How Social Justice Unionism Helped Spark Mizzou Protests
An anti-racism boycott by Black football players at University of Missouri may have been the final straw for the teetering Mizzou president, who resigned on Monday, but student activism on campus started months ago when the university abruptly eliminated health benefits for all of its thousands of graduate students.
Two days before the start of the semester, grad students were left reeling, wondering how they would pay for their medications, or how they would deliver their babies, recalls Ph.D. student Eric O. Scott. And so they met, in the hundreds, to talk about what actions they could take to ensure that they would have a voice in their working conditions.
“I was speaking, and I didn’t say the word ‘union.’ But people were shouting the word ‘union’ from the audience,” Scott recalls.
Since then, the graduate students in that room have become the Coalition of Graduate Workers, a unionizing group with the support of the Missouri National Education Association (MNEA). They seek to improve the teaching and learning conditions for students, and also have become a force for social justice on campus, aligned with Concerned Student 1950, a group that was formed to address institutional racism on campus.
“Eric and I are firmly committed to social justice — and everybody we’ve talked to about the union has been on the same page,” said Connor Lewis, a Coalition organizer who is seeking a Ph.D in history. “People really respond to the idea that this isn’t just about workplace benefits. It’s also about your students.”
Graduate students — or graduate assistants (GA) — are employees at universities How Social Justice Unionism Helped Spark Mizzou Protests - NEA Today: