How a Hot Shop Burns: The UMD Graduate Labor Union Card Campaign
Last spring at the University of Maryland, our Graduate Labor Union (GLU) withered. At our on-campus launch rally in fall 2023, GLU mustered over 200 graduate workers to support our new union drive. Five months later, with thousands of cards signed in a unit of over 4,500 workers and two months solely devoted to event outreach, barely 50 UMD grads bothered to turn out for a rally in Annapolis. In Maryland, public academic workers are denied collective bargaining rights. Grad workers and faculty have lobbied the Maryland state legislature for that right for more than 20 years; it is a documented, losing strategy for labor organizing on campus and that is exactly the strategy GLU organizers chose to pursue.
Only a militant union, with a collective understanding of labor extortion within the capitalist university and of its own class formation, can win workplace-wide improvements to conditions at UMD. Our UAW lead organizer’s desire for campaign control aligned with the legislative-lobbying obsession of new organizers and former elected officers of GLU precursor, Fearless Student Employees (FSE), to starve our union of what it needed to survive: democratic process to select our organizing strategy; social events to build community; and strategic action on campus to address workplace issues. Ultimately, this happened due to unfamiliarity among our organizers with union structures and power dynamics but also the basics of social movement organization. The result: at the behest of a remote, badly-trained staff organizer hungry for short-term gains, inexperienced UMD grad organizers burned an entire year of organizing. The failure of this card campaign indicates how deeply rooted the problem of business-unionist organizing staff is in the United States and the lack of strategic vision for new southern academic units within the UAW, specifically.
We still desperately need a union at UMD, but the path to rebuilding GLU is long and likely ends in failure (I admire those attempting that difficult work). I should also say, since my tone is critical, that I include myself within that criticism. On the one hand, the tendencies I describe below were more effective in “winning” the direction of our union campaign (at the cost of our union); on the other, I myself contributed to them from my own prior inexperience with labor organizing.
Writing produced in the US labor movement often adheres to a strict policy of boosterism. For DSA organizers, this article should serve as a reminder of the use of critical analysis for organizing. UMD’s drive highlights the consequences of unearned trust in union-staff organizer expertise, but it also shows how keeping your head down and focusing on “spadework” has limits as well. As chair of organizing up until last fall, I will tell you how and why GLU failed. I’ll do this by discussing grad class conditions at UMD and among our UAW staff, the campaign that resulted, and how class composition and social reproduction directed our organizing.
Class Composition of UMD Grad Workers
As the flagship research institution in the University System of Maryland (USM), UMD has the lion’s share of Maryland graduate workers—there are over 4,500 at College Park. UMD grad workplace issues differ across such a huge unit, but pay is the most consistent. Our minimum stipends are set by a yearly administrative memo. The 2024 minimum stipend was $34,052 for a 12-month appointment: the MIT Living Wage Calculator puts the cost-of-living for a single adult with no children living in Prince George’s County at $54,391—a deficit of $20,339. Rents around College Park are terrible for graduate students. Worse, the university claws back pay with exorbitant mandatory fees.
Nothing about employment is guaranteed—university and department administration unilaterally alter conditions at any time, as they did two years ago when half of the architecture teaching assistants (TAs) were fired two weeks before the fall semester to make up for budgeting errors. The remaining TAs were expected to double their workload. The pressure for tenured faculty to exploit labor for teaching or research and grads’ dependence on their approval to remain employed and enrolled encourages abuse. One engineering professor forces his international postdocs to sleep in their lab so they can work long enough hours and threatens their visa status if they do not produce enough research; physics offices come with couches or beds so grads can sleep at the university. As a source of cheap labor, graduate workers now teach entire courses without training or support: at one college, new PhD students are leading courses they’ve neither taken nor taught before. Endless work requirements and a barren workplace creates social isolation and mental health crises as well. Student suicides quietly build trauma within the community. Food insecurity; abusive faculty supervisors; lack of workplace accommodations for disabilities; student debt; fickle medical leave provisions; gender pay disparity reproduced by bias in recruitment to particular departments; department administrations’ expectation of free “service” work from graduate students for office allocation and hiring—there is no end.
How to organize against this? These are the most important institutional divisions imposed on us by our employer: type of academic worker (teaching, research, administrative); whether we are paid with a stipend or hourly; the degree we pursue (masters vs. PhD); and international student status. Without strategic organizing within and across those divisions, our union will always be fragile.
Fig. 1. The division of grad workers by college workplace, given organizers' best estimates. "Other" is roughly divided between unknown grad worker allocations and grad workers in university administrative offices.
PhD students are promised funding and benefits, like health insurance and tuition remission, for a set number of years but are not necessarily given a specific “assistantship” that would actually grant them. Assistantships last 9, 9.5, or 12 months—many grad workers need to find external summer work. Most assistantships pay for 20 hours of work per week. There is, however, no mechanism to enforce those hours. In lab sciences, faculty regularly require their research assistants (RAs) to work 60 or more hours a week.
International student status increases precarity. Assistantships are often reserved for PhD students and masters students are often not US citizens. That means they often only have access to contingent hourly positions without benefits. Visa conditions also prevent international students from finding additional work. Beyond the mandatory fee of $641.50 levied on graduate students every semester, international students pay an additional $125. (Not paying fees results in unenrollment from all classes, including dissertation-research sections required to make degree progress.)
TAs lead class sections or entire lectures, hold office hours, and grade assignments, as well as design curricula and manage course software. TA issues are often around pay, but departments can mandate overwork. For example, our communication TAs must lead three undergrad classes every semester—this would be a full course load for a tenured professor. Because their work times are more flexible, organizing TAs requires locating TA offices and lounges or planning organizing conversations around their class schedule. If TAs withhold grades, they both break the university’s promise to deliver credits to paying students and pressure affiliated faculty and departments.
RAs fulfill professors’ grant and publication obligations. Departments with funding can impose higher internal stipend minimums. Because RAs are more often located in departments with connections to industry (and, therefore, funding), they tend to be paid better or have access to lucrative summer internships to compensate for poor pay during the year. Their work is often tied to the dissertation that will allow them to graduate, which encourages a culture of self-exploitation. RAs, however, usually work in labs and therefore have more in-built social ties than TAs do. Grad workers are also taking on more university administrative work. Degrees with professional connections, like business and education, tend to encourage their grads to pursue administrative assistantships; large departments use them as well.
The campus’s physical space and the social connections between academic disciplines also shape organizing. Departments and colleges with more collaboration are located more closely together: at UMD, arts, humanities, and social sciences take up the south part of campus and the central mall; the sciences and engineering fill out the north. Independent colleges or schools like business, agriculture, journalism, information studies, or policy are socially and physically isolated.
Any union drive at UMD is also confined by Maryland law, which forbids many public-sector workers from unionizing. UMD staff won their local with the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in the early 2000s. They did so by growing so powerful that the USM actually supported their bill for collective bargaining rights—out of fear for a union unconstrained by public labor law.1 AFSCME Local 1072, however, was uninterested in organizing UMD grad workers.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has tried to organize UMD grads two times before and failed miserably by directing grad efforts towards lobbying Annapolis; through chance, I and another organizer met the former AFT staff who told us a nightmare story of organizing within the USM, of being strung out over multiple campuses with no direction and little organic grad support. The last AFT campaign at UMD concluded with a backroom deal between the Maryland governor’s office, the USM, and AFT, which sold out grad organizers.2
Who then would fight with us against the behemoth of the USM?
The Card Campaign
I arrived at UMD in the fall of 2021 and quickly joined our union drive precursor, FSE. The activist clique had little idea what labor organizing looked like. When I was elected as organizing co-chair in fall 2022, I tried to learn. I attended Labor Notes trainings; spoke with organizers at other universities; and asked organizer friends for advice with our legal situation. Two lessons became clear: First, we needed to act as a union now if we ever wanted to win one.3 Second, in the industrial setting of a university, the building-wide walkthrough is the basic tactic of US graduate unions. Organizers need to systematically go through all campus buildings where graduate assistants work, so they can knock on lab and office doors, meet coworkers, and invite them to have organizing conversations.
In the winter of 2023 we met a lead organizer with the UAW from connections to a nearby campaign. UAW was interested, she said. I was relieved to have an ally pushing the FSE activists to set aside their legislative efforts and talk to their coworkers. Our steering committee, however, waited until our collective-bargaining bill died in the legislature that spring, again, before turning to the more-effective work of organizing conversations. The organizing committee (OC), by actually organizing, grew to outnumber every other FSE committee. We planned a walkthrough launch in which we sent pairs of organizers to visit nearly half the campus buildings we thought held grad workers. We built out our physical and social map of UMD. A few organizers developed a regular walkthrough program to make sure we had made initial contact with every department and that new organizers had an easy way to pick up the practice.
As we built, the excitement was palpable. I remember my first visit to an engineering department. “We’ve been waiting for you,” an RA told us. It became clear that FSE’s failures, year after year, were partially due to a campus-wide recognition that the organization had no idea what it was doing. Most grad workers received their yearly legislative petition, signed it, and felt resentment when it ultimately had no effect. And, over the pandemic, many organizers had dropped out. The FSE that remained had been dominated by a few loud and ineffective male (computer) scientists. Talking to more workers started to change that dynamic. This reached a head in the spring of 2023 when the sexism of the former FSE president became too blatant to ignore. After women organizers circulated a signed letter calling out FSE men on our silence, we organized to remove him from the FSE steering committee (it was unanimous). Suddenly, finally, we had a chance at a real union.
This would have been the time to formalize a stable union structure. Some of us spent the summer drafting a new constitution: It included elected positions, an administrative committee subordinated to organizing, and clear means for the general body to direct union efforts. We never ratified it, a mistake I deeply regret. In retrospect, a constitution would have allowed us to determine our own organizing strategy and stick to it. Without those commitments spelled out and socialized, anyone with enough time could redirect our union by convincing a few specific, active organizers.
But UAW’s interest in our campaign began to take over and adopting a constitution fell to the wayside. We began to discuss a card campaign as a break with FSE’s past. That summer, the UAW lead hired two of our active organizers to work on a nearby campaign. Those two organizers never relayed to us the practices of information silo-ing, dysfunction, and managerial control that defined our lead’s organizing. UAW promised technical expertise, six part-time grad staff organizer positions, the ability for GLU to form a joint unit with faculty and adjuncts, and a commitment to “worker-led organizing.” None of these promises would turn out to be true.
Momentum continued to grow over the summer. We reached over 80 grads who had agreed to organize for cards, then 100, then 200. It seemed like the time to make a clear plan for the fall. I called for us to launch a card campaign, and to vote to affiliate it with UAW. Things changed quickly, however. (My accounting around that time gets blurry, because I had to step back from organizing due to personal issues.)
As we approached our card launch in September 2023, UAW provided no organizer trainings on campus. Yet the lead UAW organizer insisted that, with its superior infrastructure and skill, UAW should take over our website, Google Drive, newsletter and organizing database. Out of trust, we gave UAW staff control of these resources. All the UAW data support workers turned out to be other graduate students, many of whom have never worked on another union drive. (We had UMD grads who wanted to contribute database programming to the organizing committee; their work was discouraged by the lead, which drove them away.) When we actually launched, our database stayed split between our old Google Drive and the new one for weeks. There was only one UAW staff updating our database because of a rush with a related campaign, so we were hamstrung at the moment when we most needed UAW’s help. None of this was communicated by the lead.
Still, at first, our card launch was a huge success due to immense worker interest. We quickly reached 1,000 signed cards and started to deal with the problem of building out an organization that could hold so many active participants. We collected survey data on our union cards to understand what issues were most pressing on campus and in which departments (that data still have not been made available to the rank-and-file). We hit the “30% slump,” which we learned (too late) was a common feature of union card campaigns. We tried to build out a political education committee to restart our regular organizing trainings, to hold social events, to hold our first union-wide vote to sign onto a labor ceasefire letter, to organize a choir to build community and prepare for on-campus actions.
Fig. 2. The pace of workers signatures for our card campaign from our public launch on September 4, 2023, to January 29, 2024; the declining rate reflects a combination of decreasing capacity, exhaustion of new contacts with eager union supporters, and the declining utility of a walkthrough-focused organizing strategy. The chart was made in our OC data dashboard, and so was visible to all active organizers.
In the middle of the fall, however, UAW staff began to quietly oppose those efforts. Multiple times, grad staff organizers diverted calls to adopt our drafted constitution into making codes of conduct without any means to enforce or hold organizers accountable to them. Grad staff organizers did nothing other than organize to get more card signatures, at the lead’s direction. In meetings, the lead would belittle any action other than getting more cards signed, even as the structural problems with our drive became more and more clear and cards slowed. In private conversations, the lead disparaged the idea of us having elected positions, staff or otherwise.
Late in the fall, the one organizer who had signed up to make sure we had a collective bargaining bill in the spring was forced to step back by their advisor. The UAW lead immediately created a legislative taskforce, without a vote, without a discussion in the organizing committee. With this taskforce, the lead was able to force priorities onto our union drive without ever bringing them up for discussion—namely, that we were going back to Annapolis.
My participation in our union drive effectively ended in early December. The lead had expressed concern with erratic behavior of a male staff member. She said she was going to do something about it. She did not. Instead, two grads asked this staff member to step down, because they had been told that “UAW was escalating the issue” and they wanted to save him the embarrassment. Burned out from the conflict, I took most of the winter break to rest and to talk to other UMD organizers about how they felt things had been going. No one was happy with our direction; we had stalled. The lead, however, directed all UAW staff effort towards Annapolis. She began to spread a spring calendar plan that would only have actions aimed at advocating for collective bargaining rights, the exact same strategy FSE and UMD grads had tried and failed with for decades.
In January, I thought I would try to organize towards the only thing that would help—a constitution, with elected positions and voting procedures to set collective union strategy. With others, I tried to get access to our newsletter account again (I had been unceremoniously booted by the lead after I published a letter-to-the-editor, written and signed by other active organizers, that criticized our lack of democratic structure). Meanwhile, the regular biweekly publishing schedule of our newsletter was broken; no issues went out. In multiple meetings, I and others spoke up for the newsletter. Through two committee meetings, including a clear organizing committee decision, the lead would not allow any organizers (myself included) to access the newsletter without her holding the keys.
At wit’s end, I published a post on our organizing Slack describing this conflict and asking other organizers what we should do. This sent her staff into overdrive. They yelled at me in a campus dive bar, that I had destroyed our chance to pass union legislation, that I did not understand the concept of solidarity. They publicly insinuated I had created a secret anti-UAW faction for organizing with my friends and called me untrustworthy and hostile. The OC agenda that week was set to devote half of the entire meeting to discuss their accusations. Reader, I quit.
I attended the spring Annapolis rally, at the advice of an experienced chapter organizer—GLU could barely get 50 people there. I learned that the UAW lead had called grad organizers that week to suggest they push for a strike, a beyond-foolish first workplace action for a fragile campaign. GLU limped along. No one, not even the members of the legislative working group, was surprised when our collective-bargaining bill failed. There is now not enough energy left in organizing to produce and socialize new social structures. A vote this summer to adopt a union constitution failed to meet quorum. I’ve been told there is new energy in GLU this fall, but their only actions have been a few disconnected rallies and petitions. I’m not allowing myself hope until they survive the gravitational pull of Annapolis.
GLU organized too fast, too unstable—hot shops are always difficult.4 But there is a world where we would be on a stable path to a contract by now. How can we understand what happened, and what that tells us about weaknesses in the US labor movement? I’ve been mulling over this for seven months (thank you to everyone who has done that with me), and I have only the following partial answers.
Professional Union Staff and Business Unionism
In academic organizing, staff organizers often come from established graduate unions. When they begin, they have little, if any, experience building up locals. Combine that with a lack of organizing education or strategy from the national unions and you can get staff organizers who pick up organizing tips, tricks, or shortcuts on the fly, apply them outside the context in which they worked, and expect workers to follow their ineffective example.
From all the conversations I’ve had with grad organizers at other universities, the current “upsurge” in grad academic organizing seems to be occurring despite many of the staff organizers supporting them, not because of them.5 I will focus on the details of what makes business-unionist staff organizers able and willing to drive the campaigns under their care into the ground.
Rather than seeing UMD GLU’s failure as the outcome of a single incompetent organizer, we can understand it as the product of accumulated socialization within particular class formations. Poor union training for academic organizers hired out of college (grad students included) encourages these staff to act like professionals without actually possessing expertise. Professionals, as a class, are defined by their monopoly over kinds of skilled labor. For professional organizers, that labor is organizing itself—a relation that can make them see rank-and-file organizers as inherently less competent. Conversely, rank-and-file grad workers—as professionals-in-training themselves—are trained to respect the marks of expertise, even if there is little substance behind them.6
Our lead—a former neuroscientist and president of the University of California (UC) postdoc local, UAW 5810—had a background in quantitative sciences. This gave her a familiarity and ease with tools of tracking and control; she used these tools to disparage organizing approaches that would not produce data she could use to organize workers herself. Training in the lab sciences also provides identification with non-democratic social structures. All of us, in organizing, have to learn to practice workplace democracy coming from workplaces that are anything but democratic. Labs, however, are strange. US tenure-track principal investigators secure their own grants and wield immense power over grad lab workers. They are like little feudal lords; their labs are their fiefdoms. While lab work is often cooperative and place-based in a way that aids organizers, this also means the top-down control of this lead was comfortable to grad organizers in the lab sciences.
Our lead had experience on the bargaining team of her UC local. The adversarial environment of bargaining made her assume that strict messaging discipline was always a necessary part of union organizing. And her election and consequent behavior at UMD indicates an ability to navigate stable political structures by pitting organizers against each other—something dangerous to do in a nascent organization that cannot support subterfuge and infighting without collapse. There is also the influence of being a careerist within a US business union. As she told organizers to develop trust with them, our lead was not permanent staff. Like the grad staff she hired, she is a temp—one interested in securing a permanent career in the labor movement. The pressure to produce results, quickly, from campaigns is immense.
The spending behaviors of the UAW also corroborates an interest in shallow organizing that will (theoretically) produce dues-paying contracts as quickly as possible. A related campaign that launched at the same time as ours pulled all of UAW’s attention that fall to reach a successful election result. But there was little to no local structure to continue to build the union once UAW’s interest (and funding) waned. I ran into one of the staff organizers at a coffee shop near me; they told me that now that the election had passed, staff were receiving no support or guidance. The union had checked boxes for the labor board over building worker power.7 Similarly, at UMD, UAW’s pursuit of the same failing strategy of the last 20 years reflects a willingness to roll the dice on a favorable-enough legislature every year, rather than build a durable local (which might have its own ideas about how to organize).
From the beginning, the UAW lead organizer cultivated a respect for her expertise. For example, she hid how technical tools like the UAW database worked or misdefined union terms for political purposes. The lead used grad staffs’ ignorance of union operations to tell them that paying dues to her home local, UC’s UAW 5810, was both a necessary part of employment and enrolment in a non-existent UAW staff union. From experience with bargaining and a desire to create a sense of urgency that would allow her to gain control of communication, the lead acted as if the university administration would take any public statement made by our union, on social media or otherwise, and twist it against us.
This organizer acted as if any information about our organizing strategy sent out to card-signers would lead to a fatal leak of strategic information. The university did not do this. They held a few “open forums” to pretend they were meeting our issues, but otherwise, they sandbagged us. Some department deans told their staff to intercept and forbid organizers from entering grad work spaces, but the university administration just waited for us to collapse. The end result of this paranoia and strategy to gain control was to make learning about our campaign and participating in it more alienating and more difficult. The lead’s insistence on tight messaging control on social media made it hard to share information about our drive, how it was going, and how interested workers could get involved. And conversely, it made it harder for active organizers to share what they learned on-the-ground in departments with the rest of the union. This short-sighted control made it hard to understand the structure of our union effort and drove grad organizers away—no one wants another boss.
Similarly, the fact that there were several UAW data entry staff was used to present UAW control of our organizing data as imperative. Out of their legacy as command-and-control hardware, computers and the software they run use rigid permission systems that are inherently anti-democratic.8 That, combined with the decisive action required at key moments in a union campaign, means the short-term efficiency of unelected admin or moderator positions is both appealing and difficult to avoid. Zoom deserves special mention here. Our lead organizer does not live in Maryland and works on more than four different campaigns. Through the pandemic, UMD grads all learned to participate in discussions via videoconferencing. This allowed increased accessibility for our meetings, yes, but it also allowed our lead to avoid almost ever visiting our campus herself.
Our organizing database allowed distant organizers to imagine that its quantified data reflected the entirety of UMD organizing. Zoom encouraged them—without the embodied knowledge of a workplace built by talking and listening to hundreds of workers—to weigh in on organizing conversations as if they were informed. This distance also encouraged a top-down approach to organizing conversations. Conversations between workers, the basic unit of labor organizing, require all conversational parties to listen and make asks of material support from each other. Computer-mediated communication encouraged staff to get to their asks as quickly as possible and avoid learning from workers to shape union strategy—organizing conversations were made into sales pitches.
For an example of redefining union terms for political aims, this spring, our lead undercut attempts to organize workplace issue campaigns by claiming that a series of Instagram posts on a particular topic constituted an issue campaign. In another instance, our lead claimed that including undecided issues or criticism of our union campaign in our newsletter to grad workers who had signed union cards constituted “third-partying the union.”
The UAW lead also secured her control over specific inexperienced organizers through verbal abuse, but also patronage—she hired grad staff organizers that she had handpicked. Once they were receiving pay from UAW and had no structure to hold them accountable to their coworkers at UMD, grad staff began to internalize the managerial organizing style of our lead and to assume their rightful place at the top of our campaign’s informal hierarchy. There were other small gift exchanges as well: our lead picked a grad organizer she favored to represent our union at the UAW Community Action Program conference (grad staff were sent as well), again without public discussion.
As a result, the UAW lead could always direct three or more people to do something. Inertia would pull more people away from whatever consensus the organizing committee had arrived at. Any attempts to change that direction could simply be ignored—which undermined the legitimacy of our organizing committee as a site for collaboration. What approach to organizing does this create? At UMD, one that dogmatically pursues rigid organizing strategies, that overflows with misinformation, and that is obsessed with bureaucratic tools that provide little benefit to organizing. But it’s how UMD organizers themselves reproduced that environment that ultimately put the nail in the coffin.
Social Reproduction within the Local
Good organizing builds capacity by always involving more people who bring energy and needed skills to a union drive. The social composition of the workers who comprise the union will organically affect what “good organizing” looks like—the practices that join those workers together, both on and off the job, will come to define their union.
In our case, however, academic workers are at risk. The common tasks that tie them together are writing, teaching, research, combined with a shared goal of professionalizing to become faculty (or some related profession in industry). As I discussed above, their backgrounds bring both aptitudes and predilections with them. Academic unions possess a range of skills within their units, which creates the potential for local autonomy and strategic analysis. But academics’ predilections and the activities they find most comfortable are often in contrast to good organizing.
Grad students work in labs and departments, as trainees that hope to be inducted into the faculty class formation. From those aspirations, they can mirror faculty behavior and veer towards managerial command in organizing, rather than listening. Similarly, research, while necessary for workers’ inquiry, too easily leads to an obsession with rhetoric and false consciousness. UMD has a non-binding “meet-and-confer” process that captures grad worker discontent like a company union. I watched certain grads spend years convinced that this semester’s presentation on UMD’s exploitative student fees or lack of maternal leave would result in changes if only we could present the details of our exploitation well enough. A confusion of PowerPoint with power. The strange volunteerism of academic work in US academies also undermined us. Academic workers pursue social capital with the least amount of effort: many assume positions of power, like representatives in student government or president-appointed taskforces to collect a CV line but not perform the basic responsibilities. This custom corrodes solidarity within the unit.
For a union to continue to grow, its members need to deliberately weave social ties between themselves and maintain those ties. But how and where they work affect what ties are possible and comfortable for organizers. In effective social reproduction of the union, socializing spans the breadth of the workers in the unit. For example, in my college, there is a shared nerd culture so organizers planned game nights.
At a larger scale, the dive bar Town Hall was an integral part of socialization for grads in natural sciences, computing, and engineering because of how close it was to their buildings. STEM organizers, as a result, gravitated toward Town Hall in their suggestions for union events. Humanities and social scientists, however, had little to no familiarity with Town Hall. Every social event held at Town Hall would inherently pull more workers from the College of Math and Natural Sciences (CMNS) than other colleges (and, of course, only workers interested in drinking alcohol). If you extend that lopsidedness to an entire drive, you fail to reach the range of workers in the unit. (This winter, Town Hall closed because its lot was purchased by a Texas real-estate company, for redevelopment. The closure of this organic site of worker organizing was in itself a huge blow to GLU.) Social reproduction in a union involves not just building community but communities, many of which will not look alike even if they are within the same workplace.
How organizing conversations are held also affects union social reproduction. GLU is a strange duck for being well-represented in the sciences—aside from a few organized departments, like history and English, humanities are not present. In one way, that makes sense. The CMNS is nearly one-half of the grad worker population at UMD. The walkthroughs recommended by grad organizers elsewhere and zealously promoted by our lead are most effective in buildings that house research assistants, tied to their labs, offices, and centers by their faculty supervisors. Walkthroughs are ineffective at reaching teaching assistants, who often do not have shared offices and are only required to be working on campus in limited stretches of time (class, office hours). Those workers have to be reached by other means.
Ignoring the immense tuition dollars secured by teaching assistants, STEM workers are also taught that their departments are benefit-producing, and therefore virtuous, and that departments in humanities or social science are an institutional drain, and therefore suspect. That is, these workers often internalize the neoliberal logics of university administration. This dynamic was reproduced within our campaign itself—organizers in the sciences continually expressed frustration with their comrades across campus but would not help them solve their organizing problems.
The cultivation of this kind of disdain and the stance of moral virtue became a kind of social power within GLU, without a clear structure to put it in check. The organizers of atmospheric and oceanic sciences are a perfect example: with three active organizers, they were quickly able to get 100% of the cards within their department of 30-something grad workers. The climate scientists, crowned by their local success, disparaged organizers who had signed a similar number of cards in larger departments (that therefore displayed a lower “card signed” percentage in our data dashboard). Rather than helping their coworkers, they consolidated social capital via a reputation as “effective organizers.”
The insistence on walkthroughs, and habitual training that walkthroughs and organizing are identical (i.e., if you don’t do walkthroughs, you’re not organizing) overbuilt our union towards STEM and engineering—those organizers joined our union through that practice, but were unfamiliar with the other side of campus and unwilling to learn how to adapt their practices to organize arts and humanities. At the point where we needed to transition our strategy because we were reaching saturation for first contact in many science departments, STEM grads simply would not organize humanities grads, who are mostly positioned on the opposite end of campus. We were told over and over again by older academic organizers (not just from UAW) that humanities were leftist enough that we didn’t need to, and shouldn’t, focus on organizing them. That simply wasn’t borne out by the drive—humanities did not organize itself.
In our case, what’s worse, we had another system of socialization built into our campaign. The GLU activist-clique predecessor FSE had cohered around the yearly practice of lobbying for collective bargaining rights in Maryland’s state legislature. This practice and goal defined what many FSE activists saw as comprising both organizing and overall union activity. I have realized, in retrospect, that FSE activists only became interested in organizing last spring once their legislative efforts failed. They never learned the lesson of why our organizing started to work; they were just looking for something to do until the next legislative session.
As chair of our organizing committee, I tried to define our organizing and walkthroughs as contradictory to legislative lobbying and the calendar of state activity. This calendar, however, had enormous pull. When the UAW lead created a legislative working group in fall 2023, its members consisted entirely of former FSE activists and grad-student government representatives. The working group was united by its affinity for legislative action. This working group redefined the entire purpose of the union drive over a few months near the end of the fall semester, when fewer organizers were paying attention and silently redirecting the union drive could occur without public discussion.
I contrast UAW’s support of the “serious” activity of legislative lobbying with the treatment of a labor choir formed by organizers in the humanities. A small group of music grad workers created a monthly choir session that would teach US labor-movement songs to GLU organizers. Music grads fliered for this event and facilitated it themselves; the aim was, through a fun event that brought organizers across departments together, to provide organizers with some grounding in US labor history and to teach them a tactic for future workplace action—choir meetings concluded with mock picket marches through the performing art center.
Because these events produced no new card signatures, however, FSE activists and UAW staff alike saw them as a waste of time. Writing, art, and social events to promote the union were all considered “unserious” organizing activities that were, at best, a “shortcut” and, at worst, a waste of organizing capacity.9 Lack of interest in planned social events also reflected misogynist bias against this kind of organizing—most men provided zero logistical support for social events.
The idea that organizing could be fun was anathema to GLU organizers with nonprofit experience. The GLU choir was, at the time of its creation, the only regular public event held by our union where interested grads could meet each other. UAW staff and uninterested men only saw these events as a source of social media posts. Beyond the fact that not everyone has to enjoy singing to support a union choir, we can also consider that the class aspirations of those involved created their opposition or apathy towards a kind of organizing they did not understand. The moral crusades of the middle classes—overpopulated by grad workers with time—confuse the creation of collective labor power with the ineffective outrage they reserve as their right. Why sing, when you could spend your time talking to politicians in a hall of power?
Conclusion
The UMD card campaign had the following effects: more than half of UMD grad workers have expressed a clear desire for a union on campus, and hundreds indicated a willingness to organize. The current GLU organizing committee seems to be trying to redirect their efforts, but they failed to adopt any democratic structures and have only made further calls on workers to sign a proliferation of petitions—resentment, or at least apathy, on campus for our so-called union is growing. In a non-negotiated concession, university administration granted grad workers eight weeks of paid parental leave, an issue UMD grads have been organizing around for over twenty years. And in the DC AFL–CIO, UAW has made its mark on our campus; we are now their turf, even though we will not have a union due to their failure. There is no way for us to appeal to national UAW to recall the lead organizer they assigned us—most UMD organizers don’t even know who our lead’s boss is. With a lead organizer quashing local autonomy, it will take years to build up organizing momentum again on campus.
The conservative, expertise-based practices of business-union staff invite them to present organizing strategies copied from a generic playbook as practical and “serious” against organizing that seems more radical but is actually the only proven path available. Those who oppose are marked as “goofy radicals” (yours truly). For socialists, do not underestimate the willingness of liberals and professionals to burn your union campaign to the ground, rather than engage in constructive conflict with your approach to organizing.
I understand the collective failure of the UMD GLU card campaign as a failure of vision, of the breadth of social life needed to sustain our union, and of the strategic flexibility required to navigate our difficult organizing landscape. Only a cadre of organizers more experienced or more committed to learning could have succeeded. But that is something the surge of US grad organizing has not yet produced at UMD.
Readers interested in organizing at UMD can reach the author by emailing umdorganizing@mortemale.org.
Footnotes
1 Fox, Emily. 2024. “Toward a People’s History of the University of Maryland: AFSCME Local 1072.” Cosmonaut, June 26, 2024.
2 This problem was not unique to AFT—ironically, a similar dynamic is now available to UAW. For UMD grads at the time, their local organization did not have access to negotiations with state power unmediated by their national. From conversations with grad organizers at other UAW locals, circumventing local consensus in the interest of the national through the use of professional negotiators is common in bargaining. DBK Editorial Board. 2012. “AFT Caught in the Act.” The Diamondback, March 12, 2012.
3 In thinking through this problem, I looked often to EWOC’s report on how to navigate this kind of union campaign: “Pre-Majority Unionism: Models for Building a Union When There’s No Clear Path to a Majority or a Contract” from the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. Other academic organizers in the U.S. South, via the United Campus Worker (UCW) model, are also grappling with how to organize without collective bargaining rights: “Fighting Neoliberal Universities in States without Bargaining Rights.” 2020. The Forge (blog). October 10, 2020.
4 Dunn, Brendan Maslauskas. 2019. “The Perils of Organizing a Hot Shop.” Organizing Work (blog). January 7, 2019.
5 Teresa Kroeger, Celine McNicholas, Marni von Wilpert, and Julia Wolfe. 2018. “The State of Graduate Student Employee Unions: Momentum to Organize among Graduate Student Workers Is Growing despite Opposition.” Economic Policy Institute. Also see Dave Kamper's “What’s Fueling the Graduate Worker Union Upsurge?” Labor Notes, March 22, 2023.
6 “The professions constitute themselves in an opposition to the unregulated and the ignorant without acknowledging the unregulated, ignorant, unprofessional labor that goes on not opposite them but within them. [...] Think about the way the American doctor or lawyer regard themselves as educated, enclosed in the circle of the state’s encyclopedia, though they may know nothing of philosophy or history.” Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe New York Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013) 12.
7 Just because U.S. unions are willing to spend some money on organizing doesn’t mean they do it well. In fact, their approach to financial risk analysis for how to allocate their small amount of investment in organizing is exactly what undermined us at UMD. Chris Bohner. 2023. “The Labor Movement’s ‘Business Unionism’ Has Transformed Into ‘Finance Unionism.’” Jacobin, May 2, 2023. For a more detailed analysis on how little U.S. unions spend on organizing, see Bohner’s report: Bohner, Chris. 2022. “Labor’s Fortress of Finance: A Financial Analysis of Organized Labor and Sketches for an Alternative Future.” Radish Research.
8 What actually constitutes good (not just good enough) digital infrastructure for organizing is still unclear. For the types of utopian promises that software developers and unions made of efficient “cyberunion” organizing at the beginning of the 21st century, see: Khovanskaya, Vera. 2023. “The Cyberunion 20 Years Later.” Interactions 30 (2): 48–51. And for a descriptive account of what data practices U.S. union organizers have now, see: Khovanskaya, Vera, Phoebe Sengers, and Lynn Dombrowski. 2020. “Bottom-Up Organizing with Tools from On High: Understanding the Data Practices of Labor Organizers.” In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1–13. Honolulu HI USA: ACM.
9 Jane McAlevey’s book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, a popular text for new organizers, was unfortunately itself often used as a symbol of “serious” organizing. By labeling an activity outside their control as “a shortcut” to a union, UAW staff were able to redirect organizing efforts toward their priorities.
Sam Dee is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland and a former organizing chair and staff organizer for the UMD Graduate Labor Union. He studies labor and surveillance technology. He can be contacted at umdorganizing@mortemale.org.
The monthly Washington Socialist informs readers about perennial and evolving aspects of democratic socialism. Each issue includes essays, briefs, and articles covering topics oriented to specific local campaigns and broader socialist analysis. Each issue of the Washington Socialist is a produced by members of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, although contributors from the DMV's political left should always feel welcome to contribute!