The Temple Anti-Union Strategy

We’ve talked about the Temple teaching assistant strike a bit already and it wasn’t the best run thing in the history of the labor movement. OK, well, there’s now a deal. Not a particularly good one for the students, but it’s probably the best they were going to do given the situation. But what’s remarkable is how hard Temple came down against the teaching assistants. Temple administration has been truly terrible for a long time, so this wasn’t super shocking in context, but still….this was an overtly unionbusting move. Heather Thompson places this in context of the larger trajectory of anti-unionism in the U.S., in the past and present.

But the truth is that while the graduate student unionization movement isn’t new, the teaching and grading they do is labor, period – and no university has yet made the decision to go right for the jugular of its employee union in quite the sinister the way that Temple University just has.

Why sinister? Consider the implications of this move just for Temple and in the city of Philadelphia, where it is located. Temple’s striking graduate students are demanding higher wages because they say their current wages don’t allow them to make ends meet. Now, those same students, many of whom currently cannot even put their own children on their health care plan as dependents, must pay many thousands of dollars in tuition because they dared to take this collective stand. Those students who continue to strike now face the possibility of having to forego the degree they have already put time toward earning, to seek another non-union and thus low wage jobs, or even to land fully on public assistance.

According to Temple, state law stops the public school from paying those who refuse to work. In a recent statement, the school said, “Because striking workers are not entitled to tuition remission, they have been notified of their obligation to make arrangements to pay their tuition, consistent with how the university treats other students who have unpaid tuition obligations.”

Imagine this sort of new no-holds-barred union-busting strategy being adopted in similar forms at other universities, other companies, in other major American cities with their own large populations of already struggling citizens.

This how the rich get richer and poor get poorer in America. And it is a most familiar story, it is a story as old as the nation itself, and it is a story that we can’t afford not to know.

Do say, the many hundreds of graduate students currently negotiating with the University of Michigan, or the more than 30,000 custodians, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, special education assistants and other support staff who are voting whether to strike against the Los Angeles Unified School District, have to fear a similarly draconian response from these employers? Perhaps.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, not if all of us resolve to reckon not just with this nation’s long history of letting businesses work their employees for the least pay and the longest hours, but also to take inspiration from the equally long and determined history of ordinary people’s efforts to achieve and then to defend the labor movement’s most basic gains over the last two centuries.

It’s an anti-union era and also a pro-union era, in terms of popular belief that unions are a good thing. But whether the rather vague pro-union beliefs can really handle the determined anti-union forces of order is another question entirely.