“This building vs. these people.”
It was a message that stood out from the litany of signs and slogans that proliferated on the picket line. The words were scrawled on a large, double-sided cardboard arrow. One end pointed up at The New School’s University Center and its shingled, muntz-metal facade. The other pointed down to the stretch of sidewalk upon which dozens of part-time professors—unionized under the local 7902 chapter of the UAW (yes, the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America)—alongside full-time faculty, staff, and student allies trod back and forth for several chilly weeks last winter. Architectural antagonism felt like a decent proxy for a situation that would become the longest adjunct faculty strike in US history. My fellow picketers and I had been steadfastly avoiding setting foot inside the building, whose polygonal windows, emblazoned with course titles like “Artists as Activists” and “Inequality and Varieties of Capitalism,” announced the university’s social justice bona fides to the busy entrance at Thirteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Weeks into the strike, the scene had taken on a valence of bitter irony.
Another irony, more strange than bitter: just over five years ago, after graduating from a now-defunct experimental urban studies program at Parsons (the once-independent design college that has been under The New School’s administrative umbrella since the 1970s), I actually worked, briefly, at the architecture office that designed this very same, coppery campus centerpiece. At that time, organized labor was for me more an abstraction than a viable prospect to work toward. I had just barely missed the formation of a graduate worker union at The New School (still going strong and now also represented by the UAW), but I was sympathetic to what I was hearing. I began to use my spare time to work with the editorial collective Failed Architecture, which was then planning a special series of articles about labor conditions within “the discipline.” In the break room at my day job, I would seldom, but with great interest, catch snatches of chatter about something called The Architecture Lobby. On even rarer occasions, murmurous speculation followed: Can you imagine? A union? Here?
These days, of course, it’s not nearly as hard to imagine labor organizing taking place within architecture. The past year alone saw high-profile union campaigns at SHoP and Bernheimer Architecture (only the latter succeeded), and at least a half dozen or so drives are reportedly brewing inside design firms across the country. The question has become far less hypothetical to me on a personal level as well. I joined two academic unions in 2022: one as a part-time lecturer and the other as a full-time doctoral student and graduate worker at Rutgers University–Newark. This recent plunge back into academia, jolting as it has been on its own terms, also happens to have coincided with the most significant strike wave ever seen in American higher education. Thus, I find myself at a peculiar juncture: not only reflecting on the wintry picket line along Fifth Avenue, but once again marching (in much more amenable weather) across the grounds of a brutalist campus in a neighboring state.
My trajectory from union sympathizer to rank-and-file member to unlikely strike veteran has been swift and not always smooth. Striking takes a lot of work; even for those well-versed in the ins and outs of labor politics—not me—it can be a dizzying and imperfect lesson in what collective action can achieve in a culture that is largely inimical to worker power. At The New School, where adjuncts make up nearly a whopping 90 percent of the teaching staff, striking allowed thousands of us to shove a giant wedge into the glaring contradiction between the institution’s progressive image and a business model that treats educators as gig workers. Out of that enormous gap, we were able to create much better working conditions and, relatedly, better learning conditions for students. Expanded benefits, increased job security, immediate, retroactive pay raises—cool stuff, without a doubt, and for many of my colleagues, cobbling together a precarious livelihood from adjunct teaching, legitimately life-enhancing propositions. But as with any struggle in the actually existing world, our hard-won contract represents neither a definitive end nor a clear beginning, but a moment of possibility propelled by regular (if, in this case, hypereducated) people demanding a greater say in the conditions of their own workplace, i.e., where they spend a great deal of their waking lives.
Like me, Molly Ragan has a graduate degree from The New School, where she currently teaches part-time (and where hiring alumni is a fairly common practice, if you can’t already tell). Ragan is also in the unique position of working full-time as a local staffer for ACT-UAW Local 7902. (The first part of that acronym, unique to our shared union chapter with NYU part-time lecturers, stands for “Adjuncts Coming Together.”) Labor organizing dovetails nicely with the participatory design methods she studied during the course of earning her master’s in strategic design and management. As Ragan succinctly puts it, “The New School trained me to shut it down.” Last fall, when the opportunity to put such training into action came, Ragan was on the picket line by day, and in meetings by night, for nearly five weeks straight. Though physically and mentally exhausting, the work of “building social structures for energy to move through” paid dividends: within hours of the strike being officially declared, dozens of union officers and rank-and-file members had been mobilized for all sorts of roles, ranging from strike captains to social media photo editors. (An introvert, I opted to serve as one of the latter.) With support from the UAW national already in place, union members were able to sign up for strike benefits in the event that The New School reserved the right to stop paying striking workers, which it eventually did.
Though the dramatic climax of the strike has passed, union life—and political life at The New School generally—has settled into something a little more ... ordinary. This is a good thing, and it gives me a modicum of relief as I picket against yet another recalcitrant boss.
As active participation within the union, and on the picket line, swelled from double to triple digits in the span of days, designer and part-time lecturer Lee-Sean Huang was at his home in Providence, Rhode Island, steeped in virtual negotiations with The New School’s (reportedly patronizing) legal team. Elected to the union’s bargaining committee during the winter of 2021, Huang had already taken part in three months of negotiations with top management by the time the strike began. He describes these sessions as “all-encompassing”; during the strike’s peak, he would go days at a time without stepping outside. But even the unglamorous, if hugely important, job of virtual negotiating—against a law firm, hired by the university, with a track-record of representing clients such as a private prison corporation and a strip club in labor disputes—proved to be anything but an isolating experience. Designated by the bargaining committee as one of a handful of press liaisons, Huang was tasked with telling the complex and often exasperating story of labor negotiations in real time. One priority for him was to communicate to the media, in clear terms, The New School’s “demystifying” hardball tactics, which became increasingly punitive and alienating to the university’s community at large. And as greater, in fact national, attention and sympathy focused on the strikers, Huang would reinforce the notion that it was “not a disruptor of design practice and pedagogy, but an extension of it”—a kind of curriculum through which both an institution’s workers and its ostensible “clients” (i.e., students) could radically rethink its future, together.
For those students, the experience of the strike was perhaps most obviously, if not always intuitively, pedagogical. Bruke Alemayew and Artem Chouliak, two undergraduate seniors studying architecture in Parsons’ School of Constructed Environments, dove headfirst into student-faculty solidarity efforts. Initially using their podcast, After Studio, as a platform for covering the strike from a student perspective, the pair would go on to spend nearly every day on the picket line, joining dozens of their peers in lending youthful energy to an increasingly festival-like atmosphere along Fifth Avenue. Alemayew became one of the strike’s most prolific documentarians, and Chouliak one of its most vocal student supporters. Their strong support notwithstanding, the strike was still an uneasy coda to a college experience marked by crises: epidemiological, political, and otherwise.
The penultimate week of the fall semester, the administration made good on its threat to cease paying striking faculty and, in a more unprecedented move, cut all health insurance benefits. Just as the strike looked like it might continue indefinitely, two events finally broke the impasse. First, a group of sympathetic parents began organizing a class action lawsuit against the university. Then, a large number of undergraduate students occupied the University Center. Within hours of this second, critical action, the administration was back at the bargaining table in better faith; a few days later, it was all over as quickly as it had begun. Yet, for students, the occupation had unleashed latent grievances around financial aid, racial injustice, and other longstanding issues—as well as an organizing spirit in need of an outlet after several weeks of suspended normality. As occupiers gathered for teach-ins and long participatory meetings in the waning days of 2022, Chouliak notes that the school—with its byzantine administrative structure dispersed across several West Village buildings—finally found a “central town square” in the University Center’s lower mezzanine.
Striking takes a lot of work; even for those well-versed in the ins and outs of labor politics—not me—it can be a dizzying and imperfect lesson in what collective action can achieve in a culture that is largely inimical to worker power.
The occupation evolved into the student-led One New School coalition, which facilitates working groups around issues as far-ranging as immediate votes of no confidence in the administration, the establishment of campus Black Affinity and POC Spaces, and “opportunities for restructuring the university towards self-governance.” (This last ambition echoes exciting, if muted, calls to reform Parsons as a co-operative.) Alemayew and Chouliak, who have since graduated, used their newfound organizing skills to advocate for a more democratic culture in their final design studios, helping implement community agreements, a stack system of communication, and a general disposition of “resilience, empathy, and understanding” to approaching design—something akin to what Alemayew calls the task of “problem-solving as a community.” Union activity, meanwhile, has pivoted toward both external political organizing (around the New York State budget, for instance) and internal electoral work, including the UAW’s first-ever, fully democratic national leadership vote. The strike may be receding into the past, but there remains a strong, and more expansive, interest in organizing at the school.
Put another way: though the dramatic climax of the strike has passed, union life—and political life at The New School generally—has settled into something a little more … ordinary. This is a good thing, and it gives me a modicum of relief as I picket against yet another recalcitrant boss. The circumstances at Rutgers and with my union there (which, uniquely, encompasses full-time faculty and grad workers) are very different, as is the scale and scope of a labor action led by three distinct unions and spread across campuses in three cities. As of this writing, on a balmy mid-April week, circumstances are still very much up in the air. Given the fuzzy legal status of public sector strikes in New Jersey (Rutgers is a state school), the administration has threatened to seek a court injunction, and the sudden involvement and oversight of New Jersey governor Phil Murphy in bargaining has created new opportunities and pressures in negotiations. But back on the picket line, I feel the familiar exuberance of people discovering just how much power they really have.
Both of my unions, at the end of the day, are effective (if imperfect) institutions that advocate on behalf of my interests as a worker. They provide a democratic counterweight to the structural hierarchies and inequities of work within an economic system that, despite the best intentions of its reformers, increasingly depends on workers’ acceptance of precarity—and on their begrudging complicity in providing more for less. Architectural workers—does that sound familiar? If it does, here’s some friendly advice: it’s not all about you, but also, you are not alone. Labor organizing may be just one part of broader struggles for justice, but it is a crucial engine of solidarity that tangibly links your interests to those of countless other workers, of all kinds, whose fate is inextricably tied up with your own within this wacky system (to put it as lightly as one can) called capitalism. You can call that class consciousness—I would—but the more I live through it, the more it just feels like common sense. If you ever find yourself faced with a choice between “this building” or “these people,” bet on the people.