the failure of solidarity between union members, but the lessons of the strike were altogether different, less about the shamelessness of faculty unionbusting - things the previous decade and a half had long since made clear - than about how to build power, how to talk to each other, how to fight. The failure of the years after the strike was the failure of the international union to sustain organizing which took into account the lessons we learned during the strike, a failure I could get into here in great detail but won't, both because I think those lessons were never entirely forgotten, at least by members, and because I still think that the experience of the strike, and the many sacrifices that strikers made (and I don't include myself in this, because I was on fellowship, and because the worst things that happened to me during the strike were getting yelled out of a bar by another first year in my department and having some people in my department who had returned to work write mean anonymous comments on this blog) played an important, if indirect role in the making the present moment possible. So I think it's good to think, at this juncture, with everything else that is happening today in Columbia, Missouri, in New Haven, in Madison, everywhere else, about what the strike got right and what we got wrong and what that experience might mean for the struggles which are now taking place at NYU and everywhere else.

Edit:  I wrote and edited and posted this several hours before Tim Wolfe announced his resignation.  Five years ago I wrote this post on the meaning of november ninth and november tenth in the history of university labor insurgencies.  It's amazing that this victory by the students at Mizzou falls on the same date that our strike began.  I can only hope that the next few months build on these insurgencies to create new anniversaries for us to celebrate in the years ahead.

2nd edit.  Also, I forgot to mention U Chicago's GSU, who are amazing.  Well, I didn't so much forget as intentionally steer clear of mentioning them because I'm out of the loop and wasn't sure what the status of their campaign is.  Thankfully, they're still going strong, and certainly deserve a great deal of credit for helping the movement to organize grad employees at private universities survive and grow over the last eight (?) years.