Higher Education’s Labor Upsurge

This is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand, and join, the growing movement fighting for the future of higher education.

In recent years, higher education has become one of the most militant sectors of the labor movement. From graduate workers to faculty, from the US to Britain and beyond, campus workers are organizing, striking, and reshaping the struggle for better wages, conditions, and control over work.

Across the Atlantic, universities have seen an unprecedented surge in unionization and strike action: over 120 new unions formed in US universities in just a decade; the historic University of California strike, the largest in higher education’s history, mobilizing nearly fifty thousand workers; and in Britain, years of coordinated national strikes pushing back against attacks on pay, conditions, and casualization.

Born out of the workshop Higher Education’s Labor Upsurge workshop at UC Santa Cruz, this book gathers insights from worker-organizers to make sense of this unfolding wave of struggle. Together, the contributors explore the role of universities in contemporary capitalism and how campus struggles can shape the broader labor movement.