Faculty and graduate employee working conditions are student learning conditions, and the learning conditions at Chicago’s universities are miserable and unacceptable.
National Lawyers Guild Chicago joins in solidarity with the members of UIC United Faculty, UChicago Graduate Students United, and Northwestern University Graduate Workers, who are demanding appropriate workloads, fair wages, academic freedom protections, and greater support for students and faculty, including greater access to mental health care.
Each of these unions face significant struggles this month. UIC United Faculty voted to authorize a strike, with a tentative strike date of January 17, 2022. This comes after months of negotiation with administration lead to an impasse on critical bargaining demands, including wages and expanded mental health services for students and faculty. In addition, GSU graduate workers at University of Chicago organized with UE and Northwestern University graduate workers organized with UE are both preparing to vote for NLRB recognition of their unions due to their university’s refusal to grant voluntary recognition.
As a bar association rooted in a core belief that “human rights and the rights of the environment shall be held more sacred than property interests,” we have been proud to support students, staff, and faculty across Chicago’s universities throughout numerous organizing campaigns, to ensure the protection of their First Amendment rights to speech, association, expression, and petitioning the state for a redress of grievances.
Our membership and Board includes students and alumni affiliated with all three of these universities. While law schools constantly tout their rankings and supposed “prestige,” mistreatment of faculty, graduate workers, and students can be found at every Chicago university–in every department and program. Our model of higher education is one of austerity, which requires students to pay unaffordable tuition and take out loans to obtain the degrees required for economic stability. This model can be traced back to Ronald Regan’s time as California Governor, where he deliberately gutted California’s public university system with the expressed purpose of quashing leftist student and faculty organizing movements.
Contemporary campus protests and organizing movements are possible due to the critical legal victories fought and won by student activists during the height of the Vietnam War, including Healy v. James, 408 U.S. 169 (1972) and Papish v. Bd. of Curators of Univ. of Missouri, 410 U.S. 667 (1973). Students, graduate workers, and faculty continue to be at the forefront of struggles to prevent state repression in higher education. This is more critical than ever as even tenured faculty face sanctions for abolitionist and antiracist scholarship and advocacy, and multiple state legislatures seek to weaken or eliminate tenure, or criminalize the right to teach classes about systemic oppression in the United States.
All three of these local universities currently taking an adversarial position against faculty and graduate student workers use legal rhetoric to justify their refusal to bargain with union members or voluntarily recognize graduate worker unions. This is a blatant violation of their workers’ express rights to organize and collectively bargain for higher wages and better working conditions. University administrations take advantage of the fact that they will receive a slap on the wrist at worst for their flagrantly illegal conduct, and only after the significant delays caused by the inadequate funding and staffing for the NLRB. Law is not neutral, and just because American labor law is biased towards management doesn’t make that right or just. Any number of our members could share their “horror stories” about stressful experiences as students–experiences that are not in fact necessary to educate the skilled attorneys and legal workers that Chicago’s social justice movements need.
We recognize that the landscape of law school and higher education will not improve without solidarity between all faculty, graduate researchers, students, and staff. United, we can challenge inadequate wages, demanding hours, and relentless attacks on academic freedom.
For example, in the fall of 2020, UIC and UI Health workers affiliated with SEIU Local 73 and the Illinois Nurses Association went on strike for 7 days to demand higher pay, COVID-19 protections, and safe staffing ratios for workers and patients in the UI Health system. Striking workers were joined by UIC students, UICUF members, and members of UIC Graduate Employees Organization (GEO). Healthcare and university workers who had been disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic won their demands due to this outpouring of solidarity, which included Teamsters Local 705 members refusing to deliver packages to UIC.
The professions of law, healthcare, social services, and many other fields seek to divide workers from clients as a way to advance “professionalism.” This always comes at the expense of our clients receiving the time and quality of care that they deserve and negatively impacts the entire community as a result.
When we work together and reject blatant austerity measures, we can win a better world for all faculty, graduate workers, students, and staff in Chicago and beyond.
In Solidarity,
NLG Chicago Board
Elena Gormley, MSW, UIC Jane Addams College of Social Work, NLG Chicago Board Member
Mike Podgurski, JD, UIC Law, NLG Chicago Board Member
Andrew Segal, 3L, Northwestern University Law School, NLG Chicago Board Member
Dean Mayer, JD, Northwestern University Law School, NLG Chicago Board Member
Eli Massey, 2L, University of Michigan Law School, NLG Chicago Board Member
Sarah Ryan, JD, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, NLG Chicago Board Member
UIC Law NLG Chapter Board
Jacq Spreadbury, 3L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board, NLG Chicago Legal Observer®? Program Coordinator
Rachel Sternic, 3L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board Tony Wingfield, 3L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board
Jonathan Ballew, 3L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board
Emily Cotner, 3L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board
Ashlyn Amador, 2L, UIC Law, UIC NLG Board
University of Chicago Law School NLG Chapter Board
Gabrielle Zook, 2L University of Chicago Law, UChicago Law NLG Board
Rebecca Marvin, 2L University of Chicago Law, UChicago Law NLG Board
Allison O’Connor, 2L University of Chicago Law, UChicago Law NLG Board
Isabelle Argueta, 2L University of Chicago Law, UChicago Law NLG Board
Juliana Steward, 2L University of Chicago Law, UChicago Law NLG Board
Northwestern University Law School NLG Chapter Board
Elaine Cleary, 3L, Co-president NLG Northwestern Law
Shawn Oh, 2L, Co-president NLG Northwestern Law
Chicago-Kent College of Law NLG Chapter Board
Devin Ross, 3L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG President
Kayla Farhang, 2L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG Vice President
Yasmin Yousif, 2L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG Secretary
Ben Ginzky, 3L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG Events Chair
Jake Marshall, 2L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG-Chicago Liaison
Emma Byrne, 2L, Chicago-Kent, C-K NLG Chicago Area School Liaison
Loyola University Chicago Law School NLG Chapter Board
Kelly Barrett 3L, LUC Law School NLG Board
Agrismary Santiago 2L, LUC Law School NLG Board
Casey Callahan 2L, LUC Law School NLG Board
Juan Gonzalez-Martinez 3L, LUC Law School NLG Board
Jasmine Anderson 3L, LUC Law School NLG Board
Charlene Echeverria Burciaga 3L, LUC Law School NLG Board
DePaul University Law School NLG Chapter Board
Sarah Pitre, 2L, DePaul Law School NLG Board President
Arjun Nair, 3L DePaul Law School NLG Board Vice-President
James Fleming, 2L, DePaul Law School NLG Board Treasurer
