Conference Program

On the first day of the 2023 University of Illinois-Chicago - United Faculty strike, Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates rallied the crowd by insisting that “how we union” matters. Outlining a commitment to common good unionism, Gates refrain of “how we union” encourages us to broaden the foundations of labor organizing by using an intersectional feminist lens to understand and address the root causes of oppression and to work in solidarity with impacted communities struggling to contest oppressive systems. In Chicago, this has meant bargaining beyond wages and benefits, integrating community partners into decision-making processes, and centering demands that uplift racial, gender, and disability justice. In this way, common good unionism insists that struggles to improve workers’ conditions are intimately tied to struggles to improve community conditions, particularly for public school workers whose institutional mandate is to advance the public good. This is not to say that bargaining contracts in higher education can end oppressive systems; instead, it illustrates how bargaining for the common good can create openings ripe with political possibility for further agitation and transformation. In this paper, I examine what common good unionism can look like and fight for in the context of intensifying austerity, resurging authoritarianism, and growing assaults on higher education.