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Open-Source Unionism: New Workers, New Strategies
New patterns of academic employment challenge traditional notions of the academic worker. Can new technologies help organize today's dispersed, mobile faculty?
By Julie M. Schmid
In "Open-Source Unionism: Beyond Exclusive Collective Bargaining," published in fall 2002 in the journal Working USA, labor scholars Richard B. Freeman and Joel Rogers use the term "open-source unionism" to describe a form of unionization that uses Web technology to organize in hard-to-unionize workplaces. Rather than depend on the traditional means of union organizing—leafleting at the plant gate, holding organizing meetings in the break room, or "house visiting" workers after hours, for example—open-source union organizing relies on "cybertools" such as Listservs, chat rooms, and Web sites. These tools help bring together people who, as a result of the new economy, are employed at separate locations, often as temporary or contract workers, and lack a common work experience. Like the open-source software movement—in which communities of programmers linked through the Internet share and improve upon software code—open-source unionism embraces the utopian, collaborative ethos of the Internet revolution. Ideas and calls-to-action are circulated over the Web, shared ideologies are developed through e-mail exchanges, and, through this process, a nascent worker consciousness is forged.
The current state of the U.S. labor movement makes open-source unionism—with its imagined cyber-community and its rather fuzzy approach to union membership—appealing. Traditional unionism depends on the physical work site as the locus for developing workplace solidarity—one feels an affinity with co-workers because one sees them day in and day out on the shop floor. Federal and state labor law replicates this emphasis on the geographical workplace—the presence of a common work site is one of the benchmarks labor boards use when asked to rule in disputes over the definition of bargaining units. Traditional union campaigns culminate in a work-site recognition election under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) or commensurate state labor law, the establishment of a union local, and the negotiation of a collective bargaining agreement that covers all the workers included in the work-site-defined community of interest. (The NLRA is the federal law that covers labor relations at private entities; it is administered by the National Labor Relations Board. Public employees—those who work for state, county, or municipal governments—can unionize under state labor laws where such laws exist. Several states do not have laws permitting public employees to unionize.)
Membership is similarly place bound in majority-status unions—those recognized as the sole collective bargaining agent, by way of a card campaign or an election, by the majority of workers. A worker becomes a member in a union by joining her union local; active membership is defined by attending meetings at the union hall or walking the picket line during a strike or similar job action. Unbundling, in which employers break up jobs into discrete duties, and outsourcing, in which they hire off-site workers to perform the duties, have displaced many people. These outsourced workers no longer share a geographical workplace, and many change jobs throughout their career. Without a shared workplace and day-to-day interaction with co-workers, it is difficult to build a sense of a shared struggle and a shared labor consciousness.
Professional Appeal
Open-source unionism addresses the disintegration of the work-force by redefining union membership and replacing the geographical work site with the Web site as the locus of community and consciousness building among workers. Open-source unionism does not focus on work-site elections, the establishment of union locals, or the negotiation of collective bargaining agreements. Nor does it define membership as signing a dues check-off card, attending membership meetings, or walking the picket line. Instead, workers and union organizers test and develop a shared set of values through Listservs or chat room discussions. Union membership becomes more fluid—it might include an affiliation similar to full membership in a traditional union, but signing up for a Listserv is also defined as a kind of membership. Sociologist Arthur Shostak and management professor Daniel Mitchell describe a similar organizing model in their 1999 book, Cyberunion: Empowering Labor Through Computer Technology, and in The Cyberunion Handbook: Transforming Labor Through Computer Technology, the volume they edited in 2002.
As a new organizing strategy, open-source unionism promises to provide an inroad into organizing those who identify as professionals rather than as workers and who, because of their positions as independent contractors or temporary workers, tend to have a hypertrophied sense of individual merit—"mind workers" such as computer software engineers, for example, or technical writers. In "Open-Source Unionism: Beyond Exclusive Collective Bargaining," Freeman and Rogers review examples of open-source union projects (mostly in the United States, but also in the United Kingdom and Australia). They are most interested in projects that target hard-to-organize white-collar workers—for example, WAGE (Working at General Electric); the National Writers Union; WashTech, a craft union affiliated with Communications Workers of America that represents workers in the high-tech sector in Washington state; and the inspirational Alliance@IBM campaign, which used the Internet to organize employees to write letters protesting IBM's changes to retirement benefits and travel reimbursements.
The writerly nature of these campaigns, their reliance on the Web as an organizing tool, and the low level of active commitment required among participants suggest that this organizing strategy is tailor-made for the academic workforce. Most higher education unions already use the Web with varying degrees of success, and organizations such as the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) and the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) have embraced the strategies and techniques enumerated in Freeman and Rogers's article.
I believe, however, that the academic labor movement needs to do better—especially in developing strategies to organize faculty at private institutions as well as contingent faculty and graduate employees (the academic equivalents of the outsourced high-tech worker). I don't want to push the comparison of the IBM computer programmers and college faculty too far, but the higher education labor movement would do well to look more closely at some of these open-source union campaigns and apply the lessons learned to our efforts across all sectors of the academic workforce.
In the next few pages, I summarize the efforts of organizations such as the CGEU and COCAL to extend workplace protections to people on the margins of the profession (graduate employees and contingent faculty). I then discuss how academic unionists might transform the academic labor movement by further deploying the strategies of open-source unionism to build worker consciousness among academics of all ranks.
Cyber Union Hall
The most significant trend in the academic labor movement over the past decade has been the increase in unionization among graduate employees and contingent faculty. Graduate employees at twenty-three institutions nationwide are unionized, with most of that organizing taking place in the past thirteen years. In addition, union elections at Brown and Columbia Universities and the University of Pennsylvania remain unresolved pending the National Labor Relations Board's decision whether graduate assistants at the University of Pennsylvania are employees who are covered by the NLRA or whether, as the university contends, the unionization of graduate students violates the institution's academic freedom.
The success rates for contingent faculty unionization drives are even more impressive. Whereas elections among graduate employees are often hard fought and campaigns have failed on the first or even the second try, every contingent faculty organizing campaign in the last decade has ended in a successful vote. These successes suggest that something is going right.
Despite these victories, however, building strong union locals and a sense of worker consciousness among these groups continues to be difficult. Undoubtedly, their lack of job security and fear of retribution for union activism discourage many from becoming actively involved in their unions. Also at play is the marginalized position that graduate employees and contingent faculty occupy in the institutions where they teach or conduct research. Much has already been written on the substandard pay and working conditions of most contingent academic workers (see, for example, contingent faculty activist Joe Berry's essay, "In a Leftover Office in Chicago," published in 2003 in Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor). Suffice it to say that the contingent academic workforce fits the model of the outsourced white-collar intellectual worker that Rogers and Freeman describe.
The Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor and the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions function as open-source unions for these groups of academic workers. Both organizations have effectively used Web sites and Listservs to create cybercommunities that extend beyond the boundaries of the department or the campus and serve as the repository of the history of their movements. The CGEU (www.cgeu.org), for example, functions as an electronic labor council or clearinghouse for information on the graduate employee union movement. The CGEU's Listserv operates as a resource for contract language and organizing strategies and is a forum in which colleagues call on one another to take part in letter-writing campaigns, sign on to petitions, or participate in other forms of collective action.
Many of the subscribers to the CGEU's Listserv are union activists on their campuses; however, one does not have to be a union member to subscribe, and much of the information on the Web site seems geared toward increasing labor consciousness among graduate employees and encouraging unionization. Several pages on the site, for example, address such topics as union recognition campaigns and labor law, or provide contact information for graduate employees interested in unionizing.
Similarly, local COCAL sites, such as Chicago COCAL (www.chicagococal.org) or COCAL-California (www.cocalca.org), contain information on contingent faculty union drives, successful contract settlements, and calls to action for contingent faculty. Unlike the CGEU site, which is international in scope and focuses fairly narrowly on helping graduate employees engage in traditional union activities (organizing unions, negotiating con-tracts, preparing for strikes), the COCAL sites tend to function as clearinghouses for the contingent faculty in a limited geographical location—the cities of Chicago and Boston, or the state of California. And although both the Chicago COCAL and the COCAL-California sites state unionization of contingent faculty as their goal, each site contains information that is outside of the ambit of traditional majority-status unions. The Chicago site, for example, is more service oriented and includes national and local job lists and information on how to file for unemployment insurance.
Although neither the CGEU nor COCAL is a union per se, the two organizations have helped shape the contingent academic labor movement—from supporting campus unionization efforts around the country, to establishing worker consciousness among subscriber graduate employees and contingent faculty on nonunionized campuses, to reaching out to the larger academic community and the public. As such, they represent important models for transforming the union movement in higher education. Using the CGEU and COCAL—the jewels in the crown of academic union organizing—as jumping off points, I will now suggest ways to draw on the successes of open-source unionism to reinvigorate the academic labor movement.
A Modest Proposal
First, the academic labor movement must implement the Web-based techniques emphasized in Freeman and Rogers's discussion of open-source unionism to develop strategies for organizing faculty at private institutions. For these faculty—who find their ability to organize unions hampered by the 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, which effectively denied most faculty at private colleges and universities the right to unionize—the kinds of campaigns undertaken by the WAGE and Alliance@IBM employees are instructive. They show how to effect change in the workplace outside of collective bargaining, grievance processing, and other traditional union activities.
Drawing on these successful models, Listservs or Web sites should be created on which faculty from non-collective-bargaining institutions can share information on campaigns to change working conditions or protect faculty rights. Such sites can also educate faculty who are not covered by collective bargaining agreements or state or federal labor law about their legal rights and about how to build campus coalitions to address concerns such as the freezing of tenure lines or increased class sizes. Given the uncertainty of the outcome of the pending National Labor Relations Board decision at the University of Pennsylvania, developing effective post-Yeshiva organizing strategies becomes even more necessary.
We must also redouble our non-collective-bargaining organizing efforts among contingent faculty and graduate employees. Protecting tenure in the long run depends on improving the working conditions of contingent academic workers now. Much is being done to educate all sectors of the academy about the growing misuse of contingent faculty and graduate employees. However, so long as it is cost-effective for universities and colleges to freeze tenure lines and replace full-time, tenure-track positions with adjuncts and graduate employees, it will be impossible to ensure the survival of tenure.
Certainly, contingent faculty and graduate employees should be encouraged to pursue unionization where it is a viable option. But the six-year struggle for union recognition among graduate employees at the University of Illinois and the difficulty encountered by part-time faculty at Emerson College in achieving a first contract reveal that unionization often involves long, drawn-out battles that take years to resolve. It is important, then, to provide options for collective action and coalition building outside of collective bargaining.
Higher education unions could help in this effort by providing a chat room for connecting contingent and graduate employees to other members of the academic community. Such a forum would give graduate employee and contingent activists access to information about higher education organizing among contingent faculty (a function already served by the CGEU and COCAL). More important, however, it would also raise consciousness among the full-time faculty about the plight of their graduate employee and contingent colleagues, put contingent faculty and graduate employees in contact with full-time faculty activists willing to lend support, and build solidarity across the ranks.
The academic labor movement would also benefit from creation of a Listserv or umbrella group for faculty activists from colleges or universities at which union drives have failed. After failed union drives, the local organizing committee tends to disband completely or go dormant, and communication between the parent union and the faculty activists from the campaign often stops. This is troubling for several reasons. First, it further entrenches the view that the only way for faculty to empower themselves and fight for change is through a successful unionization campaign. Second, it demoralizes good activists and makes it more difficult for the parent organization to maintain contact with faculty leaders and explore the possibility of resurrecting the union drive later on.
A Listserv dedicated to this group of faculty activists would give them an opportunity to communicate with other faculty who have been through failed campaigns, to share with one another ideas for collective action outside of collective bargaining, and to trade ideas for how to move ahead with future union campaigns. In short, it would provide a connection to the academic labor movement for faculty who have been unable to establish a union on campus. It would also open communication between these potential union activists and the parent union and allow the union to learn firsthand about the conditions on the campus and the potential for future campaigns.
None of these suggestions represents a radical departure from practices currently in place in the academy. None of them are beyond the grasp of the academic labor movement. Academic workers represent the fastest-growing sector of unionized workers in the United States at a time when the overall unionized workforce continues to shrink. This growth in unionization—along with the success of recent conferences and events organized around contingent faculty issues and the inclusion of academic labor panels at major disciplinary conferences—suggests that much of what is being done is on some level successful. However, the ongoing erosion of tenure, the shrinking of state funding to higher education, the increasingly irrational academic job system, and the unbundling and deskilling of the profession indicate that much remains to be done. How—and whether—the profession weathers the storm depends on its ability to work aggressively to find new organizing models that improve the working conditions of all academic workers—even those outside of traditional faculty positions or the protection of state or federal labor law—and build worker consciousness and workplace solidarity across all academic ranks. Open-source unionism is one such model.
Julie Schmid is a staff member in the AAUP's Department of Organizing and Services and co-editor with Deborah Herman of Cogs in the Classroom Factory: The Changing Identity of Academic Labor, published in 2003.
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