CHICAGO, April 5—Graduate workers from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) along with their supporters gathered for a rally on campus today to mark the end of their three-week strike against the racist university administration. The Graduate Employees Organization (GEO) Local 6297 union, representing some 1,600 workers, secured a tentative contract guaranteeing annual raises and a decrease in parasitic university fees.
The strike has been instrumental in further exposing the exploitative working conditions for graduate and teacher assistants, which inevitably translate into inferior learning conditions for the university’s predominately Black, Latin, and international student population.
The strike highlighted the decadence of the capitalist bosses’ academic institutions, which function first and foremost as factories of ideological and social control, bound to the profit motive of capitalism. Comrades from Progressive Labor Party (PLP) had a small role in supporting the strike, and look forward to connecting the lessons learned from the struggle to the larger fight of crushing the bosses’ rotten system entirely with communist revolution!
Graduate workers fight oppressive conditions
Shortly after the tentative contract agreement was announced, PLP joined over 100 graduate workers, students, faculty, and community supporters in the campus quad for a victory rally. Various speakers reflected on the oppressive conditions that led to the strike and the key role that bold action and solidarity played throughout the struggle. As one speaker sharply stated, “The graduate students are the backbone of this university, yet the university has been treating them like they are the appendix.” She wasn’t joking. According to UIC’s official statements, the graduate employee minimum salary for two semesters with 20 hours of work per week is a measly $18,000. Arbitrary charges and medical fees for the university’s Campus Care coverage have been steadily rising, bleeding working students of hundreds of dollars every semester.
A rapid community health assessment of over 600 graduate student workers conducted by campus public health organizations during the strike detailed some harsh realities. Seventy-seven percent of graduate workers don’t earn enough to cover their basic living expenses in rapidly gentrifying Chicago. Eight out of ten reported experiencing general anxiety, and seven out of ten reported depression (uic-geo.net).But despite these obstacles, the same graduate workers were able to lead a three-week strike that forced the university bosses to concede to some of their demands. The speeches shared experiences of their daily pickets on campus, cramming administration boardrooms during contract negotiations, classroom walkouts, and marching through the surrounding community after drawing support from local unions, faculty, and undergraduate students. Hundreds of classes taught by graduate workers had to be cancelled, even though the university claimed that courses went on uninterrupted (Chicago Tribune, 4/4).
Universities under capitalism serve the bosses needs
At the same time that many UIC students and workers have fought against economic insecurity and declining emotional health, the overall university system has continued to distinguish itself as a for-profit institution like all colleges and universities under capitalism. The same UIC bosses who claimed they couldn’t afford to pay student workers the Chicago minimum wage received an endowment of almost $400 million dollars in 2017, and salaries and bonuses for the chancellors and president total hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
What’s more, this past year the university bosses unveiled a plan to pour over $1 billion into renovating the campus over the next ten years, including building a new soccer stadium and ice-skating rink (Chicago Sun-Times, 12/31/18). These superficial vanity projects are sure to make the university more exclusive towards working-class students while displacing more workers and their families in the surrounding communities.
This is what passes for higher education under the profit system. Graduate students are worked to physical and mental exhaustion, helping churn out research that is instrumental in the university bosses cutting lucrative deals with major corporations, military contractors, and government agencies. Undergraduates lack basic support services to assist them in their courses, and graduate   saddled with astronomical debt. All the while, the ideology promoted is saturated with pro-capitalist ideas that will not help students fight against a racist and sexist system of exploitation, wars and ecological ruin.
Lasting victories
In the wake of a strike against the bosses, it’s essential to define what constitutes real victory in the class struggle. Pay raises and better staffing can be offset or rolled back entirely, but the relationships forged in working-class fightback are much harder for the bosses to erase. It is the act of expanding the base and militancy of the mass movement that must be the key goal in any reform struggle.Such a strategy gives us communists opportunities to have more workers and students questioning the capitalist system entirely, and discussing how an egalitarian society based on science, collectivity, anti-racism, and anti-sexism could educate our class infinitely better.