Why Andrew Carnegie Would Feel Right at Home at Columbia During the Strike

“Whatever you think of Columbia University or our situation, the Homestead Strike this is not,” writes Kevin Murphy in response to an open letter to Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley that recently appeared on HNN. Now Murphy, a graduate student in history at Columbia, certainly has a better understanding of events on the ground there than I do. However, as a student of the Homestead Lockout and a former member of the Teaching Assistants Association at the University of Wisconsin – Madison (which, by the way, is having its own major labor dispute these days), I want to suggest that this comparison is not nearly as far-fetched as Murphy seems to think.

I have to concede that to my knowledge there have been no riots in Morningside Heights, however it is worth noting that Columbia University has begun to recruit replacement workers for the strikers “in order to maintain a climate of civility and mutual regard.” Now most people who see scabs taking their jobs, like the workers at Homestead, are not civil at all.

More likely, Columbia wants to use these workers to encourage strikers to cross the picket line. Indeed, the use of permanent replacements has traditionally been the easiest way for employers to keep unions out of their shops. This strategy certainly worked at Carnegie Steel.

But keeping his employees non-union was only one of Andrew Carnegie’s goals. Another was getting labor to work harder. As Carnegie explained to a congressional committee in 1910:

When labor is plentiful, men do a great deal more work . . . When wages are high and men are scarce, they do not work. The reason is this (I am not blaming the men for it; it is human nature): When labor is plentiful, a man is zealous to keep his job. When labor is very scarce, and you can not get other men, the man will be a great deal less attentive to his duties. That is my experience, and it is that of every employer of labor, I think.

Indeed, what goes for steel companies goes for universities as well.

For years, universities like Columbia have been admitting more students to their graduate programs in the humanities than can reasonably be expected to get tenure-track jobs once they are through earning their degrees. This allows schools to have a ready supply of labor to call upon during struggles like this one.

Ever wonder why professors don’t organize more often? In these lean times, workloads around the country are generally getting worse, not better. Tenure might mean job security, but it is not absolute protection against the trials and tribulations of the state budget process and it is hardly a license to get rich.

In Colorado, it is next to impossible under the law for professors at public universities to join unions. In other places, fear of replacement by this same pool of contingent labor would likely lead to the same result. I wish critics of higher education (such as the soon-to-be ex-academic Erin O’Connor) would quit blaming tenured professors for the treatment of adjunct labor. In reality, professors, graduate students and adjuncts are being hurt by the same forces.

Murphy makes a similar mistake in another part of his post. Rather than mocking his union because it thinks its members are part of “an oppressed subaltern class because we are paid $17,000 a year, at least $12,000 in housing subsidies, basic health care, gym membership, etc.,” he should think about just how much Columbia University pockets whenever it replaces a professor with a graduate student or adjunct instructor. I guarantee you his administration makes that calculation every semester. The only reason most schools don’t copy the University of Phoenix and gradually hire an all-adjunct labor force is that they would have problems with accreditation.

The other common argument that gets made against graduate student unions is that they hurt the professor-grad student relationship. Columbia has adapted this stance to defend its position before the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] that graduate students are not really workers. Not only has the NLRB already rejected this position, it flies in the face of common sense. If teaching assistants have to work to make ends meet during graduate school, doesn’t this make them student workers? Why should student workers be denied the same rights as other people in the labor force?

Here, once again, the comparison between Columbia and Carnegie Steel can be helpful. In order to keep the nonunion employees at his Edgar Thomson steel works motivated, Andrew Carnegie promised in 1889 that, “There is not a man within the sound of my voice who may not rise to the highest position, nor is there any man who, from lack of the right qualities or failure to exercise them, may not sink to the lowest.” In other words, Carnegie used the possibility of upward mobility to keep labor in line.

Claiming graduate students are apprentice professors rather than wage workers is a way to remind them that in order to have a bright future in this business they have to jump through a lot of hoops which the faculty control. “Work hard, don’t rock the boat and you’ll make it to the top,” is a message that fits the situation at both Columbia and Carnegie Steel. Ironically, in both cases, deliberate efforts to increase the labor pool undercut this promise.

While things may seem bleak for graduate students, I was delighted to read that New York University has signed its first contract with its adjunct professors’ union. A victory for those at the bottom of the wage scale can only help workers at every stage of their careers. For example, this precedent might make organizing full-time professors easier in the future. If only academics at all levels could stop fighting one another and recognize that we are all in the same boat, we would all be better off.