Student Unionism and Sustaining Student Power

The progressive American student movement has proved itself one of our country's most powerful political forces over the last seventy years. Although now forgotten by most historians, the first mass student strikes for free speech were launched in the 1930s. New Left activists revived the free speech movement in the early 1960s. By the end of that decade, students had helped advance desegregation, forced LBJ out of a reelection bid, and regained the power to shut down America's universities with sit-ins and strikes.

Today, American students are beginning to wield their power again, shutting down the 1999 WTO meeting, forcing private prison companies off campus, winning campus living wage policies, and making their schools "sweat-free." However, as in the sixties, the student movement is having to rebuild itself from scratch. Each time the movement realizes its power, it fails to sustain it.

Consequently, corporate America and other outside forces have diluted curriculum, pushed tuition hikes, and kept American higher education largely inaccessible to poor people and people of color. In recent years, we have even seen conservatives begin to roll back what token affirmative action programs exist in higher education. These problems have advanced in large part because students and faculty have been disempowered in university decision making.

The student movement need not continue this way. The American student movement can sustain itself this time around with a new brand of student unionism that borrows the best aspects of the labor movement, past American student movements, and foreign student movements. Such unionism could open U.S. universities to the disenfranchised and make student power and campus democracy realities.

Creating Sustainable Power in a Student Union Movement

A national student organization that could form the basis for a union already exists in America: the United States Student Association (USSA). Its leaders are diverse, radical, and militant. It boasts nearly 2 million members (though many are inactive or even unaware of their membership). Moreover, students owe USSA much unpaid thanks for its victories in enhancing access to higher education and preserving affirmative action.

Founded in 1946, USSA is a national federation of student governments. Student governments affiliate by an affirmative referendum vote at public universities in which students vote to pay a portion of their student fees as membership dues to USSA. Student government executive boards can also vote to affiliate with USSA and pay membership dues for the school as a whole based on size of the student body population.

USSA differs in many significant ways from labor unions. Most notably, USSA lacks any form of collective bargaining with universities. Thus it allocates membership and affiliate dues to lobbying for legislation for student rights as well as better and more accessible higher education. USSA also uses the dues to win new affiliates and mobilize students to advance their interests locally and nationally. However, USSA and other student activists have not yet succeeded in fundamentally changing how universities make decisions. This change could yet be made by USSA in partnership with other unions of academic workers and the grassroots base of United Students against Sweatshops (USAS).

Unions Rising at New York University

In 2001, our USAS affiliate at NYU focused much of its energy on forcing NYU to recognize and bargain with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee, or GSOC-UAW. In the fall, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) recognized NYU's graduate student employee union, the first recognized grad union at a private university. The NLRB then instructed NYU to bargain with the union. NYU, being a corporate-controlled university, opted instead to break the law and refused to negotiate with GSOC.

Anticipating the NLRB decision, our USAS affiliate started working with GSOC in the fall to mobilize undergrads to fight NYU's antiunion campaign. We prioritized this campaign for four main reasons, reasons I hope everyone will consider who attends a school with a student employee unionization drive:

1. Grad unionization was and is vital to the quality of our education. Our...