Union Organizing As a Mechanism to Address the Mental Health of Precarious Graduate Workers: A Critical Consciousness Autoethnography of a Black Woman Organizer

Background and Purpose: Precarious employment (i.e., job insecurity, temporary employment, and erosion of worker protections) is a social determinant of health with detrimental consequences to workers and their families’ quality of life. These adverse social stressors include low social support, isolation, and feelings of powerlessness due to increased overwork and lower wages. In the case of public higher education, graduate workers functioning as Teaching Assistants (TAs), or Graduate Assistants (GAs) have challenged their precarious conditions through unionization. Despite the growing interest in studying graduate unionization amidst the 2016 Columbia decision and the recent UC strike, most literature has focused on the history and organizing tactics of unionization without analyzing the mental health impacts of precarious labor. Specifically, there is limited insights from Black women organizers that analyze the role of critical consciousness and graduate unionization to challenge the social stressors caused by precarious labor.

Methods: This autoethnographic study highlights the tense experience between being a labor organizer, doctoral student, and graduate worker, underlined by the unending stressors derived from precarious labor (e.g., overworked, social isolation, powerlessness). Specifically, I examined my mental health while navigating these tensions and how I transformed my wellbeing through critical consciousness and a praxis of collective action that forged a community of solidarity. I was co-president of the Union during contract negotiations on behalf of nearly 3,000 TAs and GAs at a predominantly white mid-western institution. I analyzed several data sources including personal meeting notes, strategy documents, newspaper articles, text messages and emails, bargaining session notes, and personal journal entries. Using Paolo Freire’s critical consciousness framework with theories of liberation psychology and radical healing, I developed a thematic analysis to tease out key instances of my political and liberatory development.

Results/Excerpt: The account revealed that despite the historic wins of the Union, there’s a consistent theme of suffering from oppression in conflict with the hopeful sense of community from organizing. “The administration claims that our demands for wages above inflation, overwork protections, and childcare are uncompelling and operationally burdensome. I’m exhausted with 12hr days managing academics and organizing along with racist microaggressions from my white colleagues. While they believe in bread-and-butter unionism based on feasibility, capacity, and pragmatics, I see our union as an instrument of class struggle to increase worker consciousness and combat austerity through militancy and solidarity. Despite that, I’m surrounded by wonderful women organizers who have become my friends as we push the Union to win a fair contract together”.

Conclusions and Implications: A framework of critical consciousness through collective organizing can enable social workers and scholars to understand the specific mental health challenges of organizers and empower workers to transform their precarious conditions through worker solidarity. Moreover, the field can expand its analysis of racial oppression in dialectics with precarious labor and mental health by supporting Black workers. This critical perspective will advance the field in valuing the decolonization of knowledge within the community context studied by centering the experiences of oppressed workers and their journey towards emancipation and liberation.