 Welcome everybody. Welcome to the Future Trends Forum. I'm delighted to see you all here today. We have two fantastic guests on an incredibly important topic, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. We've been talking about academic labor pretty much since the very beginning of our program. We've been talking about it in all kinds of terms, academic freedom, what happens with tenure, what happens with adjuncts, and also not just faculty, just looking at staff from IT to libraries to senior administration. But what we haven't done is we haven't really taken a deep dive into how to organize academic work. What does it mean to form a union in a campus or to fight for union, and what does it mean to organize in a state where you can't legally organize a union? I'm so excited to not just address this topic, but to do it with two awesome people. We have with us Helena Worthen and Joe Berry from the West Coast. Both are lifelong labor educators, organizers, and now, in a so-called retirement, are busy trying to organize all of American higher education's academic workforce as they put it from wall to wall and from coast to coast. They're also the authors of a great new book, which you can see a link to on the bottom left of the screen called Power Despite Precarity from Pluto Press, which I really, really recommend. So let me start off by bringing up Helena and putting her on stage so you can see and talk with her. Good afternoon or good morning, Helena. Good morning. It's late morning right now. You asked, what does it mean to organize in higher education? Yes. And I'm not the person to answer that question. I would say that the... what it means has to come from the people who are doing it at the bottom. And so organizing sessions like this or other sessions where people can talk to each other and figure out the vocabulary, the language, the kinds of arguments, the meanings of what people want is the first thing to do. Which means stirring things up a lot and getting a lot of conversation going. I will move this to Joe because the way we work tends to be a constant conversation back and forth and I suspect that he can put something in at this moment. Understood. I will bring Joe up right now. Hang on one second. By the way, I love the dragon behind you. So do I. And welcome to Joe Berry. Good morning on the West Coast. Good morning. Good to see you. Good to see you. Let me organize things so that everyone can see the two of you. Joe, I think you heard. Helena was just talking about what it means to organize and she was describing the importance of paying attention to the grassroots at the bottom up where people can learn the language and the tactics and strategy. And then she threw the ball to you. Well, I think there's two levels to answer that question. One, we can't answer. And the second comes out of every individual and collective struggle. The part we can't answer is the, is the generically what it means through, you know, and the answer also was a collective answer, but it comes from the collective movement knowledge over the years that we have attempted to distill and be the funnel for both from reading of organizing in this sector and in other sectors all across the country and the world and history, you know, all the way back to the beginnings of organizing the oppressed and more specifically the organizing the oppressed under capitalism, you know, in the last 300 years or so, and more specifically the oppressed in the academic world. So generically, I would say organizing is, you know, the elevator speech one liner is to, for the powerless to come together to achieve that which none of them can achieve by themselves in the struggle against those who determine, who otherwise determine the terms of our labor specifically and our existence generally. I mean, that's what popular organizing is. You talk about organizing among the 1%, that's a different question. But, and we would, as we explicitly say in our book, go further than that and say not only to organize, you know, the things that we, to get the things we need that we can't get otherwise, but to recognize that that requires not just organizing for specific gains, which are very important in the short term, wages, benefits, job security, but also larger questions of, and recognition of the fact that our work, the conditions of our work and our lives are likewise the conditions of our students because we're not working on widgets, we're working on things and that, you know, our lack of academic freedom, is there lack of academic freedom, our lack of freedom to teach and research freely, is there lack of freedom to learn? And so we, and even more broadly than that, we explicitly say in the book that we believe that for this to be fully achieved for us and for our students individually and collectively, we're going to need the whole system to change, the higher ed system and in fact the social system. We're socialists and we don't hide that. That's the generic answer. The specific answer is exactly as Helen has said it, that we, you know, has to be starting with listening in the situation that people are in and it's only, we believe, only through time and interaction and the whole dialectics of collective learning that people can come to see that what we really need in our situation is in fact larger, you know, the whole banana, larger systemic change too. We specifically try to address this in our book in the section called Troublesome Questions, which are questions that definitely do not want an answer for quickly and want an answer for them coming from above or it's not the kind of thing you want to ask staff. You know, if you are just sitting there in some department in Ohio, for example, which is actually where I'm from, and you are experiencing a sense of terrible trouble and remorse and anxiety about your job in a college or a university and you just have a couple of people to talk to, you do not want somebody to answer these questions by saying X, Y, and Z is true and X, Y, and Z is not true. You want to work through these questions. They're supposed to stir things up and trouble you and actually it's much more important to create a coherent group out of the discussion than it is to get an answer. So this is definitely a question of process of investigation of co-determination. Yeah. And the building of a collective, the building of the collective, the building of the movement, the building of potential power is much more important than any tactical struggle. I would argue even the struggle for state power as we have seen that people can win state power and then lose it or have it distorted or have its goals changed. We have plenty of that to the 20th century. Indeed. We hope that the 21st century might be somewhat different in that regard. Well, let me pause you both just for one second. This is fantastic and just for people who are new to the forum, let me just say we're beginning our conversation. I'm going to ask our guests another question but then I want to turn it over to all of you. I would love to hear your questions and your thoughts for our guests. So what questions do you have for Joe and for Helena? So again, remember the very bottom of the screen? You can type them into the chat but better yet type them into the Q&A box or click the raised hand button so you can ask us out loud, in person, face to face as it were. This is after all your space. So the question I would ask you both now is what does it mean to organize an entire campus, an entire college and university? Well, that's the motto and goal of HALU, Higher Education Labor United, which has popped up in the last two years and I have no idea whose brainchild it actually was. By the time Joe and I became conscious of it, it was already pumping along in a very healthy way. And the motto of Higher Education Labor United, HALU, is wall to wall and coast to coast. And that is a utopian vision. It is, and I think one of the wonderful things about it, it is radical enough. It doesn't have any back wall. It just says we're going to keep going until we've got everybody. And that raises all kinds of central questions about what is knowledge? Who knows what? Who decides what is really good and what isn't good? Does the custodian know something that the professor needs to learn? What kind of knowledge is accumulating over the years by somebody who has been a clerical worker in an academic office for 15 years? I mean, who really knows how to run the university and how is that knowledge being used and shared? So I would say that what does it mean to organize a whole college or university? It really means revolutionizing some of our ideas about status and the kind of knowledge that matters. And I would argue that given the climate catastrophe, we need to rethink what knowledge matters. I'm all ears in that last point. So we're talking about organizing staff of all kinds from custodians to senior administrators to faculty, and that includes the tenure track, as well as the adjunct population, which is the biggest one. It does. You can just imagine how complicated that is. Student workers as well? I would insert, though, a clarification to that. Please. I hate to do that with the interviewer. Oh, by the way, I am missing a tooth in the front because I just had oral surgery and I can't put my temporary dental replacement back in. Oh, no. I'm fine, but it's disturbing to look at. And so I want to explain it to people so that they would know that this was a temporary condition. And luckily, with adequate money and dental insurance, I am able to get a dental implant and the proper care, which most people can't afford, unfortunately. True. So I wanted to give an example and answer your question, but also correct your question. We are not talking about organizing bosses. Senior administrators, trustees in their function as board of trustees and, you know, in top managers, we don't use the term administrators because administrators, a lot of administrators are not bosses. In fact, there's administrators unions and those people are workers doing useful administrative work. I know the common term and this is straightening out the terminology as part of organizing wall to wall, coast to coast because the terminology has come to reflect both the delusions of meritocracy and the deeply ingrained, you know, structural level of higher education, which are, you know, just almost as bad as healthcare and reflected the corporate system. So we're interested in organizing the 95% of people who work in higher ed who are part of the working class as a part of broader working class movement explicitly. That's why we focus on people as labor what they spend most of their time doing. And then by extension, who can be our closest allies in that? And we would argue the first level of allies are our students, are the students at the institution. But so with that, I would then say the best example of that are the nascent campus labor coalitions that have sprung up around the country uniting what are multiple unions on many campuses and very, very few campuses, 100% of the campus working class is organized. None springs my media. Some come very close and some it's virtually zero. But in all of it, there is more than one union. This is a reflection of the national situation for being 13 unions representing workers in higher education. And we say higher including higher education affiliated healthcare system, which are major in the healthcare system in quotes that we have in the United States. So these campus labor coalitions are varying in level. Some of them have almost achieved joint bargaining. Some of them have achieved open bargaining to each other. And people sitting on other people's tables, some of them have achieved lining up some of their contracts at the same time so that they reach their maximum leverage capacity with the employer, public or private, this point doesn't matter, at the same time, rather than allowing the employer to play them off against each other, which like in the film industry has historically been done by getting directors to sign chiefs and then using that as a lever against the actors and writers and the outside technicians and other workers. And that didn't work this time, partly because of the solidarity between the actors and the writers and partly because the directors didn't settle as cheap but they went right close to the right deadline. And the whole level of struggle was better. The same is true in campus labor coalitions. The example that we are most familiar with is Illinois where we are both labor educators and stretch the edge of our paid job to be the advisors and labor educators for what was one of the largest collections of unions at one of the largest employers in the state. So it was completely legitimate, but it was also our employer, right? And we had a boss on our job who wasn't always happy by our work with the campus labor coalition. I bet. Either as delegates or in my case as a, you know, as their in-house consultant and labor educator. But the University of Illinois or Banna-Champaign campus labor coalition was able to support the first successful strike at that university ever that won grad students, not surprisingly. And then on the power of that demonstrated solidarity with that strike, three more contracts were settled in three more contracts were settled. I'm sorry, I got a call coming in. I'm trying to get rid of. Understood. You'll forgive me. Three more contracts were settled on the political capital that had been raised by that legitimate, by that strike. Wow. And now serious strike threats allowed the other unions to be able to settle on the eve of a strike, but with a serious, gave their strike threat a serious measure and also made it more encouraging to their members. Well, we can vote to strike. It's not a hopeless thing. We're not just walking off the cliff. We might win. You know, it's possible. And that has been reproduced. That experience has been reproduced, you know, most recently in the California grad student strike where they got good support from other organizations on campus, certainly at the strike at New School and the strike at Columbia and all around. And many of them never get above the waterline because they're legitimate strike threats that work. And a strike threat that works is almost as good as a strike. Not quite because you need a strike periodically to demonstrate both to your members and to your boss to rebuild that political capital, you know. And this is true of the broader labor movement as well. We can talk about all of labor history in that context of the up surges and down surges and the living off of past struggles capital. But Helu is an attempt to take that notion from a very positive experience, partial though it was at Rutgers and also a similar experience, which is going on right now, by the way, at Portland State. They're on the very edge of the strike right now, the adjuncts, but they've got coalition work. But it was people from Portland State and Rutgers who sparked and out of the organization, Higher Ed Labor, New Deal for Higher Education, who sparked the gathering of Higher Ed Labor online with hundreds of people that gave birth to Helu. And it's an attempt, Helu itself is an attempt to take this campus labor coalition notion and spread it wall to wall and coast to coast to build a Higher Ed Labor movement out of these 13 unions who basically don't speak with one voice for us at all. And they don't have the capacity to, they don't have the incentive to. We're not trying to undermine them. We're trying to supplement what their work is, and to build the collective power of all Higher Ed Labor vis-a-vis the boss. All Higher Ed Labor. All Higher Ed Labor. I mean, we are a major sector. We are a bigger employment sector than steel. We are a bigger employment sector than auto. We are the biggest employment sector in many metropolitan areas, Boston for one. But in the top five or 10 in almost every major metropolitan area. And we punch way below our weight because we don't have a single spokesperson. So by default, the bosses get to speak for Higher Ed as if it's a non-class, you know, outside of the rest of society ivory tower, which both can make it a bad target. It can be a privilege, but it can also be a target, which we're seeing now with the prestige of Higher Ed declining in many sectors of the population, and legitimately so, because it's been led by, you know, people who don't believe in the tradition of Higher Ed as a, especially public Higher Ed as a collective good. I mean, it's always been a terrain of struggle, but that's a struggle. And so that's what we face. Well, thank you for seeing all of this. This is fantastic. This is definitely a labor education going on live right now. And I'm so sorry to hear about your mouth. I'm glad that you're in no pain and that you... I'm fine. And clearly you have no problem with speech. Let me just quickly ask the audience. This is, again, a time for your questions and for your comments. I wanted to share one comment or one question that came, rather, from a big fan of yours. This is from Don Charlis from Higher Ed Inquirer. He can't make it today, but he wanted to say first, thank Helena and Joe for their service to the working class. And second, ask them what it will take to unite adjuncts with student loan debtors. We're finding out right now. Hailu is working on that. There's an outreach from the debt collective that has made a connection with the Contingency Task Force and the discussions are beginning. So at this point, an answer to that question is hypothetical, but we're trying to do it. The generic answer is we need to build a joint movement and have all the people involved in the movement as it grows understand that fundamentally it's the same movement. We have not just a common enemy, but a common commitment to, you know, higher ed as a social good that therefore should be paid for socially by progressive taxation and not an individual commodity purchased for the purpose of personal upward mobility or whatever other purpose by individuals and their parents and other family members who can be coerced into contributing to it. But it's, you know, it's obviously it's the right thing to do. Yeah, I mean, that's part of that first layer of allies because these are students or in this case, ex-students, many of whom have been treated tremendously badly, especially in the for-profit sector. They've been on the front edge of this and they've actually won some court victories, limited, but they've won some court victories as these for-profit institutions are much less stable and go up and down. They were the biggest sector in higher education 10 years ago and the fastest growing. And now they have shrunk for good reason, but that's what our contingent faculty are really important in that regard because we move around. Many of us have taught in all the sectors, you know, from adult ed, extension work to universities to community colleges to liberal arts colleges to the for-profit sector. I myself have taught in all of those sectors as a non-tenure track contingent faculty member. Almost none of my tenure track colleagues have had that experience. They do not collectively have the knowledge to understand the whole thing and therefore to understand who our strategic allies are in their gut. We do collectively that contingent and that's the contribution that the contingent faculty sector can make to the broader higher ed labor movement, the particular that and our consciousness of inequality because it's so much more striking in our sub-sector, the faculty sub-sector than almost any other sub-sector of the higher ed labor force. And we have pushed that and especially in California where the issue of debt is a recent issue because we had pre-higher education, you know, higher education in this generation. We just lost it in this generation. In fact, today, California's state system just voted to increase tuition 6% a year for the next five years. Yeah, the CSU system, which is the very system we use is our case study in our book. And there'll be, there's serious pushback against that. There's a struggle. And part of that struggle is there is the consistently correct position of the union to fight for free tuition. And likewise in the community colleges, the California Federation of Teachers Community College Council was the last man standing in the fight against community college tuition in California. Everybody else eventually signed off on low tuition, you know, made a deal essentially that they wouldn't oppose it anymore if it was only $5 a credit or something. But we knew the community college council of the California Federation of Teachers, of whom the majority are contingent, we knew that this was the camel's nose under the tent. Just as the rise of contingency in the 70s was the camel's nose under the tent for disempowering the faculty. Indeed. Well, thank you. So the question was how to connect student debt and adjuncts? Student debtors with adjuncts. Student debtors. Okay. One thing I would say is that this group that we're talking with right now can do a lot towards figuring out how to explain why that should be a priority strategy. This is the situation we are in now. You know, it's visualizing the problem, defining it. I mean, I didn't know somebody outside this conversation was thinking about this. But, you know, to bring it in and try to figure out the exact words to frame the problem and then to try to figure out how to actually, you know, how to actually make it happen down to the really concrete stuff, like who's going to do what? Well, that sounds like lowercase D democracy right there. Thank you, Don. And, Don, thank you for your work, of course, at the High Ridge Enquirer. Thank you both, Elena and Joe, for your really, really good answers to this. We have questions coming in that I'd like to share. Here's one coming from Wisconsin. John Hollenbeck, he asks this. I found in both my music and academic careers that actual workers' support rarely rises above 50%. How does Halu expect to be wall-to-wall when the problems of academia aren't bad enough? What does he mean by aren't bad enough? Yeah, John, if you'd like to either join us on stage, let me know so you can respond in real-time, or if you want to just type in text, then I can display that on the screen. Oh, he'll come on. Hang on a second. Let me just add him to the screen. Hello, John. Hello, all. Good to see you. Important discussion. I was in the Cal State system, both as a student and as a faculty member at San Francisco State. And I will say, first of all, as I said earlier, it saved my career to have a union. I was almost hounded out of there for no good reason. But anyway, the real-world problem then, and as far as I see it now, always was, it seemed like slightly less than 50% of faculty were members of the union, of the California Teachers Association. And that was, in the music union, you had to be part of it to work, but the support was incredibly low. And I always say that it was like things were not bad enough because people more or less could get by on what they had. Now, well, I'll stop there. That's what I meant by that. Conditions could have been better, but apparently they weren't bad enough to cause collective action. And I think that's kind of, well, there's that, and there's also just the feeling about unions among a lot of people, that there's some kind of evil, some kind of socialism, some kind of another kind of corporation run by the powerful against us and all that other kind of stuff. There's a lot of stuff about unions that needs to be overcome before we can start really thinking 100% membership in my opinion. Well, that's certainly true, but I would argue that bad conditions, although they may cause a trigger moment, in my own case, there was a moment when I was treated very badly when I went and talked to the union and the union organized me. So for me, there was a trigger moment of how bad something had become. But generally speaking, I think what organizes people is hope rather than despair. Because in despair, you can't really do much. It's hard to lift a spoon to your mouth in the state of real despair. But once your imagination begins to get stirred by hope, which comes from other people, beautiful views out the window are nice, but it's actually connections with other human beings that motivate people and enable and grow a culture of hope. So I would suggest that in a union where people are feeling hopeless and angry and exploited by their own union, the first thing to do is to find a breath of hope which may be very, very little at the beginning. It may be very small, but it needs to be nurtured and encouraged. And academics are good at doing that, actually. We have the practice of being imaginative and communicating imagination to each other. It's true. I would just add to that that all organizing is a movement of the scales from fear and fatalism that people feel that keeps them from getting together and acting together and hope and courage on the other side. And moving the grain of sand from one to the other is our job, and it can start very small. But the wonderful thing about it is the principle of inertia. Once that scale starts moving, it's not just one plus one equals two. One plus one can equal three or four, because you've got motion then. You've got a collective activity. I don't think that... And that's sort of our global job in organizing. I don't think the worse the better. Historically, struggles and revolutions have never actually begun and mostly led by the people on the very bottom. The level of oppression of people on the very, very bottom is such that they don't have the headspace or the material space or the time space. Generally, there are exceptions to be the main sparks and leaders. It's usually a layer up of people who have a little more privileged position within the working class who can more easily see a little bigger picture, see, be exposed to bigger ideas, have enough time and mental energy to think about it, and then begin the organizing process. In factories, that was often the people who ran the parts around the factory because they had more contacts with people and saw how the whole system operated. I would argue that that role is going to be played to a great extent by continuing to tackle it. Right, yeah. Because we think of ourselves as the very bottom, but in fact, we're not. The outsourced minimum wage cafeteria worker is the bottom. The student worker making less than minimum wage on work study and having to borrow thousands of dollars to go to school is the bottom. We flatter ourselves to think we're the worst off because we didn't get the brass ring of tenure. But in fact, we're not the bottom and we shouldn't be looking at oppression Olympics anyway. The other thing I would suggest is, it's always been a minority that begins. A committee of two is more than, like I say, more than one plus one because it's a geometric growth, not just merely additive because people act in their energies and the dialectic between them produces something new. I think the biggest problem in organizing academics is the same thing. It's the biggest problem organizing people anywhere is fear and after that fatalism. And we also have the problem of professionalism in higher education. But that's less true among contingents who are now the majority in the CSU system unfortunately as well as most other places. Believing that to be a professional means to not engage in collective action but to engage in individual upward mobility meritocracy system behavior. And we've made a lot of progress in changing that but as my father used to say, the carpenters figured out over 100 years ago that they needed a union but the people with master's degrees and PhDs took them a lot longer. He was a teacher. And I just add that it's always a minority that generates the activity. Our real study of the history of the contingent group, the lectured group and CSU system from the first time we became a substantial group in the 70s up through the 2000s is we think demonstrates the fact that even without the Janus decision that now made all public employment open shop nobody's got an agency shop or required union membership anymore in the public sector in the United States. And that was true earlier in most sectors including California up until the 80s 90s they've gotten majority membership and continually up and down but generally speaking more and more level of participation including debates and disagreements. What is the percentage of faculty who belong to the California Teachers Association right now? Well, you're referring to California Teachers Association which is the statewide affiliate of the CFA but it's not anymore. California Faculty Association is your union. It's been years, I forget all the terms. They've disaffiliated from the NEA and the CTA but it's the California Faculty Association. At the time we wrote the book which was two years ago I think they were at approximately 80%, wasn't that right Helena? Yeah. Voluntary membership. I want to loop back to the original question about how hard things have to be in order to get people active and then my response which was they get active by being infused with hope and I do want to say that the flip side of this is to make sure you acknowledge is that you can be a Pollyanna about how cool it is to organize and when my heart sinks sometimes when I see students engaging in their first strike preparation without really grasping that they're entering a fight where the fear is reasonable. People will get laid off they'll get fired, they'll get disciplined and ultimately the fight of workers against capitalist employers is a fight that you can get killed in so the fear is you have to educate people that their fear is well grounded as well as inspire them with the hope that collective activity is basically the way things are going to get better. Thank you. Thank you both. John, thank you for the really good question. Thank you. And I appreciate your back story too. Friends, we have a couple of more questions and I want to make sure that we get a chance to ask them before we run out of time because this is terrific. Joe and Helen, this is just great learning from you. We've got a lot of support in the chat by the way. A lot of people are just saying yes, you're right, applause and they really like what you're saying. Here's a question about practical organization and this comes from our friend Joseph. What are the complications that can exist when a university faculty organizes under an existing union like the UAW or Teamsters? That's a good one. Yeah, say it again, please. I just noticed that a good friend is in the chat here and I'm surprised to see him. Of course. What are the complications that can exist when a university faculty organizes under an existing union like the UAW or the Teamsters? Who wants to handle that? Let's have Joe deal with that. Okay. The complications can be positive and negative. Complication can be a positive or a negative word. As Helena has often taught me when looking at her bailiwick, which is fiction and stories, is that being complicated can be a compliment. The obvious negative complications can be that first people say, well, why should we join them? We have to have auto workers or service employees or electrical workers or communications workers just to name some of the unions that have organized faculty and faculty like positions in higher education. So that's a complication that has to be overcome through practice and discussion with the base. There's also the problem that many of those non-traditional unions in higher education, the traditional unions being AFT, Federation of Teachers, NEA, National Education Association and AUD, American Association of University Professors, which has recently affiliated with AFT just last year, that outside of those unions, the other 10 unions that have organized that's not their specialty and they don't have the same base of knowledge of the sector. Now, it's not as big and different as people think because except for AUP, the traditional education unions were majority K-12, were less than 25% of both of them, way less in NEA, maybe 15-20% in the AFT, maybe a little more with the addition of the AUP members now. But we're the ward on the elephant's ass basically. In all of these unions, actually the union where we have the highest percentage of members, higher workers in general, is now the UAW with their tremendous growth among graduate employees and very high among the unilateral workers which has organized some big deals with graduate employees as well. But nevertheless, that's a factor. What you can get from them in terms of collective expertise. Now, the positive is these unions have a tradition, some of these unions have a tradition of industrial organizing and viewing the workforce as the appropriate group and that's the culture of their union. That's true of the UAE, that's true of the UAW. It's becoming true more and more of SEIU although it started out as a craft union. So that's positive and the culture of that union has been on display in some of these recent grads. Both ways, both support for the grad workers mobilizing in support now in the case of UAW with the struggle with the big three. Tremendous mobilization around that and especially coming from people who come to conventions mobilizing and feeling that way. So it's plus and a minus. It is important to say though that to not let the traditional academic unions off the hook, they all began as militant craft unions who were not janitors the educated people in the K-12 column certificated in the higher ed called faculty or other professional titles and the root of that is elitism. The root of that is not positive professionalism in seeing yourself as a professional worker as part of the working class but elitism in the guild mentality as we call it the exclusion mentality that we get what we are by excluding other people and that's a heritage that needs to be overcome and because of that heritage especially attitudes from that toward contingent faculty, toward non-faculty employees and especially toward contracted out and contingent staff in general that meant that the traditional academic faculty union were not interested in organizing them for the most part and most of the bargaining units certainly among contingent faculty and also among other higher ed staff exist in the way they do because the traditional academic unions ignored them or refused them admission in many cases or actually opposed their organization in some cases. Yes militantly and in some cases at a state and national level you know specifics on request but so that's why I say that the answer to that question is a mixed heritage and we're trying to make some new history now but I mean HELLO is an inside-outside strategy we're trying to organize outside the existing academic existing union an entire larger movement so that it also will exercise so that we can speak as one voice you know to government and employees generally in the sector but also so we can exercise some pressure on the national unions that haven't lived up to their potential for the workforce and cause them to engage in more collaborative and behavior than the previous hundred years has demonstrated that they're not likely to without some outside pressure from the base and like burning says the change always comes from the bottom ultimately if you look at the history carefully enough the change always comes from the bottom never from the bottom we have had one presidential candidate in the last hundred years who's been willing to say that out loud which is pretty important I agree a big fan Joe, first of all, Eleanor thank you for tossing that to Joe Joe thank you for catching and wielding that such a fantastic answer and oh please go ahead Eleanor I could add something and I think one of the complications of allowing oneself and one's local organizing committee to become part of the UAW or the Teamsters or SEIU or any of the big unions is a union democracy problem that people are probably wary of when they think about the history of these big unions and that it's very important if you are part of the organizing committee and you're thinking of inviting unions to come and do a beauty contest and show you what they've got and how they will support you or not support you which is something that they should do and have done is to remember very very clearly the original language in labor law in both in North Slugardia and the National Labor Relations Act that the purpose of organizing the union is to have the purpose of collective bargaining and concerted activity and self-organized not be organized either by the boss or by some other group some other union and also to have representatives of your own choosing so keeping that at the top of your mind will you be able to truly self-organize and will you be able to have representatives of your own choosing when it comes down to negotiating either with the union into which you are getting organized or the boss with whom you are going to try to negotiate your contract well thank you that's a very very important detail to add Helena Joe do you have time for one more question we can be here all day you guys well okay well this is a big one and this comes from a dear friend of ours coming to you from the Houston, Texas area and Tom Hames asks a typically deep question which is how does digitization such as location independent remote teaching impact unionization does a more distributed labor force make organization more difficult I think it is I think that we've seen new opportunities arise and we've we've lost the warmth of meeting in a church basement or in somebody's office late at night and having a piece of it together but HALU HALU would not exist without digitization because it's it's possible to have a national movement rising in real time and you know to have have zoom meetings even with if some people are traveling all over the world people can get together and talk and you know we've learned a new culture of how to behave and how to interact digitally on zoom and you know how to do emails how to do google groups mm-hmm we are of course much more dependent on technical people with technical capabilities I recognize one of our one of our important helpers who's in this group right now I don't think I'll call her out by name but I want you to I want to thank her for being here close to whoever that is so I would say I would say that overall it's a plus I mean we're in a moment because digitization has not delivered the immediate promise of more democracy that it had back in the 90s I mean it it creates a handle that can be controlled by somebody with the power to control it so it's it's not it's not what we pictured back in the days the whole earth catalog mm-hmm which I was skeptical of even at the time but but on the other hand Helu could not be happening if we were relying on postal mail or people driving around in cars and staying overnight on people's sofas and having conversations that way interesting thank you I would just add the I think the both sides and is another example of you know the dialectical wheel never quits you know the contradictions create a new a new situation and whether it's better or worse depends on the the power of the struggle of the two sides of the dialectic the contradiction that comes together what gets created out of that that's new you know is redone every every every click of the wheel and and our digitization both in teaching and in organizing is both an opportunity and and a tremendous threat but one of the one of the dangers is there's the danger like people had in the 90's and 80's and some still do looking for the technological fix for what is fundamentally a social political economic power problem an inequality problem looking for the easy fix technological fix that's a danger and another danger is for people to forget how that the essence of building political power for us for the for the majority who have no individual political power is the relationships between us the essence of a union is not recognition by the boss recognition by the state legalization by the laws the essence of the union is the coming together of people in a relationship solidarity which means unity in action to defend each other against a common foe that's the essence of a union essence of any political progressive political organization but I'll stick to unions for a moment that's the essence of it everything else is just the decorations on the Christmas tree but that's the trunk and we shouldn't forget that and we shouldn't let people in power tell us you can't have a union because you don't we don't have a law or you don't or you can't have a union because we don't have collective bargaining law this was a question from a guy from Texas too yes we do we're collective bargaining explicitly as illegal but people have found ways around that if they generate enough power they've signed various limited metamars agreements in K-12 districts I know in Houston and some other places and have managed to force some ad hoc bargaining on local campuses in different places and you can always organize and you can always make things better that's the essence of it and that's the answer to the broader to the broader question as well seems to me thank you both for those great answers and Tom as always thank you so much for that really really deep question that is so productive and I would just like to say that people who are trying to fight collectively not just individually because you'll get smacked down but trying to fight collectively on all fronts whether it's legal, legislative, direct action on an institutional level whatever in places where things are really hard right now like Texas, like Florida especially but also in places where they didn't expect to have this a few years ago like Wisconsin and Iowa and Ohio and Indiana you know those people are real heroes and need to be held up as such and learned from not just be told what to do by people who are at this moment somewhat more spaces with somewhat more democratic space in it like you know like New York and Illinois and California Washington and Oregon we're not people who should be telling people as much as asking questions as Helen has said in the very first answer and learning from people and seeing ourselves as a common movement with tremendous variations but and the people who are choosing to not apply for jobs other places and leave but rather stay in fright those people are real heroes I think that's a fantastic fantastic note to end on because we are actually just over the edge of the hour I have to say Joe, Helena you both are both so inspiring, so energetic and also reflect such deep wisdom and knowledge thank you both so much for all of your great discussion today what's the best way to keep up with your work by following HALU or anything else HighlandLiberated.org for sure I'm involved in I'm involved in the coalition of contingent academic labor international.org very good and we if you want to put our personal our emails up we're happy to talk to people I got to call it 2 o'clock this afternoon from a guy who's trying to organize a big unorganized unit in the University of California system of thousands of people that still hasn't been organized and to try and talk to him about organizing that so we would encourage people to you can put that or we can put it in a chat and finally also I want to the labor notes which many people may have heard of is a publication and a network and a labor education group and a lot of other things does a weekly discussion for higher public labor and run by Barbara Mandeloni who's a staff member there was a former president of the Massachusetts teacher association on a reform slate and taught both in higher ed and in K-12 wonderful discussion floating discussion answering questions the same kind of questions people asked here from the point of view of the rank and file should be the highest body in a democratic focus and they run this weekly discussion so I would encourage people to check that out as well email Barbara Mandeloni at labornotes.org Mandeloni or Mandeloni M-A-N-D-E-L-O-N-I but if you just go onto the labor notes website you can find her M-Excellent, well thank you again and thank you both this is so rich there's a wonderful book by Chris Newfield about defunding public higher education and the very end of it he says perhaps the thing that happens is we change from an individualistic sense of higher education towards a sense of the public good and you two have shown us one way that way thank you both so much we'll have to have you back again now friends before we go let me just point out where things are headed and thank you all for your questions and thoughts and by the way in the chat people who are still left let me know if you'd object to me sharing some of the chat anonymized I'd be happy to do that if you want to keep talking about these questions about how to organize faculty, staff and students on campus please I use the hashtag F-T-T-E and here are my handles on Twitter and Mastodon if you'd like to look into our previous sessions that discuss some of these issues just go to tinyurl.com slash FTFarchive and you can find some there looking ahead we have sessions coming up on meeting unmet student needs on how to ungrade on what's happening with academic Twitter and what's going out the EDUCAUSE conference just go to our website forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more and thank you again everyone for a terrific hour of conversation I really appreciate all the thoughts we put into this all the information shared I hope all of you are well on this latter part of 2023 I hope you're all safe working hard and we'll see you next time on the line take care bye bye