“Academic Workers for a Democratic Union” (AWDU) have already written a “rebuttal” to my previous diary, but characteristically resort to more name-calling and mischaracterizations. My assertions still stand: they’ve presided over a precipitous decline in participation in the union, they made major concessions for the first time in UAW 2865 (http://www.uaw2865.org/) history, they did not tell members they made these concessions, and they exaggerated/lied about what they did (not) accomplish.
AWDU’s straw-person tactics are on full display as they apply false labels to their targets: “bureaucratic former leaders,” “business unionism,” “top-down,” “essentially conservative,” etc. Meanwhile their self-attributions are glowing: “participatory,” “democratic,” “social justice unionism,” etc. But real social justice unionism demands results and accountability. So, no—they cannot claim to be “participatory and democratic” if only 44% of the workers can even vote on internal union decisions, and a much smaller percentage participate in any significant way. No—they cannot claim to have won victories for “social justice” by experimenting with peoples’ lives, agreeing to disempowering concessions, and trying to conceal their losses while taking undue credit for the actual victories.
Let’s walk through the examples of their intellectual dishonesty.
AWDU Claim: “this propaganda piece provides an opportunity to explore the very substantial differences between the business unionism of the former leadership of our union, and the efforts on the part of Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU) to develop a more participatory and democratic form of social justice unionism.”
Fact: AWDU can falsely label me however they want but I am proud of my record as a social justice scholar and union activist. I am Jason Struna—a graduate student in sociology at UC Riverside. As a member of UAW 2865 I have worked inside and outside the university with other rank-and-file members, and other grassroots organizations and unions to fight for social justice. There are many of us who have decided that AWDU’s legacy is damaging and that we will speak up when members of AWDU seek to achieve notoriety by making dishonest claims about its work. We are graduate student workers in the social sciences, humanities, natural sciences, math, engineering, and other disciplines who engage in collective action, and understand that the outcomes of our campaigns bear heavily on other organizations. We realize that our collective destinies are linked in our various struggles on the ground. Our objective is to include more voices and members, and in so doing, expand the ranks of our union and other partners in solidarity.
AWDU Claim: “This active participation contrasts with the participation in previous contract campaigns within our union, which often was limited to signing off on an agenda set by a small minority of the bargaining team, generally in the form of a petition.”
Fact: AWDU falsely denigrates thousands of former rank-and-file members who voted (not “signed off”) on agendas, and who not only signed petitions but took direct action and struck to win justice. AWDU offers no evidence to refute the well-established fact that they presided over a contract campaign with historically low participation.
AWDU Claim: “…at the Joint Council meeting in July 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. The AWDU members of the bargaining team advocated bargaining most actively during the school year when members could participate and make this into a public struggle for significant gains. By contrast, Struna made a presentation arguing that we should avoid any extensive campaign as it would lead to losses and instead, we should bargain intensively through the summer.”
Fact: My colleagues and I on the bargaining committee argued at the July 13, 2013 Joint Council meeting and throughout the bargaining process that AWDU’s strategy of intentionally delaying bargaining would result in a worse contract. Instead, we argued for building a REAL strike threat (one in which a majority of student workers would participate) in October 2013 to take advantage of the leverage created by contract expiration and the starting school year to maximize the disruptive impact of the strike. History has proven us correct on that account—waiting until Spring to have a wispy strike with historically-low participation got us a concessionary contract for the first time in our union’s history. AWDU is not explaining itself on this matter. Why did they agree to the first concessions ever? And why are they evading addressing that failure under their leadership?
AWDU Claim: “In the five year period covered by our most recent contract - AWDU's first campaign - we won wage increases that accrue up to 17% and are higher than any other five year period in the history of the union. The raises over these five years are roughly equivalent to those of the previous 7-year period. If AWDU-aligned bargaining team representatives engaged in a “tactical experiment”, it was clearly successful.”
Fact: State funding for UC increased 20% in 2013-14 and our wages increased 0% (as opposed to the previous 7-year period when State funding for UC decreased by 7% but wages increased by 17%). AWDU cost the average TA $950 in lost wages (and TAs with children $900 in additional child care subsidies) in a year of financial plenty. Many of our members who have left will never see that money. AWDU is the first UAW 2865 bargaining team to “win” a salary and benefits freeze during a massive influx of state funding. AWDU is also the only UAW 2865 bargaining committee to go past expiration of the previous contract without winning retroactive pay and benefits. AWDU didn’t disclose that in their ratification documents. Anywhere.
AWDU Claim: “Simply put, without fighting through the spring we would never have won the breakthrough on the rights for undocumented student-workers, the gender neutral bathrooms or the class size.”
Fact: Again, AWDU is trying to paint me as a “conservative” despite my clear assertion that the victories on access to all-gender bathrooms and lactation services were important victories. My critique is that AWDU exaggerates the degree to which they deserve full credit for policies that coincided with ongoing legal and UC initiatives. They did this because they had to justify their “tactical experiment.” If you don’t believe me, take it from an AWDU member who wrote to excoriate his own caucus on this same point in an email May 16, 2014: “We demanded equality for transgender workers, in particular all-gender bathrooms. The management's response was that they are with us on this, but have already begun such system-wide changes by other means. There didn't seem to be any disagreement on substance. Yet our representatives continued to try to press the issue on technical points. It was agonizingly redundant. To me it was clear that you wanted to use the bargaining table to strongly express your political advocacy for some amount of time, regardless of whether it had any meaningful bearing on end-results or even amounted to a substantial protest. It's the struggle that matters, you see, for its own sake.” And as I said in my original diary, “A competent leadership group would have won these provisions without making the above concessions.”
AWDU also has done nothing to refute my claim that the win on undocumented workers was opportunistic. A key AWDU leader and current member of the UAW 2865 Executive Board wrote in an email to her colleagues on March 18, 2014 that AWDU needed to ready the undocumented community for the union to concede this demand: “one other thing that i'd like to think about with you all is how to deal with the undocumented student-worker issue. i think we need to start talking with our membership about what is and isn't possible and what kinds of organizing we should start doing (perhaps outside of the context of bargaining?), if folks are amenable. i don't want people to feel thrown under the bus, so i think it's important to start emphasizing now management's utter intransigence on this issue.” Thankfully, undocumented students and their allies on the UAW 2865 bargaining committee stopped this effort to throw undocumented students “under the bus,” and won one of the truly historic victories in the contract—no thanks to AWDU.
AWDU Claim: “Before AWDU, the union was bureaucratically controlled by a handful of leaders close to the UAW International.”
Fact: Where’s the evidence? Rank-and-file, progressive student leaders have always been active at UAW 2865. None of us would be here today in this organization if UAW International wasn’t open and inclusive enough to help us organize (not to mention 7,000 student workers at CSU, 4500 at UW, thousands more at NYU, UMass, UConn, over 7,000 postdocs at UC and UMass, and thousands of adjuncts at NYU and The New School). We are stronger in coalitions than we are alone. That’s the point of union building!
AWDU Claim: “This is probably the one piece of Struna’s article that has some, albeit not much, legitimate critique. Membership under AWDU has declined somewhat…but… AWDU actively promoted popular participation in the bargaining process in this contract campaign. Over 600 members attended bargaining sessions throughout the year, as bargaining was held on every campus across the state. AWDU considers participation as the active contribution of members in creating agendas and struggling together, rather than merely signing up the membership cards and accepting an agenda already created by the bureaucratic leadership.”
Fact: At least AWDU admits that this is true, if begrudgingly. However, predictably AWDU claims that signing membership cards is de minimis. I have never disputed that—I am only claiming that strong majority membership is a precondition of a democratic union. I threw out some significant stats about membership and other forms of participation to which AWDU does do not respond. And, good for AWDU that you turned out 600 (5% of 12,000 ASEs) to bargaining, but it wasn’t enough to avoid having to take the first concessionary contract in our union’s history.
AWDU Claim: “AWDU explained the duration of the contract and the demands we did not win, including on retroactive pay.”
Fact: AWDU never mentioned the $1850 in pay and benefits freeze in the contract summary. AWDU never mentioned giving up the opportunity to bargain for the longest period of time in our local’s history in the contract summary. AWDU never mentioned giving up having an effective strike threat at contract expiration in the contract summary.
AWDU Claim: “The new date in no way weakens our right to strike. We cannot strike until the contract expires, but there is no reason to think we would want to strike immediately after it expires.”
Fact: This is the kind of thinking that led to the first concessionary contract in UAW 2865 history—meh, just give up the leverage afforded by threatening to strike when we have peak power in the academic year, at contract expiration, “no problem” (AWDU actually said this in an email to UAW 2865 membership in late September 2013 as our contract was expiring.) Make no mistake: it is a huge step backward to have the contract expire in the middle of summer when few are working; we have very little strike threat. Why does AWDU think this was such a high priority win for President Napolitano, and why did AWDU succumb to Napolitano’s demand?
AWDU Claim: “The recent class size victory makes class size a topic for bi-annual labor management meetings and provides the union with a legal basis for requesting information on current and previous class size data. Such meetings provide the important focus of mobilizations to demand smaller section sizes. Furthermore, it is simply untrue that the union won any contractual advances in class size previous to this contract.”
Fact: I’d like AWDU to answer these questions: where does the new contract guarantee that class size will be addressed at all at the new labor-management meetings (hint: it doesn’t)? Even if UC agrees to discuss class size at meetings under the new language, how is that different than the already-existing meetings (hint: it’s not…we already had this right)? How does the new contract give us any more of a legal basis to request information about class size (hint: It doesn’t, the law already gave us the right to make these requests)? Even if AWDU won a new right to discuss class size, is there any guarantee that UC will agree to, or even bargain over our demand to improve TA-student ratios (hint: nope)? Finally, previous bargaining committees did successfully bargain over REAL gains in fighting increasing class size in the appointment Notification, Posting, and Workload articles. Look for yourself if you’re not sure who to believe.
AWDU Claim: “And while a shorter contract can be preferable, a longer duration is not a concession that involves erosion of substantive workplace rights, protections, wages or benefits in any way. Finally, because the contract stipulates regular labor-management meetings on class size, undocumented students’ rights and all-gender bathrooms, it provides a constant opportunity to mobilize for these demands -- a situation that many unions call “continuous bargaining.”
Fact: Labor-management meetings are not bargaining. Bargaining means UC must bargain in good faith to impasse with the union (meaning we have the leverage of striking). Labor-management meetings mean UC only has to listen to us, not bargain in good faith, and we do not have the right to strike because the contract is still in effect. AWDU may think there were “substantial” enough economic gains to give up future workers’ right to bargain, but they did give things up and they did not make this trade-off clear to the members during ratification.
AWDU Claim: “The bargaining team’s agreement to recommend ratification of the contract is standard (both throughout the labor movement and for our local)”
Fact: Our union has never agreed to “unconditionally recommend ratification” of the contract. And, if this is common practice more broadly in the labor movement (I don’t know if it is), one would think that the labor-movement-reform crusaders at AWDU would oppose that.
AWDU Claim: “Katy never claimed that AWDU endorsed prop 30 -- she said that we were instrumental in restoring state funding of higher education through a ballot initiative.”
Fact: Katy Fox-Hodess wrote: “Through a ballot initiative [prop 30], we [AWDU] also partially restored state funding of higher education”. Thus, prominent AWDU leader Katy Fox-Hodess did write that AWDU restored state funding through Prop 30. But it’s a lie: AWDU did not support Prop 30. Plain and simple.
Social justice unionists can indeed see differences on display in this debate. AWDU uses false labels to denigrate their opponents and to hide their tactical and strategic ineffectiveness at winning justice. We look for actual evidence in deciding whose model works. Social justice unionism is vitally necessary for the labor movement—it just is not to be found in AWDU.