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In the article that Louis posted, the author states, correctly I think, that
tenure-track professors don't ever take collective action to participate
actively in the unionization of graduate student teachers. And the same goes
for adjuncts. These professors have privileged positions, the privileges of
which are due largely to the labor of grad. student teachers and adjuncts, who
carry the course loads and are compelled by circumstances to do so cheaply.
Many tenure-track professors at research universities would do most anything to
avoid teaching, even paying others themselves, from monies they make consulting
and the like.
However, these things were not always so. In the early 1970s, we put together a
union organizing drive at the University of Pittsburgh, under the auspices of
the American Federation of Teachers. Our local was independent in terms of
working out our own agenda. One of our key articles was that graduate teaching
assistants were to be in our bargaining unit, full members with equal rights.
We were committed to considering them as faculty members on a par with all the
other teachers. In the end, the state of PA ruled against their inclusion in
the unit, at which point we petitioned for a separate unit for teaching
assistants. I don't remember what happened after that.
That time period, the sixties and early seventies are sometimes maligned by
millennials, especially some around Jacobin magazine. But we were far more
radical than many DSA members are now. We were cognizant of imperialism and
took a global view of politics and economics. We were interested in the radical
transformation of work and much more. We were firmly anti-racist and made
progress with respect to feminism. We weren't perfect, but on the whole, we
were radicals and not social democrats.
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