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This is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand, and join, the growing movement fighting for the future of higher education.
In recent years, higher education has become one of the most militant sectors of the labor movement. From graduate workers to faculty, from the US to Britain and beyond, campus workers are organizing, striking, and reshaping the struggle for better wages, conditions, and control over work.
Across the Atlantic, universities have seen an unprecedented surge in unionization and strike action: over 120 new unions formed in US universities in just a decade; the historic University of California strike, the largest in higher education’s history, mobilizing nearly fifty thousand workers; and in Britain, years of coordinated national strikes pushing back against attacks on pay, conditions, and casualization.
Born out of the workshop Higher Education’s Labor Upsurge workshop at UC Santa Cruz, this book gathers insights from worker-organizers to make sense of this unfolding wave of struggle. Together, the contributors explore the role of universities in contemporary capitalism and how campus struggles can shape the broader labor movement.
Introduction—Sarah Mason and Jamie Woodcock
Chapter 1: A Tale of Two Tables: The University Strikes in California and Michigan Viewed from their Bargaining Teams—Jack Davies and Ev Smith
Chapter 2: Researchers Against the War and the Fight for Worker Control in the Lab—Isabel Kain and Becker Sharif
Chapter 3: “Faculty Won’t Break the Strike”—Jessica Taft and Deborah Gould
Chapter 4: Executing an Effective Research Strike—David Freeman, Genevieve Goebel, Rendi Rogers, and Jake Willard
Chapter 5: Higher Education VS. Trump, Collectively Written
Chapter 6: The Liverpool UCU Strike—Collectively Written
Chapter 7: How the MAB was lost—James Eastwood, 6,000 words
Chapter 8: Worker Organising in Higher Education: A View from a University Library—Matthew Lee
Chapter 9: The Sky’s the Limit? Fighting Against Outsourcing in UK Higher Education—Eve Dickson, Farhana Uddin, and Abu Mostafa
Chapter 10: A History of Struggle at Goldsmiths, Part 1—Collectively Written
Chapter 11: A History of Struggle at Goldsmiths, Part 2—Collectively Written
Chapter 12: Trade Dispute with the Secretary of State for Education—Collectively Written
Conclusion—Sarah, Jamie, and contributors