Hamilton Nolan on Organizing in Higher Ed

A Q&A with our leading labor reporter.

CDAF director Isaac Kamala recommended I watch Hamilton Nolan’s keynote address to the Connecticut State Conference of AAUP, and he didn’t have to ask twice.

He didn’t have to ask twice because I’ve been a longtime reader of Hamilton Nolan’s writing, both at his newsletter, How Things Work, and his 2024 book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor.

What I appreciate about his writing is the combination of present day reporting mixed with a deep understanding of the history of the American labor movement funneled through a clear moral compass and rendered in direct and lively language. He’s a pleasure to read on several levels.

Spurred by Isaac’s response to the keynote and my own engagement with Hamilton Nolan’s writing, I reached out to Nolan for a Q&A about the state of play with the labor movement in general and higher education in specific.

Hamilton Nolan is a journalist with over two decades of experience, including a previous stint at Gawker and numerous freelance publications at places like The Guardian, In These Times, and Defector, where he writes about, among other things, boxing.

His 2024 book, The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor, is an indispensable look at the dynamics of labor and politics in today’s United States. He lives in Brooklyn.

John Warner: At your recent keynote talk (which folks should watch in its entirety) you started with the “bad news.” What is the bad news? Why is it so bad?

Hamilton Nolan: In terms of America’s crisis of inequality, the bad news is that union density–the portion of American workers who are union members–just dropped under ten percent, for the first time in about a century. We have basically given back a hundred years of progress on worker power now. This is bad news for everyone, not just union people, because we know that higher union density equals greater power for the entire working class, and that that is probably the only serious path to counterbalancing the increasing power of the rich that has landed us in what is effectively an oligarchy. At the same time that we need union strength more than ever, the institutions of organized labor are showing no signs that they are capable of reviving themselves, even after four years of a very pro-labor president. 

JW: Having read The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for Labor not long after its release in February of last year, I walked away feeling like it was a hopeful book. You share a lot of recent successes in the labor movement, and the book was released when we had the most pro-labor president in recent memory. I’m curious about how you see the last 12 months on two fronts, one emotional and one analytical. As someone deeply immersed in labor reporting and politics, how does this feel to you? At the same time, what’s your journalist/analyst take on this moment?

HN: I think Biden did some very bad things, but he was pretty clearly the most pro-labor president of my lifetime and maybe since FDR. He did, in fact, expend political capital on behalf of unions and appointed really good people to the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and elsewhere. So the fact that union density did not turn around at all under Biden should cause a huge reckoning in the thinking of the labor movement about what a realistic strategy going forward should be. 

What Trump has already done is, literally, the worst stuff any president has done to organized labor in my lifetime, much worse than Reagan. So there’s quite a bit of whiplash there. I think the takeaway is that labor power comes from organized workers, period. Politicians can make our lives easier or harder, but the job of the labor movement is to organize workers. Lose sight of that and we die. 

JW: I’m also curious about your view specifically of labor organizing in higher ed. I think organizing in higher ed is tough for a few reasons. One is that the nature of the work does not breed solidarity. For the entirety of my 20 years teaching college I was non-tenure track faculty, and, for more than a decade, I was warning tenured faculty via my Inside Higher Ed blog that my very existence was signaling to administrators that their labor was being devalued by paying me less for the same work and these same forces would come for them eventually. I’d like to hear your thoughts on other reasons it can be difficult to organize at higher ed institutions.

HN: Well, as hard as it is to organize in higher ed, it’s better there than anywhere else! Numerically speaking, higher ed has had the most organizing of any sector in recent years. But as you point out, it has its own challenges. I suspect (and you would know better than I) that building the kind of solidarity that is necessary in the higher ed workforce is particularly challenging because of the ideas of prestige that are baked into things like tenure vs. non-tenure professors. There is no question that structurally, total unity of the workers from top to bottom is the only way to gain the labor power necessary to compete with donors and the administration. If tenure-track professors can’t see that, they’re not so smart after all. 

JW: As you note, there have been some real successes in terms of organizing in higher ed, particularly in recent years. What can we learn from these successes?

HN: All workers can be organized, but the single easiest demographic to organize is “well-educated but underpaid workers.” This, very broadly speaking, is the demographic that covers some of the sectors where you’ve seen the most unionization in the past decade: higher ed, media, cultural workers, etc. These workers, again broadly speaking, tend to be a little less vulnerable to typical union busting tactics of lying and intimidation, and higher ed is full of people who spent many years and a lot of money to get degrees only to find that the conditions of the industry at the end of that rainbow are still extremely exploitative. Anyone who can understand how they’re being exploited is latent material for a union—hence the huge numbers of higher ed union campaigns recently. The solidarity that you see between campus workers and other workers inside of big unions is really heartening. That said, I would encourage higher ed union members to take on the project of building one big standalone higher ed union, rather than being divided among many different unions. Such a union would be incredibly powerful, both on campus and within the labor movement itself. 

JW: I’m wondering if you have any advice for higher ed people who live in states (like my home state of South Carolina) where collective bargaining is not in the cards. My view is that an organization like the AAUP (American Association of University Professors) is still helpful, even if you can’t strictly “unionize” the workplace. How do we move the ball forward there.

HN: No doubt any organizing is better than nothing. When the laws are against you in terms of legal certification of unions, I think it’s just a matter of seeing your mission more broadly: you’re trying to get workers on the same page so that they can act in a collective way. That’s a union, regardless of what the laws say. Fundamentally, if you can get people to understand that they’re all in the same boat and get them willing to act as one, the latent power of labor cannot be stopped. Be ruthlessly realistic about your leverage, but at the same time don’t be ruthlessly pessimistic. They need you to work, or you wouldn’t be there. That’s leverage, always. 

JW: You’re clear in The Hammer and your newsletter that you believe unions are a necessity in resisting what we’re up against now, which, in my view, is an attempted authoritarian destruction of important public and democratic institutions on the way to subverting democracy itself. Unions have been central to several important resistance actions in the last few days and weeks. What can you tell us about some of the specific mechanisms by which unions help preserve democracy aside from what people may perceive around issue advocacy or get-out-the-vote work?

HN: Economically, we know that higher rates of unionization lead to higher wages for working people and less inequality, and the 50-year-long rise of economic inequality is the major trend underlying our current quasi-oligarchy. So that by itself is critical for sustaining a general public belief in democracy. Also, unions are, in fact, the first and only place where a lot of people experience genuine democracy in action. Meaning that a good union is democratically run; it’s an experience of workers coming together, voting on contracts, strikes, and other actions, and doing all the small-d democratic things that most people never really get to do in their day-to-day lives in a meaningful way. Being in a functioning union shows people that democracy is a thing that works, can build power, and deliver results. Unions are schools for democracy, and they build personal knowledge of and belief in the efficacy of democracy. The decline of unions saps all of that out of society. 

JW: And lastly, what is a first step that individuals, particularly those working in higher ed, can take to advance the cause?

HN: If you don’t have a union, make it your personal project to organize a union at your school. Contact the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations), or reach out to any one of the unions active in higher ed, such as the AAUP. If you can’t unionize, you can still organize–reach out to EWOC (Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee) to get in touch with an organizer who can help. Talk to colleagues at other schools who are in unions to find out what they’ve learned. People are usually happy to share what they know. Build solidarity everywhere. 

If you do have a union, get involved. Run for office. Learn about the issues. Make sure the union is working for them. Talk to your coworkers. Listen to your coworkers. Organizing is hard and time-consuming, but the power you all get at the end is worth it. Talk to the other unions at your school about how you can all work together. Form one big higher ed union. 

And in general, the more worried you get about our country and our politics, keep in mind that building LABOR power is a great way to tackle those problems. It can work a lot more directly than voting and waving signs for candidates. Try it! Kick ass for the working class. 

—

We at the Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom would like to say that whether you are a graduate student or a tenured, tenure-track, or contingent faculty member, your AAUP advocacy or collective bargaining chapter can help defend your academic freedom and your rights as a worker. AAUP advocacy chapters are campus organizations that work to defend academic freedom and support academic workers, even if you campus does not have a recognized union.

Even if you do not yet have a union on your campus, joining the AAUP makes you a member of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Local 6741.

You can find your campus AAUP chapter here or by emailing organizing@aaup.org. If you do not have an AAUP presence on your campus yet, take up Nolan’s call to “make it your personal project to organize a union at your school.” Here is a step-by-step guide for doing so.

The views expressed in this newsletter are those of individual contributors and not those of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) or the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom.