Can Labor Save Higher Education as a Public Good?

Back in 2020, higher education faced multiple challenges—including student debt, administrative bloat, and the spread of contingency (also known as adjunct labor) in faculty hiring. Five years later, the challenges facing higher education are as significant but different. They include a spate of police actions on campuses, anti-DEI and anti-tenure legislation, academic freedom lawsuits, weaponization of accreditation, and political tests for everything from curriculum to top institutional leadership.

[Higher Ed Labor United] is an organizing project that seeks to bring together unionized higher education workers…under a common umbrella.

At the same time, there are also emergent opportunities—the product of intensified union organizing, encampments, more strikes, more wins, and better contracts.

Driving some of this forward movement is a new coalition, Higher Ed Labor United, better known as HELU. Both of us have participated in HELU, and here we take stock of what is working, where we are challenged, and what might come next.

A Labor Coalition Is Born

While local unions are relatively common in higher education, workers are fragmented into multiple national unions, none of which primarily focus on higher education workers. For example, today, over one-fourth of the members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor in higher education, but no one would call the UAW the higher education workers’ union. Similarly, while many union workers on college campuses are members of the Service Employees’ International Union (SEIU), higher education workers are a minority of SEIU members. Even the traditional national teacher unions—the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)—are dominated by members working in K–12 systems, not higher education.

HELU is an organizing project that seeks to bring together unionized higher education workers from all of these different national unions under a common umbrella. HELU first went public in 2021 with a vision platform that was quickly endorsed by over 140 local unions and allied organizations, including many labor-aligned nonprofits like the Debt Collective, Scholars for a New Deal for Higher Education, and Jobs With Justice.

A series of virtual summits drawing hundreds of participants led to the creation of an acting steering committee, followed by a campaign to get formal membership commitments from local unions and allied organizations willing and able to pay dues. By May 2024, when HELU had signed about 50 such organizational members, it held a founding convention, elected leaders, and hired staff.

Wall-to-Wall and Coast-to-Coast

Early in the effort to create HELU, members adopted the motto, “Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast.” This simple organizing slogan caught on. It implied solidarity on the one hand and disruption on the other. Also, it was not a halfway kind of response; it was total—and didn’t suggest exceptions.

Determining what “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” means in practice is still a work in progress.

In October 2024, HELU produced a Statement of Unity signed by nine leading national unions that represent most unionized higher-ed workers. This statement is a banner under which these national unions can influence policy while supporting organizing, like coordinated bargaining, at the local level. The policy agenda might seem like a small step, but for a group of unions that famously have not always gotten along with each other in the past, it is a significant step forward.

But the “wall-to-wall” motto—meaning an organizing effort that encompasses the entirety of an institution—also exposes some challenges. It reflects the fact that institutions of higher education do not run just because of the work of tenured professors. These institutions actually function because adjuncts and grad students teach, clerical workers manage departments and programs, engineers operate information technology and heating plants, custodians clean the labs, and so on. Colleges and universities depend critically on the labor power of all who work in them.

The gaps are daunting between, say, dining service workers who work seasonally [and] earn less than a living wage…and tenured professors.

This view is truly disruptive of historic social relationships and university hierarchies.

Faculty, for instance, have tended to bargain on their own. When they bargain alone, an institution can survive a strike or bad publicity by laying off faculty and narrowing its purpose as a public good. But imagine if they bargained jointly with custodians, healthcare workers, and information technology workers who run the university infrastructure. It is often the case that custodians, healthcare workers, and information technology workers actually have greater experience and skill in hard bargaining. A coalition of local unions wall-to-wall can mount a credible strike threat that sends a different message: Higher ed is a public good by and for all of us, and must be protected and supported.

The wall-to-wall challenge is one quickly pointed out by union staff who represent workers in nonfaculty job positions in higher education. How are you going to get graduate students and doctoral candidates to listen to and learn from custodians? How are you going to get dining service workers to sit beside tenured professors and discuss strategy?

The gaps are daunting between, say, dining service workers who work seasonally, earn less than a living wage, and are at risk of getting subcontracted; and tenured professors, who often have six-figure salaries and what is often presumed to be a lifetime job.

Case in point: HELU has not yet managed to fill the slot on its steering committee for service and maintenance staff. Solidarity at the top is easier than solidarity top-to-bottom. At some universities, however, campus labor councils now meet regularly in a kind of mini-HELU session and work toward the wall-to-wall goal. These have been effective in supporting strikes and creating credible strike threats that lead to real gains for workers and students.

What’s Next? From Goal to Action

HELU is not an isolated effort. Rather, it comes on the back of a 40-year-old contingent faculty movement. We wrote about this movement a couple of years ago in Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education.

In that book, in thinking about the future or higher education unionism, we used Andy Blunden’s theory of how a social movement forms, starting with point zero when there is no movement, to a point where a problem occurs that creates an opportunity for people to become aware of others that share this problem.

According to Blunden, the next phases of the rise of a movement are, first, to bring “the abstract concept [into] general social practice,” and then institutionalization.

The good news: “Wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” is now widely accepted as a goal across many local unions that represent higher education workers. HELU, the new cross-union solidarity effort, has stabilized. It now has a budget, a fiscal sponsor (Jobs With Justice), and committees.

However, the new approach has yet to be fully accepted in the field.

Can a coordinated union strategy that’s spread across different higher education career lines be effective? The odds may seem daunting but given the level of crisis under our new presidential administration, no lesser strategy is likely to work.