Organizing Professionals - by Gary Rhoades (Paperback)

About the Book

Academic employees are organizing and negotiating for respect for workers, their work, and the public value of higher education. Scholar and labor activist Gary Rhoades analyzes how academic employees are shifting the imbalance of power between labor and management, reducing the internal professional stratification between segments of the academic workforce, and intersecting workplace issues with broader issues of equality, public value, and social justice, and in the process organizing and negotiating for a new, more progressive academy.

Book Synopsis

Amidst unprecedented levels of union organizing in higher education, Gary Rhoades combines the perspectives of a scholar and labor movement activist and leader to provide a comprehensive analysis of organizing campaigns and collective bargaining agreements for faculty (contingent and tenure-track), graduate students, and postdoc employees. Academic employees are organizing and negotiating for respect for workers, their work, and the public value of higher education. Rhoades analyzes how academic employees are shifting the imbalance of power between labor and management, reducing the internal professional stratification between segments of the academic workforce, and intersecting workplace issues with broader issues of equality, public value, and social justice, and in the process organizing and negotiating for a new, more progressive academy.

Review Quotes

"This is a well-written book, rigorously researched but also suffused with Rhoades' extensive personal experience which spans campuses of different types across the country, and over time. The analysis is grounded in scholarship in the fields of both industrial relations/labor studies, and higher education, deliberately bridging the gap between these academic literatures. It is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the roots of the current academic moment. . . . Organizing Professionals demonstrates that organizing on our campuses, from the most secure and elite faculty to the most contingent, across the academic divides that are designed to thwart solidarity, is the only defense we have."-- "Journal of Collective Bargaining in the Academy"

"A vital book by the scholar who has contributed more to our understandings of higher education labor than anyone else in the past three decades. Gary Rhoades does far more than update his classic Managed Professionals, he charts new ground, analyzes hundreds of union contracts, and deeply considers the significant and growing organizing of academic workers--especially those in precarious and contingent positions. He argues that now is the time for workers to organize and for scholars to understand and theorize what their organizing means. Now is also the time for those who care about higher education to read this book."--Tim Cain "author of Campus Unions: Organized Faculty and Graduate Students in U.S. Higher Education"

"It's one thing to tell workers that if they stand together to fight the boss, they can win. Rhoades shows how they can win and what specifically they can fight for to improve their lives and their students' lives. Higher ed employers could be leaders in their regional economies, but only if higher ed workers take these lessons to heart and force their employers to lead."--Robin Sowards "labor organizer, researcher, and negotiator"

"This important, accessible text gives inspiration and direction to all who are working to create a more just academy. The time is now to focus on labor in higher education."--Daniel Saunders "associate professor of higher education, Florida International University"

"Gary Rhoades has far exceeded his classic achievement in Managed Professionals. He provides a consistent vision of a possible progressive future for higher education that both serves the needs of the working-class majority and of the workforce that makes the institutions function--in contrast to the neoliberal austerity future currently being projected by those in power. This book will serve for many years as a reference for contract comparison as well as a current analysis and call to action for all of us with a stake in the future of higher education as a public good."--Joe Berry "author of Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education"

About the Author

GARY RHOADES is a professor of higher education at the University of Arizona, Tucson. He served as the president of the Association for the Study of Higher Education in 2004 and was the general secretary of the American Association of University Professors from 2009 to 2011. He is the author of Managed Professionals: Unionized Faculty and Restructuring Academic Labor (1998) and coauthor with Sheila Slaughter of American Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education (2009).