iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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UAW Local 4121 @uaw4121.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Last month, our Local joined our @uaw.org siblings at the Hunter College National Conference for Collective Bargaining in Higher Education to talk about addressing sexual harassment in academia through worker-led programs like EPIC, and fighting Trump 2.0 by coordinating mass actions.

Four smiling people raise their fists in front of a mural depicting striking workers.

Two people sit at a table while another speaks at a podium. The table has a banner that reads "National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. www.hunter.cuny.edu/ncscbhep. Hunter: The City University of New York."

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Sniffit @sniffit.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

No solidarity with the rest of the nation goes both ways. Go fuck yourselves.

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Sniffit @sniffit.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Everyone should end all support for UAW until Fain is gone and they get their heads straight.

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I'm a Lectern @notpodium.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

correct alt 2nd image: speaks at a *lectern also 😍

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UAW Local 4121 @uaw4121.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

Read more about the panel featuring Local President Levin Kim & @nihfellowsunited.bsky.social President Emilya Ventriglia here: www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty... @uaw4811.bsky.social @umd-glu.bsky.social

Concerns about higher ed’s future under Trump and calls for a forceful response to his actions pervaded a recent gathering on collective bargaining in higher ed. The conference—held in Manhattan just two days after Columbia announced it would capitulate to multiple demands the administration made—offered a snapshot into a large pocket of resistance.

We couldn’t actually be better positioned to fight back against the kind of authoritarian attacks that we’re seeing.”
—Ian Gavigan, national director of Higher Ed Labor United

Panelists and the audience discussed the Trump administration’s ongoing targeting of higher ed and how to respond.

“We are under absolutely relentless assault,” said Rebecca Givan, general vice president of the Rutgers University AAUP-AFT and a HELU steering committee member. “It’s constant, it’s everywhere, it’s in every direction, but it would be so much worse if we didn’t have our unions. And so we have these structures and we need to use them to fight back.”

Givan said that “none of us have been sleeping,” but “if we can’t organize within our unions to fight back, we have nothing.” She said unions have to work within state and federal politics and agencies, fighting for changes such as higher taxes on the rich to fund higher ed.

“We also have to give our university administrators a strong invitation to do the right thing,” Givan said. “And if they do not, we have to fill that leadership vacuum. We cannot let them back down. We cannot let them do a Columbia and capitulate.”

Atop the litigation, presidents and members of those unions and others—such as the United Autoworkers, a major organizer of graduate student workers—have rallied in Washington, D.C., against cuts to universities and federal research agencies. This week, the UAW joined other, nonunion organizations in suing to overturn the administration’s cancellations of National Institutes of Health grants.

Attempts at more national shows of force are coming. Across dozens of campuses, multiple unions are sponsoring a “Kill the Cuts” day of action on April 8, focused on reversing the NIH cuts and other federal funding reductions, followed by a more general protest April 17. It all adds up to campus unions taking a public stand where administrators largely haven’t.

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