what I'm doing next.

your girl is gainfully employed not in academia!

This is a JOB UPDATE post: she’s an organizer, babes.

Or, rather, I’ve long been an organizer in one capacity or another, but now I’ll get paid to do it full-time. I’ll be working for SEIU Local 509 in eastern Massachusetts, helping with negotiations and campaigns in higher education, starting in September. For those unfamiliar, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is a large labor union in the United States, primarily representing healthcare and public and private sector service workers. Local 509 represents academic workers—a growing community served by SEIU—at six Boston-area private universities, two of which will become my responsibility. AAAH.

We love excuses to wear more purple.

I have so many thoughts about this. First and foremost: it is always an honor and a privilege to get to work with grad workers. Within the academy, they are consistently the most radical, the most creative, and the most driven. They push the rest of us to be more caring, structurally aware people, and that is always a good thing. Providing support to grad workers feels both like paying forward my own experiences (shoutout to TAA Madison) and some of the most vital work that needs doing in academia at the moment.

I’ll also be working with adjuncts and non-tenure-track faculty. These are groups whose experiences I know less well, as I’ve never personally been in either position, but the wheels of the university would fall off without non-tenure-track labor, for better or for worse. Helping these folks get the support they deserve, and locating that within larger conversations about hierarchy and priorities within academic institutions, is also crucial work.

When I start this job, grad workers at Boston University will enter their 23^rd week of strike action (unless negotiations move significantly before then). BU grads only voted to unionize in 2022, which is a reminder of how young many grad worker movements in the US are. Yet they are mighty: recent strikes from Columbia to Indiana University to much of the University of California system have emphasized the power grad workers have and how poorly their employers continue to treat them. As universities crack down on Palestine solidarity, roll back even the most tepid diversity efforts, and outsource teaching to predatory third-party firms and AI, there has never been a more important time for campus unionization.

University leaders are scared of unions because they work. My former students are used to me asking them to define “work”—what’s the outcome you care about and are the standards of evaluation you’re using consistent with that outcome—so I’ll hold myself to my own standards here. “Work,” in the most basic sense, means improved working conditions: livable wages, caps on hours, paid parental leave, and the like. But it also means organizing and the fruits thereof. It means fundamentally rethinking, and practically restructuring, how we relate to each other in the workplace and in the larger communities within which workplaces are embedded. It means building networks of trust and support such that, whatever problem might arise, we have the ability to weather it, fight back, and demand better.

In a nutshell, Jane McAlevey called this “whole worker organizing,” which she wrote about extensively in her 2012 memoir/playbook/cautionary tale Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting in the Labor Movement. McAlevey’s key reminder is that our goal cannot simply be more crumbs within oppressive institutions. Rather, she offers a vision of worker power as a foundation for transforming not only labor relations, but community resource provision. The way to do this? Time-consuming, empathy-demanding, but simple: talk to workers. Talk to them where they are, listen to what they need and want, and then act. At the end of the day, workers are whole people—and whole lives for whole people within whole communities is what we’re fighting for.

I’ve spent a lot of time writing and thinking about “community” in academia and what it can mean. At the core of my belief is that helping people is far more interesting and impactful than helping institutions, and in any case institutions simply cannot love you (but people sometimes might). And “people” includes those outside of your immediate bubble, and absolutely outside of your specific research area. (We work at centers of learning; why would we limit ourselves to those who already think like us?) “People” includes the TAs who help run your classes and the librarians who facilitate your research and the office administrator who files reimbursements for you and the students who have as much to teach you as you do them. In a more radical formulation, it is also more explicitly cross-class, bringing in building trades workers and cleaners and campus coffee shop staff. What it is not is a bowing down to institutional forces that would have their workers remain divided and siloed. When we are told that rights for one group depend on the ill treatment of another, we should always ask questions. Or, bluntly: no one is free until all of us are.

I’ve found it difficult to live these values in a faculty role, in the sense that it requires constant self-checks and check-ins to make sure I’m resisting professional incentives to put my head down and do the kind of work the institution wants (which is policy-aligned research, mediocre teaching, and endless time-sucking grant applications). Perhaps “tiring” is a better word, and of course, that’s how the institution gets you—by convincing you, correctly, that it would be easier to just go with the flow. What I’m hoping is that, by being in an explicit organizing role where my job is to agitate, I’ll be surrounded by others also resisting in an environment where resistance is the name of the game, rather than an aberration that annoys everyone around you (however fun being annoying is). These environments push me to be more uncomfortable and more radical, whereas my previous job did the exact opposite. What a relief, to be challenged again.

I have lots of thoughts for another time on what the process of actually getting this job was like (tl;dr: way less stressful than the academic market). For now, I’ll offer an invitation. If you work at an academic institution that has a union for your job description and you are not a member: join. If your union is not nearly as antiracist and anti-ableist as it should be (and many unions, frankly, are not): voice your displeasure. And if you’re in union leadership and haven’t talked to another worker in a while: um, do that. The antidote to the bureaucratic and interpersonal drama that can affect unions, just as it can any other organization, is to organize. A union without workers at the center is a front for management, not the radically transformative collective that the best unions can be.