Earlier this month, representatives from the UC Faculty Associations and over 75 other unions and organizations, representing over 300,000 academic workers, met in a higher education summit that developed a vision platform for a new national higher education campaign. The organizers of the event asked higher education organizations to sign on to the vision platform.
The Council of UC Faculty Associations board members voted to endorse the vision platform, which is viewable online at:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e8bjmEZzaRY0ET434bpbO-k40vlV6hkK/view
Pasted below is a plain text version of the vision platform:
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HIGHER ED LABOR SUMMIT
Building a Movement to Transform US Higher Education
Vision Platform
We envision a future in which higher education is treated and funded as
a social good and universal right.
We envision a U.S. higher education system that works for and is led by
workers, students, and the communities it serves. We envision a system
that secures our nation’s democratic future and serves as a vehicle for
addressing inequities.
We envision public and nonprofit private institutions of higher
education that prioritize people and the common good over profit and
prestige. We envision institutions that redress systemic oppression and
pursue equity along lines of race, gender, class, sexuality,
nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration status for
students and higher ed workers across all job categories. We envision
institutions that honor the right of all workers to organize a union and
collectively bargain, and commit to the fair working conditions crucial
to achieving our educational mission.
We envision a higher education labor movement that connects workers
across job categories, ranks, systems, states, and sectors. We envision
a movement that forms coalitions of and builds democratic power for all
workers.
The Challenges We Face
For decades, our state systems and their institutions, working
conditions, and learning environments have been compromised by public
disinvestment, financialization, corporatization, and a transition to
debt financing. Higher education has been underfunded, and management
has prioritized generating revenue and allocating funds to divisions
that yield the highest return on investment and to upper-administrator
compensation.
Workers and students have borne the burden of these structural shifts.
All categories of faculty, professional and service staff, and student
jobs have been cut, narrowed, outsourced, and remade into contingent,
at-will positions. At the same time, upper-administrator positions have
grown. The majority of faculty (at least 70%) are in adjunct or
contingent appointments. This precarity presents a threat to job
stability, educational engagement with students, long-term student
outcomes, and academic freedom. Expanding faculty and staff contingency
disproportionately impacts women and LGBTQIA+ workers, and workers of
color. Tenure-track and full-time employment have declined while workers
and students pay the price with lower wages, little to no benefits like
health insurance and retirement, and rising tuition and fees. This
results in workers and students experiencing the same precarity, leading
to increased attrition, faculty turnover, and withdrawals. Higher
education institutions have increasingly turned to private lenders,
forcing them to prioritize Wall Street and corporate-donor demands over
public interests. Students have been transformed into debtors–carrying
more than $1.7 trillion in debt today.
Without renewed investments and changes in governance, these crises will
worsen.
The Opportunity to Transform Higher Education
Even as we face generational challenges to the integrity and future of
our not-for-profit education system in the United States, these colleges
and universities function as educational, economic, social, and cultural
anchors in communities. So we also see enormous opportunities to
reinvest in and restructure the system—which employs more than 6 million
people and educates many millions more—along more just and equal lines.
To transform U.S. higher education as we envision will take a movement
of workers, students, and communities united across union and geographic
lines.
Therefore, as local and statewide higher education unions and ally
organizations, we make the following commitments to organize for and win
a just, equitable system that serves the core public educational mission
for which we all strive.
COMMITMENT ONE
Nationwide Action for Federal Government Intervention
In order to address these national crises, we call for coordinated
nationwide action to move the federal government to:
1. Establish the right to a quality, debtless, universally accessible,
and secure higher education for students, workers, and communities, with
intentional mandates to increase access and retention for people
historically or presently excluded on the basis of race, gender, class,
sexuality, nationality, indigeneity, age, (dis)ability, and immigration
status.
2. Enact legislation and rules to regularize and stabilize higher
education employment on a national scale, and to ensure fair terms and
safe work conditions, living wages and steady careers for all faculty,
staff, and undergraduate and graduate student workers.
3. Enact legislation to guarantee the right for all higher education
workers to organize a union and bargain collectively in every state.
4. Invest in rebuilding higher education across the country and its
territories while linking expanded federal funds to consistent and
higher labor standards. This funding includes physical, research,
healthcare, and human infrastructure that serves our public service
mission, and formation of a public finance system to free higher
education from depending on private banks for debt financing.
COMMITMENT TWO
Nationwide Action to Realign Our Campuses
In order to address our campuses within these national crises, we call
for coordinated nationwide action to move our upper administrators and
boards to:
1. Engage in collaborative shared governance in which all categories of
faculty and staff, student groups, and unions participate at all levels
and have decision-making power and key leadership roles, and surrounding
communities have avenues to participate in balanced collaborations and
partnerships.
2. Align campus and state budgets with educational priorities, and focus
on fulfilling the declared educational mission while meeting the direct
needs of the faculty, staff, and students who are central to it.
3. Reduce the average ratio of upper-administrator compensation to
faculty and staff compensation to an equitable standard.
4. Implement financial transparency by making available to unions and
other university stakeholders all relevant financial documents used in
the budgeting processes.
5. Categorize student workers as campus employees for pay, healthcare
benefits, and collective bargaining rights.
6. Improve the immediate working conditions for all contingent faculty
and staff via employment standards that include job security, pay
equity, healthcare and retirement benefits, caps on course loads and
section sizes, caps on case management and student services loads, safe
and harassment-free work environments, collective bargaining rights, and
shared governance.
7. End precarious contingent employment and create justly-compensated
work for all campus workers (full-time or part-time):
a. Increase full-time staff density by redefining most current
contingent and outsourced staff and service positions as benefited
full-time campus positions; prioritize moving current contingent workers
at scale into those positions.
b. Increase tenure density and establish a broad tenure standard for all
faculty that recognizes the options of teaching tenure, service tenure,
and research tenure for current instructors and faculty as well as
future hires; prioritize moving current contingent instructors and
faculty at scale into these positions; establish job security with
stable employment, pay equity, pro-rated benefits, and research access
for instructors and faculty who remain non-tenure track.
8. Establish academic freedom for all workers and students as central to
the educational mission, which has been undermined by the casualization
of labor.
COMMITMENT THREE
Action Steps Toward Commitments One and Two
We propose nationwide coordination and planning to:
1. Organize to win the College for All Act, including provisions for a
pipeline to tenure-track and full-time jobs for current contingent
faculty and staff.
2. Organize to win related legislation that increases federal and state
funding for higher education, with the goal of eliminating the student
cost of attending college while requiring institutions that receive
these funds:
a. Provide job security and promotion pipelines for non-instructional staff.
b. Move rapidly and at scale to a supermajority tenure-track teaching
and full-time instructional workforce, while guaranteeing job security
and seniority for instructors who choose not to participate in tenure.
c. Categorize undergraduate and graduate student workers as campus
employees.
d. Provide pay equity and regular raises for all campus workers.
3. Organize to win federal legislation to attach labor provisions to
existing mechanisms of federal funding (e.g. National Endowment for the
Humanities (NEH), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science
Foundation (NSF), Pell grants, etc.) to ensure that institutions honor
workers’ right to organize a union and bargain collectively in good faith.
4. Pursue federal rule-making with the Departments of Labor and
Education regarding categorizations and labor standards for contingent
and contract workers, employee status, and job definitions; tie these
rules to accreditor recognition criteria and procedures.
5. Organize to win the cancellation of student debt to repair the harm
of higher education disinvestment, which has disproportionately impacted
black, brown, indigenous, and working-class people.
6. Develop and organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and
where possible state legislation and rules that acknowledge and
dismantle the colonization and theft of Indigenous lands; create and
fully fund indigenous-led programs to recruit, retain and support
Indigenous students and faculty; establish institutional shared
governance systems that formally incorporate into decision-making the
indigenous peoples upon whose land these campuses sit and benefit from.
7. Organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and where
possible state legislation and rules that address reparations for
historical and ongoing systemic oppression and inequities, including
fundamental changes to campus policing, as part of a commitment to
building civil rights unionism and solidarity with the Black Lives
Matter movement.
8. Organize to win federal legislation, campus policies, and where
possible state legislation and rules that require our institutions to
divest from fossil fuels and invest in green construction, renewable
energy, and the end of single-use plastics.
COMMITMENT FOUR
A Unified National Movement
We commit to work and build solidarity together to fight in our
communities and across the country and its territories as a true
coordinated higher education labor movement to transform our systems and
our lives.