When We Fight, We Win!: Strategic Antagonism in Academic Labor Unionism

Background: Negotiation, dialogue, and navigation of bureaucracy are frequently examined as key strategies in advocacy on behalf of clients or particular social causes, according to social work and social service literature. However, disruption, confrontation, and antagonism have emerged as a minor trend in the literature on advocacy. This alternative approach represents a critique of the more hegemonic model and is a reflection of the growing demand for a more radical social work approach. At the same time, empirical investigation of different advocacy models is lacking, especially as they regard how different models are taken up and implemented by community practitioners.

Methods: This ethnography draws from over six months of fieldwork during a labor strike by a union at a major public university during the winter and summer of 2023. Fieldwork included interpersonal conversations with both rank-and-file union members and union leaders, and participant observation of rallies, union meetings, and direct actions. Also, data included interviews with main organizers and social media posts of the union. This ethnography focused on how openly confrontational and antagonistic methods informed and were informed by union leaders’ theory of advocacy and the attendant results of that approach. In this case, the union specifically relied more upon direct actions such as work stoppages, targeted pickets, and building occupations to advocate for their positions to their employer than traditional bargaining approaches.

Findings: First, union organizers created a relational shift amongst their membership. Members were encouraged to see themselves as workers antagonistically against the boss, rather than as students or colleagues collaborating with one another. Second, hostility and antagonism were sustained by community building events and combining play with resistance. Third, and finally, by relying upon anger and hostility as organizing affects, union leaders and union members often fell into a dichotomous friend/enemy distinction that left little room for disagreement, which in turn resulted in feelings of alienation amongst participants.

Conclusion and implications: Findings suggest that hostility and antagonism as an approach to advocacy can lead to efficacious outcomes though come with associated costs. First, hostility and antagonism may lead to concessions at a policy level as targets attempt to avoid further disruption. Second, the extent of these concessions is ultimately dependent on organizers’ ability to maintain participant mobilization and engagement with the campaign. Third, approaches based on hostility and antagonism require community-building efforts both during the campaign and after the fact. This substantiates the efficacy of an antagonistic approach to advocacy but also raises important questions for social work ethics, especially with regards to reconciling the efficacy of such approaches with social work values.