By Madeleine Monson-Rosen
After contingent faculty at Loyola University Chicago voted to unionize in 2016, negotiations for their first contract dragged on for a frustrating two years. Finally, in April 2018, professors fed up with stalled negotiations and low pay decided to walk off the job.
This brief strike quickly shifted the balance of power. Shortly after the walkout concluded, contingent faculty ratified their first contract, which included substantial victories: increased job security, $900 fees for instructors when their courses are abruptly canceled, and pay increases of as much as 51 percent.
This walkout wasn’t only a strike, though. It was also a demonstration, planned jointly by the union, student activists, and the Poor People’s Campaign, marking a season of struggle and solidarity between workers and students. For faculty, the strike was a rebuke to Loyola’s administration, which persisted in inserting “poison pill” language into the contract. For students the walkout was a response to incidents of police brutality and racism on campus.
The strike and student demonstration received substantial media coverage, but not much discussion of what brought these groups together. For some insight, I spoke to my friend and former colleague Snezana Zabic, an adjunct writing professor at Loyola, about what made the effort there so successful.
Zabic is a veteran of the contingent faculty labor struggle. She has participated in three successful union fights, once as a grad student at the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), whose graduate workers’ union negotiated its first contract in 2007, and then with UIC’s faculty union (representing all full-time faculty) in 2012.
For Zabic, that one-day strike at Loyola represented the best kind of solidarity. Loyola’s striking faculty committed to supporting student activists in an ongoing struggle against racism on campus, and students showed up to support instructors, amplifying their demands for better wages and reasonable schedules. The administration employed the same tactics in both fights: delaying, refusing accountability, and then pretending confusion about why both groups were increasingly active.
This strategy backfired, however, and served to build support between the two groups rather than pitting them against each other. Student and faculty organizers deployed the hashtags #timesuployola and #notmyloyola in order to communicate the struggle and build support on social media. This public show of solidarity online was one way that students and faculty built support both on and off campus, while Loyola administrators seemed to think if they ignored activists they—and their demands—would just go away.
In its negotiations with the union, Loyola administrators seemed to depend, alternately, on delaying negotiations and fighting for small symbolic “victories” for management—for example, excluding theology faculty from the union on religious grounds. Zabic recalls, “Until almost the end, they were successful in arguing that theology department adjuncts don’t have the right to be a part of the unit, but theology faculty just kept coming to meetings.” According to Zabic, Loyola’s administration seemed to think if they delayed, or insisted on language that divided the workers, faculty would lose the support of students and parents.
But in fact, the opposite occurred. Zabic characterized Loyola’s strategy this way: “The calculation is that either you threaten to strike but then you don’t and then you look weak, or you do strike and then you lose support of the students and parents. But that didn’t happen at Loyola, because we did strike and we did get support from students and parents.”
For Zabic, the lesson of the strike and the student protests is clear. “We supported them and they supported us,” says Zabic, “solidarity in action.” Those of us working to build power for contingent academic workers should also take this to heart: this solidarity in action urges us to see the fight to organize contingent academics as part of a larger struggle: against police brutality on and off campus, and against institutions determined to exploit faculty and students alike.
Read the rest of Issue 1 here.
College Labor News 