April 27 2010
Open Letter To the Leadership of UAW 4121:
We the members of Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU) are writing to express our wholehearted endorsement of the recent letter you received from For a Democratic University (FaDU), and to encourage you to immediately begin grassroots mobilization for a strike beginning on May 3rd. We believe that without a credible threat of a strike, the administration of the University of Washington will not agree to a fair contract.
AWDU is a recently founded organization which consists of rank and file members of UAW 2865 from the University of California. We here in California have experienced the most severe budget cuts anywhere in the country, and the damage to our university had already been considerable. As you are surely aware, students and some campus unions here at UC have been in full revolt for the entire academic year as the lowest paid employees have been laid off, classes have grown in size and been cut, and ASEs are asked to take on more work responsibilities for no additional pay. We have been following the evolving situation at UW, and understand that conditions are very similar. Indeed, the crisis of public education is a national and international phenomenon. We believe that students, workers, and especially student-workers need to be on the front lines in the struggle against the continual privatization of education. The managers of public universities around the country are increasingly swayed by the logic of the free market and wish to run education like a business. We must be unequivocal in our position that we will not accept this, and that we will fight to defend public education.
Many unions around the world have been complacent for too long, and incorrectly believed that they could merely service their membership by providing regular, if modest, increases in wages and benefits. What this crisis reveals is that if unions do not involve themselves in political fights, even the modest economic gains members have enjoyed for the past couple generations will evaporate. University administrators have been attempting to use the difficult economic situation as a scapegoat for their crisis of priorities and mismanagement of the public good of higher education. Changing this situation requires that students and workers must insist on exercising collective power in determining the structure and content of the university. We already know that the autocratic managers of the university will not listen to us unless we force them to. Since we are left with no choice, then we must use force: we must strike to make our demands heard.
We would like to second what the members of FaDU said to you in their letter. The power of the strike does not end once you go on strike. Strike mobilization does indeed build power, because when it is done in a democratic manner it empowers people to feel that they can have a say in their own lives. If grassroots mobilization is done effectively, then the actual strike can be an incredibly powerful weapon against privatization and autocratic decision making by management. Each day that we refuse to teach classes, each day that undergraduates, professors, staff and other university workers stand shoulder to shoulder with us on the picket line, our strength builds and we exact a greater symbolic and material toll on the administration.
The strike not only can help us win a better contract, but it is a method for reconfiguring power relations and therefore for democratizing the university. Democratization is the only means by which we can reconstitute the public character of the university, as management has already shown that they will push ahead with full privatization if left to their own devices.
We are in this fight together. When the call for a day of action to defend public education on March 4th grew out of a mass democratic conference here at Berkeley, we were excited to see that students and workers in Washington and around the country took it as an opportunity to take action. This of course is not a coincidence as the crisis of capitalism has affected all of us, albeit in different ways. We need to maintain our common commitment to resisting privatization and ensuring that all people in this country, regardless of race, class, or nation of origin have access to free quality public education, and that the people who make the university work have good, secure jobs and benefits. Now, the call to action has come from the students at UW, who will go on strike on May 3rd in solidarity with ASEs represented by UAW 4121. Therefore we endorse the call for immediate grassroots strike mobilization of the members of UAW 4121, and we stand in solidarity with all students and workers at UW.
In Struggle,
Academic Workers for a Democratic Union
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