Organized labor has a key role to play in organizing for transformational change. We are inspired by the Chicago Teachers’ Union coalitional response to COVID-19, which calls on Chicago to protect the working class through a host of social programs that include debt forgiveness, expanded sick pay, meal delivery, and more. As Clio Chang writes, “Right now, unions are showing themselves to be useful beyond the members who they directly represent, whether it comes to informing the public, pushing for safety protocols that would slow the spread of the disease, or advocating for worker-centered relief packages.” Developing cross-labor coalitions can help coordinate our fight and lay the basis for resisting future sacrifice as the recession deepens.
As socialists working within several organizations based in Southeast Michigan, in mid-March, we helped launch the Huron Valley Labor & Community COVID-19 Coalition: an umbrella coalition of over twenty labor and community organizations bringing together those involved in tenants’ organizing, mutual aid efforts, prison abolition, labor unions, and immigrant workers’ associations. We see our task as amplifying the voices and experiences of workers fighting back, coordinating between different groups, and building a united front for community survival.
Organizing Strategy
Our labor and community coalition operates on two fronts, beginning with a targeted campaign at the University of Michigan. Despite being the largest employer and landowner in the region, the University pays no property tax on its land and facilities, and outsources student housing to the private market, leading to under-funded municipalities marked by unaffordability and racial segregation. The University has plenty of resources, stemming from its $12.4 billion endowment, to contain the spread of the virus and protect the community. Yet, it continues to prioritize profits over safety, refusing to guarantee N95 masks to nurses or to preemptively test workers for the virus. In a recent shift, President Mark Schlissel announced a host of austerity measures, including a hiring and salary freeze and ‘voluntary’ furloughs for non-union staff. Predictably, Schissel spoke of “shared sacrifice” and offered to take a 10% pay cut out of his $900,000 base salary.
Labor must resist both the University’s failure to protect frontline workers and the implementation of austerity measures that increase precarity exactly when workers need greater financial relief. We submitted a resolution through the All-Campus Labor Council, which represents the unions on campus (including nurses, hospital workers, graduate student workers, non-tenured instructors, and building trades’ unions). In our resolution, we call for free testing and COVID-19-related healthcare for all who need it, unlimited sick days for those who test positive or to care for someone who tests positive, adequate PPE for frontline workers, handwashing stations for building trade workers, expanded food pantry operations, and refunds for students.
We also included larger community demands, such as prohibiting ICE and the police from hospital grounds, and enacting a moratorium on medical debt. While not all unions have signed on yet, the initiative demonstrates how labor could exert pressure toward transformative change. On a practical level, these demands have lent themselves to better coordination among University of Michigan workers, from graduate student workers fighting for a living wage in recent contract negotiations, to Michigan Medicine nurses demanding PPE. Given that the University of Michigan’s austerity measures specifically target non-union labor on campus, it is more important than ever that labor align itself with demands that extend past its membership.
On a broader level, members of these unions worked with members of community organizations to develop a “longlist” of demands that pair with the All-Campus Labor Council demands, to address the needs of the entire community, including vulnerable populations such as undocumented immigrants, the houseless, and the incarcerated. We call these “survival demands”: healthcare for all, including free testing and treatment for all COVID-19 patients; housing for all, including rent and mortgage forgiveness, free utilities, and housing for unhoused folks; as well as financial and material security in the form of income for all, mental health support, childcare, and delivered meals. Finally, we demand a robust public education campaign to counter racist myths about COVID-19 and inform the community of available resources. To fund these programs, we call for a tax on the top 1% of Michiganders and for the University of Michigan to direct all resources to alleviate the crisis.