Wall-to-Wall Unionizing on Campus: A Powerful Way to Change

In the inaugural post of Precarity and Philosophy, I discussed the nature of personal and collective responsibility within our institutions. I suggested addressing the structural injustice of precarity means including all those who work at the university, from adjunct lecturers to maintenance staff. If we come to see how endemic precarity really is, we will also see more clearly the deep sense in which it is a moral harm and how the institutions where we work can also be places of widespread exploitation.

Changing things, however, takes more than recognizing moral harms. In this interview, I discuss the ins and outs of solidarity and union work with Alex Wolf-Root. Alex has been organizing with labor unions at the University of Colorado since 2016, first as a graduate student and now as an adjunct lecturer. He is a founding member of United Campus Workers Colorado, a “wall-to-wall” union for all workers at the University of Colorado. And he is currently serving as Vice President of CWA Local 7799, which represents Public Workers for the Public Good at the University of Colorado, Denver Public Libraries, Denver Health, and UCHealth, to do his part to make sure that solidarity among the working class spreads well across job classifications and industries.

In this interview, I ask Alex how he understands precarity, how wall-to-wall solidarity works, and how union work can yield real change. Talking to Alex gave me the chance to see in more detail what union work is like and what it can do for us and our colleagues.

Thanks for doing this interview, Alex. To get us started, could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Thanks for having me Sidra!

I’m a Lecturer – that’s our term for “adjunct” – at the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder), where I earned my PhD in 2020. I’m broadly an applied ethicist and I specialize in the philosophy of sport. That said, I’ll always have a sweet spot for some of the classic analytic metaphysics issues that initially drew me to philosophy; this year I’ve had the great pleasure of teaching our brand-new intro-level metaphysics and epistemology course, and I’ve been doing so in part through film, which has been a blast. Though that’s a conversation for another time!

But as much as I love teaching – and as much as it seems students like taking my classes – I’m “just an adjunct.” Although I’m lucky in that many of my departmental colleagues value me and my fellow adjuncts, our institution does not.

How do you understand precarity at universities? 

I understand precarity as the lack of security in our profession. As reported by Inside Higher Ed several years back, “[s]ome 73 percent of all faculty positions are off the tenure track,” meaning that most of us teaching at colleges and universities lack important employment security. While it is true that many non-tenured/tenure track faculty (non-TT) are on longer-term contracts, sometimes in teaching-specific lines, this does not carry the employment security that many outside the academy might think it does or the employment security that might exist at many other sorts of jobs. 

For those of us who teach on a course-by-course or semester-by-semester basis, the precariousness of the situation is palpable. The lack of certainty about employment for future semesters makes planning life quite difficult. How do you plan your life if you don’t know whether you’ll have a steady paycheck the next semester? How can you open up to the possibility of deep human connections and relationships knowing that a “successful” trajectory over the next several years might require multiple cross-country moves? How can you stay motivated to keep doing the best by your students when any semester could be your last, for no fault of your own?

How does precarity impact you?

I’m one of the lucky ones. My classes consistently attract a good number of students and my department’s overall demand seems to keep increasing. So I can reasonably assume I will get classes for the foreseeable future. I have a supportive, financially secure family that would help me weather a crisis. But the likelihood of a lifetime of scraping by on compensation valuing ~5% of the tuition dollars my classes bring in isn’t terribly appealing. 

For those of us off the tenure-track who still dream of “making it” in academia there’s the difficulty of finding the motivation (and sometimes time and space) to research. Even though we (often) love what we research, it’s hard to find the motivation to put in the consistent work necessary to create more publishable work when you know there’s a good chance all that work will be irrelevant to future employment given the “job market” situation.

It’s cool and all that I have four new publications, multiple papers under review, an invited book chapter in the works, and more presentations on my CV since earning my PhD in 2020, but none of that has paid any bills, and there’s a good chance none of it ever will. (Okay, maybe that was a bit of a humblebrag, but yes potential future employers I can publish: you should hire me!)

The work we love doing – philosophy – at times becomes inextricable from external pressures. For instance, many feel the pressure to publish as much and as quickly as possible in hopes of getting tenured. Precarity has a way of contaminating our relationship to our work. How if at all do you keep your passion for what you do apart from the pressures of precarity? 

It’s been tough. I have a bunch of what I think are really fun ideas I want to work on, but whenever I sit down I know I could instead be working on my current actual job (teaching). Currently, research occupies this weird spot where it’s job-related but not compensated — fraught with concerns but good in the end (type II fun?). It’s hard to find the motivation to do something, even something you enjoy when it’s quite plausibly going to lead nowhere job-wise. 

I am having a hard time describing how it all feels, and some of this might also have to do with the pandemic; in my case, my graduating and becoming an adjunct is pretty much overlapping with COVID hitting the US. That said, I don’t think that, for me, it feels like “competition” is the worry, as the “job market” is, or at least feels like, so unpredictable that I don’t really feel as though I’m competing with others for spots even if that is a fair description of the reality.

As a precarious worker not too long ago, it soon became clear to me that precarity curtails freedom in important ways. How do you see the relationship between precarity and freedom? Do you think the precarious position of workers makes it difficult for them to push for change? How does unionization relate to these themes?

Legally, I can be fired tomorrow without a reason given. Legally, I could teach another strong semester and simply not be rehired, again without a reason given. That goes for most of us off the tenure-track, as well as so many workers across other fields. So yes, it’s quite understandable that precarious workers would be hesitant to push for change. But without pushing for change we won’t get change.

I’m not going to be fired tomorrow, and I’m almost certainly going to be offered more courses next semester. It’s not simply because I’m a good teacher (my students and department seem to think I am!), but in part, because I have been so vocal about organizing. I have it on good authority that multiple people in top administration positions do not like me (to put it mildly). But I’ve been very public about my organizing – from speaking at rallies, to talking to press, to writing about the failures of our administration – and any harm to me would clearly be an attack on our union (aka our workers), and so would just galvanize more organizing.

Legally I have no protections, but because I’ve helped to organize a bunch of my coworkers I have practical protection.

Now for those who are less precarious: you have an important role to play in protecting your more precarious colleagues. If you have tenure or other legal protections, you should be willing to be more vocal in supporting your colleagues’ struggles, organizing, and whatever else they need. As we know from Spider-Man: “With Great Power, There Must Also Come – – Great Responsibility!” And if you’re not sure if you have “great” power don’t fret, there’s always the Generalized Parker Principle: “With Some Amount of Power in a Given Domain There Must Also Come – – A Commensurate Amount of Power in that Same Domain!”

So how did you come to organizing? What led you to it? 


As is often the case in organizing, it started with a direct ask. During my third year of graduate school at CU Boulder, a longtime friend who was also a graduate worker (in a different department) had been working to try to improve conditions for graduate workers on our campus through our shared governance structure for a couple of years, but despite their efforts, he and other “reformers” had been unable to make meaningful change. Among other things, our compensation package (typically around 2/3 the local self-sufficiency wage in pay, with another ~$2,000 taken out for mandatory fees, and healthcare package best suited to active and healthy 18-22-year-olds) was insultingly low, making it incredibly difficult for those who weren’t already financially well off to attend CU for grad school. Given broader social phenomena, this was part of keeping CU – and higher education more broadly – disproportionately white and male. 

My friend and others working in the system realized that meaningful change to the system wouldn’t happen simply by going through the system. We decided to build our own independent power. 

He asked me to show up to a meeting and I did – that’s when the Committee on Rights and Compensation was born. This independent graduate labor union at CU Boulder has since morphed into United Campus Workers Colorado – CWA Local 7799, a union for workers across job classifications and across all four CU campuses. (Our Local has also added units for Public Workers for the Public Good at two public hospital systems and one public library system.)

How, more concretely, can unions change things for precarious workers at the university? What changes have you witnessed/worked towards? 

We’ve increased stipends for Graduate Part-Time Instructors (our instructor of record term for graduate workers) at CU Boulder by ~27%, and won a fee waiver when previously graduate workers had to pay ~$2,000 a year back to the boss for the privilege of doing our job. We’re pushing for a $15/hr minimum hourly wage on our Colorado Springs campus, something that all our other three campuses already have. And our non-tenure-track caucus is about to launch our own fair professional wage campaign.

But we’re a young union – 2016 for graduate workers at CU Boulder, 2020 for across job classifications and across all campuses in our system. It’s helpful to look at a few things others in our United Campus Workers (UCW) family have done too.

UCW Tennessee – Knoxville won massive wage increases for non-tenure-track workers, including raising base pay $9,000 since their campaign started.

UCW Kentucky won a $15/hr minimum wage, double the state minimum.

UCW South Carolina won full subsidization of health insurance.

Speaking of all of these efforts, I was amazed at the  wall-to-wall campus union (United Campus Workers Colorado) of which you are a founding member. Could you tell us more about your work? 

Our union is us, the workers, so what our union does is what we, the workers do. That might seem straightforward, but I think it’s important to stress this democratic, member-led focus as there are some misunderstandings about unions out there. (And unfortunately, there are some unions that are not so democratic and member-led.)

Very roughly, I’d say our activities span four sorts of categories.

First, we have caucus-specific campaigns. For example, our non-tenure-track caucus are launching a petition for a living professional wage. We know this petition will not get us our win, but it is an early step in a standard escalation campaign. The petition will help agitate and be a tool for connecting with future members so that they know there is a group of their colleagues working to make change, and so that they can become members and get involved for future escalations.

Beyond caucus-specific actions, we have run specific projects on things that directly impact folks across our system as well. For example, we have a campaign to engage with our ongoing search for a new CU president. Part of that involved a democratic process to create and vote on our union’s priorities to present to the Regents, and there are other activities planned to further push with this. If you didn’t follow along the last CU presidential search (and I’d be shocked if you did!) more on the process can be found in this opinion piece by grad-school-me. We’ve previously done some engagement on COVID safety protocols and on “Questionable Decisions” of the budgeting process.

We engage in various external political activities as well. We’ve been majorly involved in a state effort to expand rights of public employees to organize, but have also played in some endorsements for some local offices, ballot measures, and the Board of Regents.

Most important of all, and also part of all the rest, is growing our membership. As much as academics would love it to be otherwise, good arguments are rarely sufficient to make real change. Talking to our colleagues, and developing skills in our members to talk to colleges, is always an important function of our union.

What sorts of challenges confront solidarity in this context?

We might be in different job categories, but we’re all workers at our university. Step one is realizing that we are workers. Step two is realizing that we’re co-workers (or colleagues). Sure, there are many who don’t yet view themselves as fellow workers with others at their university, but there are many more who do. It will always be a challenge to get those who are in more secure positions to work with those who are in more precarious positions, but simply talking to each other about our shared struggles and shared role in making our universities function can go a long way. 

What sorts of issues do non-academic staff bring to the United Campus Workers Colorado? How do these issues relate to those faced by academic staff (e.g., adjuncts, etc.)?

We’re all workers at the same work site, so even if some issues are specific to certain job classifications, we’re all in this together. There are the basic concerns that we cannot teach our classes if we don’t have safe, clean spaces, that we cannot do research if our library isn’t functioning, that we can’t communicate with students outside of class if our technology isn’t working. And when it comes to things like COVID, budget priorities, our new system president, and much more, it’s clear that these decisions impact all of us regardless of job classification. 

If we only focused on faculty, or even worse just tenure/tenure-track or just non-tenure-track faculty, we’d be missing critically important workers in our university system and have a lot less power to fight for things that impact us all.

In the context of your efforts, what legislative changes need to be made to employment codes or legal codes that would empower workers at university and reduce precarity?

Legislative changes can reduce barriers, but they cannot organize workers. Workers need to organize ourselves, and while others can organize and work with us, no one can do the work for us. 

That said, legislation to reduce barriers to organization and recognition would be valuable. So too would increasing state and federal funding tied to worker rights. Expanding collective bargaining rights – something that exists in the private sector but not in the public sector in CO – would be great, but only if it didn’t come with other massive restrictions on worker actions and rights. And of course, fighting back against legislation to roll back worker protection is important. But none of that matters, or is even possible, without worker power.

Finding or establishing solidarity at the university isn’t easy in my experience. What is it about academic culture that might make solidarity difficult? 

One major cultural challenge seems to be that many academics don’t view themselves as “workers” or otherwise working in a shared enterprise as all other workers in institutions of higher education. While engaging in my coffee and doomscrolling ritual this morning, I came across this tweet discussing just this issue, which likely will have more interesting discussions/responses by the time this Q&A is published.

Additionally, it seems like many academics who have made it to tenure or even the tenure-track view themselves as special or different or better than ordinary workers. If they made it work for themselves that must mean the system is working, right? Recognizing that this is not the case requires recognizing that making it is not simply a factor of one’s talents, work ethic, etc., and that can be difficult to admit. This isn’t to say that those who “make it” are not talented or hard workers, but rather that there are many others who are as well yet failed to “luck out” in the same way.

Academic culture should change at minimum to the point where we view all workers at an institution – not simply just non-tenure-track faculty tenure/tenure-track faculty, but all workers be they faculty or otherwise – as part of a shared endeavor and shared work site. Tenure/tenure track-faculty can’t pursue their research agendas as they currently do without non-tenure/tenure track faculty teaching more undergraduates, without facilities maintenance workers making sure the work site is safe and operational, without Resident Assistants taking care of the undergraduates who pay tuition, etc.

But more than just thinking that academic culture should change I think we need to change both academic culture and structures. Workers – and students! – need real power in determining how our institutions operate. This is basic workplace democracy, and it’s also necessary to the well-functioning of our institutions and those who make our institutions work. If those at the top of the hierarchy were really the ones to make sure that those at the bottom were well-treated and that the institution was doing what it should, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Part of the way that precarity can be improved is that temporary workers are invited to participate in decision-making processes. 

Yes, we need to significantly restructure how decision-making takes place. We claim to have shared governance of our institutions, but that seems more often like a convenient myth than a reality. Unionization can change dynamics so that all workers – those at the bottom and at every level of the “hierarchy” – have a real say in how our institution is run, and so have a real say in our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions. Collective bargaining could even codify roles for shared governance so that these structures could serve the purpose that we want them to serve.

Students need real significant say in their schools as well. This isn’t to say that there isn’t an important role for career administrators who are experts in administration, but rather that everyone who is part of our institution ought to have a say in our institution. And if we’re doing this largely for students, students need a large say too.

So much of the work of our colleges and universities is from workers in precarious situations. Things won’t get better simply because they morally should. It’s on all of us to organize and fight to improve our conditions, not simply for each of us individually but for our colleagues and for our colleges/universities. We can make higher education work for us all but only if we’re willing to work for it. Ultimately unionization is about building power and worker voice. 

We’ve all got a long way to go, but change won’t happen simply because we ask or wish for it. 

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This is an installment of Into Philosophy.