Correspondences from the Upsurge

During July, we will be publishing reports from labour struggles in North American universities. Across the US, university workers are unionizing and taking strike action in unprecedented numbers. Since 2013, over 120 new union branches have won recognition in universities. In 2022, there were 15 academic strikes, the highest number of strikes in academia in at least 20 years, while graduate and undergraduate workers at 20 private academic institutions, representing over 25,000 workers, have won union recognition agreements. The high point of this 2022 wave was the University of California system strike that lasted nearly six weeks and involved 48,000 graduate student workers across 10 campuses. In 2023, this wave has shown no sign of dipping, with graduate workers taking strike at Temple University (Philadelphia), the University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College (New Hampshire), postdocs at the University of Washington, and faculty staff, adjunct lecturers, and graduate workers taking strike at Rutgers University (New Jersey) and Chicago State University.

Clearly, there is a lot to learn from these struggles and they should serve as a source of inspiration for all university workers. But there is also a lot to understand about the concrete problems and difficulties which organisers have faced in these campaigns and the regional and institutional contexts which frame industrial relations in each case.

In this mini-issue, we will be publishing short reports and longer essays from university organisers which give first hand accounts of strikes and organising campaigns. They will focus on the problems and difficulties which workers encountered during campaigns, the organising approaches that were tried out and the tactics that were effective against managers. We have compiled this series to gain a clear and sober picture of this uptick of trade union activity in US campuses - one which fills in blanks of the journalistic coverage which has been our main window into many of these disputes.