UMich workers defy “no strike” law & defeat injunction
By Workers Strike Back. Published May 6, 2023
Academic worker revolt
The cost of housing and living expenses in Michigan–and everywhere–have skyrocketed. Every worker knows wages aren’t keeping up–that a raise below inflation amounts to a pay cut. These are the arguments Graduate Employee Organization (GEO) members brought to construction workers on campus projects in explaining why they would show up at 5 AM the next day to picket the construction site.
GEO 3550 members are on strike, and they’re taking up militant tactics to hit the bottom line of their employer, University of Michigan (UMich).
Academic workers have been on the move not only at the University of Michigan, but all over the country.
In the last six months, 12,591 YES votes have carried unionization campaigns at Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and Boston University to success. In that same time, between the University of California, Temple University and Rutgers University, over 57,000 workers went on strike.
There has also been a crucial battle taking place within the academic worker unions, over what kind of leadership is necessary to build the labor movement in the face of attacks from bosses and corporate politicians. In UAW, the rank and file caucus Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) won every national leadership position they ran for after academic workers helped win a one member, one vote policy within the union.
UAWD ran on a platform of rebuilding militant, class-struggle unionism, including the demand of “30 for 40” — a 30 hour week for 40 hours pay. Winning bold demands like this will require building much stronger strikes that can force the bosses’ hand.
GEO 3550 members at the University of Michigan have been closely watching these developments. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the parent union of GEO 3550, represents the largest number of academic workers of any union nationwide, and 1.5 million education workers overall. The militant rank-and-file methods GEO 3550 is using point a way forward to rebuilding a fighting labor movement.
Building a winning strike
In preparing for their strike, UMich workers identified key ingredients to winning a strong contract:
Strong, clear demands like a $38,000 annual salary
Active involvement of a wide layer of their union
The ability to sustain their strike long enough to hit the university where it hurts: their profits.
Despite being a “nonprofit” institution, the University of Michigan pays its president, Santa Ono, an outrageous $975,000 a year and is sitting on billions of dollars in endowment funds, which are profits by another name.
A victory for UMich workers will be a victory for workers everywhere. Check out this interview Workers Strike Back activists Emily McArthur and Julia Kobelt conducted with GEO members Katie Furman and Amir Fleischmann where they explain how they prepared the ground for a strong strike.
Despite being controlled by self-proclaimed “pro-labor” Democrats, Michigan still has vicious anti-labor laws meant to break the power of unions, including a law banning public sector workers from striking. For GEO, a successful strike means not just defeating the bosses in the fight for a strong contract, but beating the attempted injunction in the courts, which would have forced UMich workers back to work.
2,300 members of the Graduate Employees Union have been on strike for more than one month. They identified a key point of their leverage was the submission of grades. Grades for the semester were due on May 3rd, and the situation is rapidly coming to a head.
Workers Strike Back and socialist City Councilmember Kshama Sawant each gave $500 to help GEO workers build their strike fund from scratch. We urge every union to do so also, as well as any politician who claims to represent workers. GEO workers need the support of the whole labor movement to win, as do writers with the Writers Guild of America, who are also now on strike.
Workers Strike Back is organizing to build solidarity across the whole workers movement and fight for what we need. We stood with TUGSA workers, and are helping to build the fight for a strong contract with UAW 4121 workers at the University of Washington. And, of course, we are supporting the critical effort by Amazon workers at KCVG to unionize at the biggest Amazon air hub in the world.
With your support, we can continue to connect workers in struggle and build the fight against the bosses for a REAL raise and good union jobs for all.
