PURSE POWER MEETS PEOPLE POWER

An interview with GLO President Sherena Razek and Organizing Coordinator Beckett Warzer

This past Wednesday, February 15, the Graduate Labor Organization (GLO)—Brown graduate workers’ anti-racist, feminist labor union— engaged in the first of a series of bargaining sessions with the Brown University administration. As GLO seeks to secure various expansions to its existing 2020 contract through their platform of accessibility, compensation, and equity, the College Hill Independent spoke with President Sherena Razek and Organizing Coordinator Beckett Warzer about Brown’s reluctance to engage in ‘open bargaining’ with the union’s rank and file membership. As an organizing-based union, GLO models its approach to negotiations after the strategies of similar groups across the country: demanding that sessions be open for all grad workers to attend rather than only the bargaining committee’s leadership.

Amid a national surge of university labor organizing, including the emergence of the Teaching Assistant Labor Organization (TALO) secure livelihood: comprehensive insurance policies, extended childcare subsidies, accessible working environments, and, notably, protections from discrimination and harassment through impartial grievance procedures. prestigious reputation—they don’t respect us. at Brown, the mobilization of campus workers complicates the University’s accumulation of wealth. Brown touted the protection of its assets as a paramount goal in fiscal year 2022; it should instead recognize and invest in the labor that sustains Brown as an institution.

GLO aspires, through the advancement of their contract, to hold the University and its multi-billion-dollar-endowed corporate structure accountable. Made to invest in the well-being of graduate workers, GLO envisions a university restrained in its capacity to expand, both in space and fiscal power, within the City of Providence.

The Indy: Brown seems opposed to open bargaining sessions with GLO. They’ve claimed, per your account, that it “doesn’t contribute to a ‘collegial collaborative problem-solving spirit’’’—but you succeeded in getting open bargaining during last year’s raise negotiations. What strategies did you all use to get Brown to agree?

Beckett Warzer: They didn’t want to but we showed up to every bargaining session. The message was: there’s no negotiating about us without us. Eventually, they had to concede.

Of course, people get upset when you hear from the boss’s mouth how little they actually think about us. So, you know, the boss can be a really good agitator for members.

BW: I think we will be able to have productive conversations with them as a full group. There shouldn’t be any resistance if they don’t have anything to hide. That’s the thing. We’re also there trying to negotiate.

At the bargaining table, there’s an illusion of equality—but that’s just not the case. We are workers at this institution. They’re a multibillion-dollar-endowed corporation. We need that worker power and collective action to get our demands met.

SR: A lot of organizing-oriented unions use open bargaining, and it’s not going to be a protest. Yet. Grads will be silently observing. Our bargaining committee will be the ones who are speaking and negotiating. But grads deserve to be there, witness what’s going on, be clued in, involved, and engaged in this process, because we’re all going to be so deeply impacted by the outcome of these negotiations.

The Indy: The recognition of grad student workers as laborers who sustain the university seems to threaten the administration and corporation. Why do you see value in being recognized as laborers of the university?

BW: The university loves to split our status into student vs. worker. They try to emphasize that we are ultimately students, because that’s the label that benefits them. And that has been really disempowering to us. We’re the ones who are teaching classes, grading, running experiments, producing knowledge, working in labs, producing research on COVID-19. Our labor makes the university run. It makes sense that they want to undermine our status as workers, because that benefits them, but ultimately we are the workforce of the university.

Following in-depth interviews with almost 300 card-carrying members, GLO has published a platform advocating for Brown to provide its workers with the conditions of a robust and

Sherena Razek: This year, the precedent has been set. [Last year,] it was over Zoom, and this year will be in person, which will be different. They claimed that with open bargaining, conversations weren’t as productive. Brown likes to position itself as this benevolent institution that has these higher education missions and values, but when it comes to the workers who actually fulfill those missions, who contribute to that

SR: It’s also important to take into consideration the broader labor drive that’s happening on this campus. Undergraduate teaching assistants in computer science have been fed up with their working conditions. They’ve been overworked, running that department on very little compensation. They’ve exhausted every avenue that exists for students to appeal to the university and have come to us to help support them in taking a different approach through labor power, collective action. They realize that’s the only real way to get Brown to move and to see our demands met.

[Brown] likes to pretend to listen to us. But as a union—and I think this is sort of where the discomfort comes from in terms of open bargaining—they don’t actually want us in large numbers, making them hear and move on our demands. I think that is the threat of higher-ed labor around the country. There’s a lot of momentum in this movement.

Making Discrimination Grievable

The Indy: Can you walk us through different organizing efforts and encounters with the University that have happened the past few years? You both mentioned violations of your rights as a product of the imposed ‘student worker’ label. Can you both speak to what those violations were?

SR: Graduate labor organizing at Brown really started almost a decade ago, when Brown unilaterally decided to revoke sixth-year funding. All of a sudden, there were graduate students in their fifth year, like I am, who were like, ‘I don’t have an income or a program to look to in the next year, that has just been taken from me.’ The university loves to cite austerity measures and cry poor as they sit on their endowment. So grads took action. Things started as grassroots organizing. But having an official election and union representing grad workers really changed the terrain of power within the university. With all this, we’ve tried to retain those grassroots organizing models for action, because that’s where our power comes from. Do we have a contract? Yes. Do we have legal protections? Yes—but what it really comes down to is collective action. In terms of what the struggle has been over: for one, our wage [was] not livable. Only since unionizing has this really changed. So far, we’ve won better protections—we won 75 percent coverage for dependents’ health care, and that’s better than what we had before! However, we need 100 percent. Along with this, we’ve won a grievance procedure. We didn’t have that before. Without it, if something happened—if you faced sexual harassment, discrimination, all these horrible things that we like to think don’t happen, but that we know for a fact do—you were supposed to go to Brown and exclaim, ‘Brown has violated me, I have faced harassment here, I face discrimination here.’ And then you are looking to the institution that has perpetrated those acts against you to also be the arbiter of the outcome and serving justice. That’s not fair. Brown can’t be the perpetrator, the judge, and the jury.

BW: One of the things that we’re really trying to focus on in our upcoming contract negotiations is making discrimination grievable [providing a process by which to file a formal complaint]. There have been a lot of instances, not only with our campaigns in the fall involving grads who were unfairly dismissed from their programs, but ongoing things, where academic discipline is being used as a vehicle for faculty or other supervisors to discriminate against people. Right now, they can’t become formal grievances because they’re not protected in our contract. There are repeated histories of faculty and other supervisors discriminating broadly against grads of color or international grads. We need these offenses to be provable and grievable with the university. This must happen through third party arbitration, not adjudicated by Brown.

SR: We deserve job security. What Brown is doing right now is basically firing grads, or dismissing them from their programs, under the guise of academic issues—and trying to keep the union out of those conversations so that we’re unable to officially advocate for and protect grads who are facing devastating situations. It’s not fair to invest so much time into a program like this—that’s paid so poorly but dangles a light at the end of the tunnel of your PhD or master’s degree—when they can just arbitrarily take that away from us. That’s not fair. Our health care, our visa status are dependent on the work that we do here, our income. And we deserve to have some security in that.

Protections for Brown/Trinity MFA

The Indy: Could you also speak to the efforts of the Brown/Trinity MFA graduate workers to join GLO’s union?

BW: If anyone needs a union on this campus, it’s them. All workers need a union, but the conditions of that program are deeply unjust. It’s essentially a for-profit program. They are paid, but the amount is almost a joke; it’s from nothing to, I think, at most, $12,000 a year, which is nowhere even near livable. A lot of them are living off loans or credit card debt in order to pay rent and buy groceries.

Not only that, but the work expectations of that program are higher than almost any other program that I’ve heard about at Brown. These actors and directors are working, like, six days a week, 12-hour days. It’s really too much and creates a toxic work environment. Then, if you have a medical issue, or if your mental health is deteriorating because you’re in this highly toxic work environment, there have been many instances where grads’ medical leave is denied, especially in that program.

The graduate school or the department love to point fingers at each other as a way to avoid responsibility for it. They say that, you know, this is a program where you can’t take a leave of absence and come back because the cohort is so important or something like that. But grads need to be able to take medical leave. That’s not something that is negotiable.

community in the surrounding area. In solidarity with the working class of Providence, we want to pressure Brown to pay its fair share.

BW: Because we are a collective of organized workers, we can be in solidarity with other workers, not only in Providence but all over. It really is about holding Brown accountable to the city of Providence in regards to its investments of the endowment. In 2021, for instance, GLO passed a divestment referendum, saying that grads want Brown to divest from companies complicit in human rights abuses in Palestine. It’s important for us to hold Brown accountable not only to paying its workers a living wage, but also to not be funding human rights abuses.

The Indy: Can you speak to the relationship between divestment and reinvestment in the community, whether through voluntary payments or other means? It seems like it would be advantageous for Brown to be able to claim they’re investing in the community without being held to account for where the wealth they’ve accumulated is coming from.

SR: I think this is not something we accomplish in its entirety in this contract campaign. But the more that we can pry away decision-making power from the upper echelons of Brown administrators and the Corporation and put it in the hands of the workers and students who actually comprise the Brown community, the better off we’ll be. Maybe there’s no Ivy League system in the long term of that horizon, right? Maybe the university becomes like a co-op that actually values these higher education missions it purports to.

SR: We’ve heard specifically for the Brown/ Trinity program, but for programs more broadly, that the hiring freeze that took place when COVID-19 first hit added a lot of pressure to already-present cohorts. At that time, Brown assured us that they were putting this freeze on, that they weren’t going to bring new grads to our departments, because they wanted to make sure that they had the means to support the grads who are already here. They made this promise to us, right? And then they expect us to trust them.

Now, they’re citing that hiring freeze as a reason why they can’t allow grads to take medical leave. They promised us that they were doing this for us, to support us, but actually, it has added an additional burden of labor onto grad workers.

Fighting for the Dream

The Indy: Throughout the long arc of the pandemic, Brown has accumulated so much more wealth. I feel like one thing on a lot of people’s minds is Brown’s physical expansion; the campus just seems to be moving out in every direction at a really rapid rate, often in the name of pressures on residential life. How do you all see GLO’s labor organizing relating to restraining Brown’s accumulation? What is GLOs relationship to voluntary payment negotiations and conversations around taxing Brown’s endowment?

SR: We’ve been in support of the PILOT program, payment in lieu of taxes. Because Brown is a nonprofit organization, they don’t have to pay the amount of taxes that a regular corporation would have to pay to the City [of Providence]. So despite the fact that Brown is continuously expanding, buying up land as a huge landowner, they are basically able to evade these taxes. To us, this is theft from the Providence community.

Part of our platform is bargaining for the common good, and that means for the broader Providence community—holding Brown accountable and pressuring it to pay its fair share in taxes. If you look at the state of education in Providence [public] schools, these are terrible conditions. You can see the wealth that Brown is accumulating and pouring into College Hill, and how that is taking away from the schools and

What that looks like, in the short term, is trying to fight on this contract to have components of our platform that are bargaining for the common good, demanding transparency, and taking steps towards more grad worker oversight and decision-making power. There would be no Brown without us. We deserve a say in how things are run.

BW: We’re fighting for the dream, which is a truly democratic worker-run organization.

The Indy: Do you feel that in your organizing you’ve learned anything from other campuses’ graduate union organizing? I’m thinking particularly of the University of California campaign, but are there any other moments of grad labor organizing that inform how you were looking ahead to the session?

BW: Definitely, grad organizing across the U.S. has been inspiring. We can look at what other people have won at their universities, and every time anyone wins something, it pushes the bar a little bit. A win for one is a win for all.

SR: Based on what we see around the U.S., we know that we are only going to win what we fight for. When we’re going to go to the table, Brown is going to say no at first, probably to all of our proposals. Our strength comes from how organized we are, how we can mobilize workers, how we can push Brown so that they can’t say no to these proposals.

To develop our platform, we had hundreds of conversations, one-on-one, with grad workers who have an in-depth understanding of what they’ve been facing and how they’ve been struggling. The platform isn’t devised by 15 grads who are disconnected from the community. It took into consideration all the hundreds of hours that organizers have spent talking to grads—and all of the different disciplines and departments and fields that make up the grad worker community. We have shaped the bargaining platform to reflect those needs.