Higher Education’s Labor Upsurge: Insights from the Militant Edge of the Movement

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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.

About the Editors

Sarah Mason directs the Center for Labor and Community at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published research on gig work, academic labor, and contemporary socialist movements in the United States, and has just concluded a multi-year ethnographic research project on labor process and labor organizing in higher education. Her writing has appeared in the New Left Review, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Logic Magazine, the Guardian, and Notes from Below. She is on the editorial board of Long-Haul Magazine and Workers and Capital. She lives in Santa Cruz.

Jamie Woodcock is a researcher based in London and a senior lecturer at King’s College London. He is the author of books including Troublemaking (Verso, 2023), Employment (Routledge, 2023), The Fight Against Platform Capitalism (University of Westminster Press, 2021), The Gig Economy (Polity, 2019), Marx at the Arcade (Haymarket, 2019), and Working the Phones (Pluto, 2017). His research is available to read online and has been featured widely in the media. It is inspired by workers’ inquiry and focuses on labor, work, the gig economy, platforms, resistance, organizing, and video games. He is on the editorial board of Notes from Below and Historical Materialism. He lives in London.

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