Register now for this Zoom event sponsored by Higher Education Labor United!
March 16, 2025 02:00 PM
Join HELU’s Contingency Task Force (CTF) on Sunday evening, March 16, 5-7pm ET, for a discussion about building internal union democracy as a way of unleashing worker power across higher ed. How can encouraging inclusive and participatory union practices help transform our workplaces, defend job security, and support academic freedom for all, even as we face escalating governmental and administrative attacks? What are the structures and cultures that enable (or discourage) democratic participation? How do the existing stratifications of labor—among and between faculty, staff, and student workers—create challenges for genuine union democracy and broad member participation? And what methods and approaches can help bridge these divides, helping our unions to become spaces where all workers have full and fair representation, despite the very uneven working conditions our bosses have created to divide us? Help build union structures and cultures that empower precarious workers…and thus strengthen higher ed as a whole. Hear about HELU member organizations—such as United University Profession in New York State and United Campus Workers in Arizona—who have worked to build union structures and cultures that empower contingent faculty and other precarious academic workers. Hear also from contingent faculty activists across the country who have struggled to make their voices heard and who are working to transform their unions into more inclusive and democratic places. A central goal of our event will be to empower event attendees with new understandings, inspiration, models, and strategies, as well as concrete lived examples that can help guide us all to realize more inclusive, democratic, and member-activated unions that can beat back the attacks and transform higher ed for the better.
Moderator: Joe Ramsey, Chair of HELU’s Contingency Task Force