Beyond the Ivory Tower

Turning Your Labor Activism Into a Career

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By Susan Basalla May

The world of labor organizing often appeals to Ph.D.'s who are looking for alternatives to a traditional academic career. Some are drawn to union organizing by a desire to find work that lives up to their political ideals or by exposure to the history and literature of the labor movement. Others become involved through participation in campus debates over adjunct pay, benefits, and working conditions.

Whether you have had direct or indirect exposure to the concept of unionization, hearing from two former academics who now work in the field can provide important perspective on what it might mean for you to choose organizing as a career.

Alyssa Picard became involved in the graduate employee union at the University of Michigan while earning her Ph.D. in history. Since 2004, she has been a staff representative for the Michigan state affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, where she is responsible for 17 different contracts, three or four of which are typically under negotiation at any given time.

Dorothee Benz worked for several major unions over the years before earning a Ph.D. in political science at the City University of New York, and then returning to the field. She now oversees communications for the Professional Staff Congress, the labor union that represents the 20,000 faculty and professional staff members at the City University of New York.

Question: Why did you leave academe?

Picard: Graduate school at Michigan politicized me. I was there while the university's affirmative-action policies were litigated. Partly because of the cases, I was becoming more aware of the racial segregation and broader inequity of opportunity that exist in the U.S. educational system, and of the need for affirmative action as a remedy for those things.

I went through the academic job cycle twice. I didn't try to hide my politics, but I hadn't considered them relevant to my candidacy. I landed one on-campus interview. The interviewers there clearly knew about my activism (I assume they Googled me) and seemed really nervous about it. I had the distinct impression that if I repudiated my labor activism, I would have been offered the job. But the idea that I'd spent so many years in school to prepare for a job where I would have to hide or apologize for my deepest convictions really disgusted me. Fortunately, I had already been offered this job, and I decided to accept it while I was waiting for the plane home from that interview.

Benz: I left academe for the same reason I went into academe. "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways," Karl Marx famously observed. "The point, however, is to change it." But Marx would be the first to point out that understanding and analyzing the world is a prerequisite for changing it. So I went to graduate school because I wanted to be a better political strategist and organizer, and I believed that deepening and broadening my knowledge of politics, political theory, government -- all of it -- would help me do that.

I know that one way we move from "interpreting" to "changing" the world is by teaching, by opening up the world for our students. To my surprise, though, teaching was not something I loved. I liked it, but I never loved it the way my peers who are truly outstanding academics do. That gave me pause, and eventually I felt like my talents and passion for changing the world were best used as a strategist and propagandist (er, I mean communications expert) back in the so-called "real world."

Question: How did you get into organizing?

Picard: I knew and admired people who were already involved in the union. In the spring of 1999, they had won a contract that increased the pay of most graduate-student instructors (including me) by almost 25 percent. It really put the union on my mental map. My local union president asked me to be a steward that fall, and I later became the grievance chair for the local. We handled some grievances about really appalling work conditions -- the kinds of situations that make people drop out of their academic programs completely.

I ended up knowing the contract really well, so I became the lead negotiator for the union in the 2001-2 contract cycle. The staff rep then assigned to my local union, who is now one of my colleagues at AFT-Michigan, encouraged me to apply for my current job in late 2003. (This is a pretty typical career path in my organization: My newest colleague is someone who followed a very similar trajectory, except that I was the one who encouraged her to apply for the job.)

Benz: I came of age politically during the heyday of the anti-apartheid movement in the mid-80s. It was one of those "Oh, my God, look at this appalling injustice, you can't just sit by, you must act" moral-conviction and certainty things you only have when you are 18 or so. But it set a lifelong path for me and gave me the first set of skills as an organizer. It happened to be that I was at Harvard during the last several years of the clerical workers' 17-year fight to win a union, and that was educational and inspiring to me as well. When I came to New York in 1988, I looked for a job in the labor movement, and I've been a career trade unionist ever since.

Question: What do you like most and least about your work?

Picard: I am a secular person, but to me union work is religious work -- in the literal meaning of the word "religion" (from the Latin religare, meaning to rebind or reconnect). We are divided from one another by our fears; organizing is about using hope to put us back together. It's a privilege to work with members who are dedicated to that.

On the other hand, it's extremely frustrating to negotiate incremental change in a systematically underfinanced system. Students in the public schools in Michigan don't get the range of opportunities I got in public school growing up, and that is painful. It's distasteful to play a role in members' decisions to accept a good bargain that is also less than they deserve. For that reason, the political-mobilizing part of the job is both practically and emotionally important to me.

Benz: What I love about my work is how tightly wound together organizing and communications are and how I can help people fight to change the world around them by helping them develop a communications strategy. I love being part of the process that brings people together, that awakens in them the realization that they can demand and work for change, and I can help that along by offering some tools and experience and ideas. That rocks. There is no feeling in the world like it.

On the downside, public relations, media, and communications work generally is incredibly stressful. You are always on deadline, you are almost always on the spot, and coordinating between players (members and leaders, reporters and subjects, etc.) is exhausting.

Question: What are the most common misconceptions about your work?

Picard: Liberal academics tend to fantasize that union work is all rabble-rousing, all the time; that this job is about me-as-Norma Rae day in and day out. Like Dorothee, I love Norma Rae (although there's some extremely bad organizing in it, too; on what real-life campaign has the organizer hopped in his car and ridden into the sunset as soon as the recognition election was won?).

But, particularly because of the volume of negotiating work I do, my job is really half troublemaking and half troubleshooting. Knowing how to frame a conflict and articulate it in a way that mobilizes people is absolutely critical, because we never win without doing that. But at the bargaining table, and within our own organizations, it's just as important to know how to defuse -- or at least depersonalize -- conflict and then turn conversations in a problem-solving direction.

Benz: The biggest challenge is always to get people to understand, and to believe, that there is no shortcut to organizing. There is no way to build organization, to develop activists and leaders, to spread the knowledge and skills it takes to organize except through dedicated, persistent grassroots work. From a communications perspective, it is also challenging to convince people that communications strategy and planning has be integrated into a campaign or project from the ground up. I think it's easy for people to miss that, to not realize how methodical and long-term organizing is.

Question: Are there many former academics in your line of work? Is it a good fit for former academics in general?

Picard: Anecdotally, I have the sense that there are increasing numbers of us -- but my perception may be skewed by working for a teachers' union. If you became an academic because you enjoyed solitude and time for writing and reflection, a job in labor organizing would not be a good fit. But if you became an academic because you enjoy teaching and the opportunity to discuss ideas, and if you are also passionate about questions of justice and resource allocation, you might really enjoy this work.

One key difference between this work and academic work has to do with working hours. I have a lot of control over my schedule, and most of my work takes place within standard business hours, but I have to be available for work tasks 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Typically, I am traveling, in meetings, or answering e-mail between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. five days a week, and on weekends four or five times a year.

Benz: At first blush, so much of our work as scholars and teachers seems to rest on individual work and effort, the antithesis of organizing. But when you stop to think about it, there's an enormous amount of collaboration that an academic can draw on to start thinking like an organizer. Look at the acknowledgments in your last book -- consider how much "your" ideas were shaped and refined in discussion with others -- or think about how many colleagues' syllabi you looked at the first time you taught a particular course.

Question: What skills common to Ph.D.'s transfer well into this field?

Picard: Research and writing skills are essential -- particularly close reading skills, which are really important in negotiating contracts. It's critical to be comfortable with conflict and with dissent. It's important to know how to identify what you do not know, which I think of as a research skill.

But the most important thing, I think, is to be able to reflect on one's role as an organizer. What's working and what's not working about my part in the strategy we're pursuing? Organizing has a lot in common with teaching, when teaching is practiced well.

Benz: If you've done a lot of service work or planned conferences, those are concrete useful skills. There's definitely a set of basic organizing skills that some people have a natural instinct for but are teachable. Writing and talking in ways that are clear, concise, and nonjargony, and that bring to life for people their power if they act together, are definitely learned skills.

For media-relations work, there are some very specific skills that are generally learned by working your way through the ranks in a communications department.

Question: What is the average starting salary in the field? What is the salary range at your level?

Picard: Salaries vary widely depending on the organization and the intended permanence of the position. Many organizing jobs are clearly burn-and-churn positions, paying under $30,000 a year, usually for a specified campaign or interval of time, and typically employing people in an "at will" capacity.

In jobs that also involve negotiating skills, there's usually more of an expectation of continued employment; I acquired a "just cause" standard of discharge (which is roughly equivalent to tenure) after a year on the job. Career-path positions start in the mid-$40,000 range and run up to around $100,000, plus retirement contributions. Union employers also typically provide good health insurance, regardless of other characteristics of the job.

Benz: The top range for communications positions in a labor organization with a big-enough budget to have a communications staff is $80,000. Starting salaries vary somewhat, but I'd say $30Kish.

Question: What steps would you recommend to a graduate student who wanted to break into the field?

Picard: Get active in your local union -- and if you don't have a union already, organize one. The AFT's Higher Education-division Web site explains the basics of organizing a new union and getting a first contract. The Web site of the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions also offers plenty of information specific to graduate employees, as well as contact information for existing graduate employee unions and campaigns in the United States and Canada.

Benz: Organizing is a state of mind. It has to do with believing that the world should be different, and believing that we can make it different. It has to do with being communally oriented, understanding the power of collective action, recognizing that ordinary people do extraordinary things when they act with courage, conviction, and solidarity. If you choke up when you read Martin Luther King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail," organizing might be for you. Interpret the world, then change it.