United Steelworkers organizer discusses importance, history of academic unions

For Robin Sowards, a United Steelworkers organizer, higher education faculty unions in the United States are not as powerful as they should be.

“Here at the University of Pittsburgh, there’s a unique opportunity not simply to contemplate history, but to make it,” Sowards said. “All of you in this room have a role potentially in shaping what that history looks like and doing something genuinely new in U.S. higher education.”

The Department of History’s Working Class History Seminar Series held an event Thursday afternoon titled “Everyone in, no one out: Academic industrial unionism and the future of higher education” in room 3702 of Posvar Hall. Robin Sowards led the seminar and discussed the history of academic unions and their applications at Pitt.

Sowards said one reason that unions do not have the amount of power he feels they should is due to them forming on a craft basis rather than an industrial one. He said craft unionism is organized by craft, such as all graduate students, as opposed to organizing all individuals in a workplace, such as all staff at Pitt.

“The first organizing in the steel industry was a sort of spontaneous-ish strike of puddlers and boilers in Pittsburgh in 1849,” Sowards said. “That right was summarily crushed. They didn’t have much in the way of, like, a sustained organized form, but lots of profoundly built grievances. In 1858, the puddlers formed a craft union, charmingly called the Sons of Vulcan.”

Sowards said iron, steel and timber workers eventually joined each others’ unions in the 1870s, which made the groups more effective in setting conditions for workers. He said similar structural factors exist in higher education, which explains why faculty should have more power.

“One is capital mobility,” Sowards said. “Can your employers pick up a factoring facility and move it, so its work can move [to] another country, right? The University of Pittsburgh is not going anywhere — very little capital mobility.”

According to Sowards, another structural factor is replaceability, which measures whether the workers could be easily substituted during strikes. He said if all of the faculty strikes, the University will have a hard time finding substitutes for lectures and labs.

“You can throw some amount of graduate students and staff in the classroom and in the lab, whatever, but not enough, not anywhere near enough,” Sowards said.

Sowards said the main source of revenue for research universities is tuition, and noted how the University cannot remain closed for weeks because they would lose that revenue. He said administrators are “very nervous” about anything that could close down the University.

“[Closure for a week] to a steel mill will be nothing but stockpiles of goods and continue selling it and stay shut for two weeks,” Sowards said. “They’ll wait you out for months. You know, a university can’t really wait out its employees.”

Sowards said tenured positions in higher education have decreased while the number of part-time positions and graduate workers has increased. He said faculty in higher education have had a hard time negotiating their standards because of their involvement with craft unions instead of industrial ones.

“Our teaching faculty are just other professionals like physicians and lawyers,” Sowards said. “You would think they would be able to sort of defend the minimum standards in their profession pretty effectively, especially given their structural power within the workplace.”

Pitt faculty could unionize in a more “systematic way,” according to Sowards. He said unions should act with intention from the start and consciously build their organization “piece by piece and unit by unit.”

“The more you search, cross-pollinate, back each other up, the more you can sort of over time build up a culture that erodes some of these barriers between groups,” Sowards said. “Those barriers are one of the main drivers of various kinds of toxic and broken up power to transform the whole university into something more democratic.”