SABBATICAL: I believe in unions.

Like a lot of people my age or older, I grew up understanding unions in abstract.

My grandfather moved to California just after the Second World War. At some point, he learned how to weld and by the time I was born, he had a welding shop in East Oakland, a short drive away from the house he built for his family. I have so many memories of running around that shop full of jagged scrap metal with my older brother that I shiver at the thought and wonder if I got a tetanus vaccine as a kid. I assume so but… I remember the smell of oil and rust, and the near total darkness in his workroom. I have tender images in my head of my grandfather, mask down, with a beautiful arc of sparks flying around him.

But my favorite part of that shop was the small break room just to the right of the front door. Everything in that room was second hand and lived in before it ever made it there, which means it was ancient by the time I saw it, and yet, I loved it. The small fridge was loud as hell and always full of soft drinks; including an endless supply of off-brand grape sodas for me. Okay, probably not for me, but I imagined they were. There was an old tv with foil antennas on a high shelf in a far corner. It might have even been black-and-white. And of course there was a candy dish on a low coffee table full of those big chunks of peppermint candy. My grandfather’s favorite. If I close my eyes now I can see that room more clearly than some apartments I’ve lived in because that room is etched into my DNA. As a child, I thought the fact that my grandfather owned his own business was amazing. Black excellence! But that’s the thing about Black excellence, it’s usually just a veneer.

Once upon a time, in the Highland neighborhood in East Oakland - near the Coliseum, below East 14th, around 90th Ave - nearly every house had a decorative, black, wrought iron screen door for safety and beauty, and many of those doors were made by Mr. Lee. My grandfather. (Lee was his first name. Kinda. That’s a story for another day.) Those doors have disappeared as the original owners died, sold, or lost those homes, but I remember them. What I didn’t realize until much later, years after my grandfather had died, was that he owned that business not because he wanted to, but because he had to.

In grad school, I started learning about the Second Great Migration and Black Californian history, for the first time (!) and I came to understand my family history in new ways and one of the things I learned was about all the ways unions had not helped men like my grandfather. As a young southern migrant, he had been hemmed into what we would now call entrepreneurship out of necessity, not desire, because what he had wanted was a “good union job.” What so many Black people have wanted since the early twentieth century were “good union jobs.” But after the war ended, these became much less accessible - especially in industrial work - to Black men.

So, my grandfather made do. As it happens, I come from many generations of people who have made do and, as I age, I appreciate them more and more.

Over the decades, my grandfather supplemented his income from non-union factory work by making those screen doors and other metal fixtures for community members and local businesses. I suspect, considering the state of his finances, that he did lots of work for too cheap and on consignment that never came through. He was also illiterate and never wrote anything down but numbers. I’m not sure if he ever signed a contract, but I know that if he had, he would not have been able to understand its intricacies. My grandfather was a hard worker, but not a great businessman, so he made do.

My grandmother was equally as industrious. She moved in and out of formal paid work as family finances dictated, but she often brought in extra cash cooking for single men (especially ones from Louisiana and Texas where she and my grandfather migrated from, respectively), throwing rent parties, and apparently making bathtub hooch. (The bootleg liquor is what I really want to know about, but no one will tell me! Yet.)

It’s no surprise then that for my mother, her sisters, and my older cousins, union jobs were the pinnacle of success. My aunt worked for the City for decades, one of my cousins was a garbage man until retirement, and my mother, for most of my youth, worked for the University of California system as a secretary. All “good union jobs.” I went in a different direction, which is for the best because but many of those white collar union jobs have disappeared over the years, become ever more elusive for people of color and women.

You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you this story about my family history. Let me answer that question by telling you another story lmao.

I regularly teach an intro-level course on modern U.S. history, which begins at Reconstruction. A large theme of that class is labor. It would be impossible to discuss that time period (or the larger history of this country) without talking deeply and repeatedly about labor, its exploitation, and activism around it. As I learned this history in grad school, I was able to contextualize the messages I received about unions as a child. But as I teach, I am surprised at how little the successive generations of students understand unions - their history, how they work now, but also why so many of them have not yet encountered one in their working lives.

I arrived at my university just after it unionized, but unviersity unions are tricky. Well, not uniquely tricky, just a new riff on an old theme, tricky. If you’ve ever studied a union (historically or contemporarily) you will be familiar with the first hurdle being the “collective” in collective action. In pretty much every workplace, it is always easier to see divisions over connections: race, gender, class, nationality, or the classic skilled v. unskilled. Universities are just that, nothing but divisions mapped across a system built on hierarchy, exclusion, and exploitation.

On top of that is the consistent messaging inside and outside of academia that being an academic is a calling, not a vocation. You can map this onto so many jobs today (general creative careers and teaching come immediately to mind). Just to be clear, being an academic is my job. I spent six years in graduate school, getting the highest degree possible, I spent another six years as an assistant professor, and have spent the last four years as an associate professor. This is my job. I wanted to study history and learn things, so I got the “good union job” that my grandfather was denied to pay the bills. If you know an academic who says being a professor or researcher or whatever is their calling, great! That doesn’t make it any less their job.

But my experience as a professor is just one of the many laboring experiences at universities. There are non-tenure track faculty (like instructors and adjuncts), graduate student instructors (who universities consider to be a “gray area” between student and instructor), there are administrators (many of whom are another gray area between faculty and managers), and staff (which includes everyone from departmental administrative support, ITS staff, library workers, and janitorial to name the few). There are so many fault lines between these groups and often unionizing efforts for one hinge on the support of another; support that unfortunately might not come. As I said above, I was raised by a university staff member and my first experiences of a university (UC Berkeley to be exact) were of its many hierarchies, conservatism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia bound in this place of “liberal higher learning.” (The myth of universities as liberal spaces is a story maybe for another day, but in short: I could not disagree with any less than my whole entire heart.)

So now to SABBATICAL. In Toni and Mike’s book you’ll read about a union maybe coming to our unnamed, midwestern university. When I started writing Office Hours, it was supposed to be a a stand alone, but since I’m a little allergic to that, ideas for Toni, Mike, and Marie wouldn’t leave me alone. The union story is Marie’s and we’ll talk about it more whenever I write her book, but I wanted to introduce it here. I said in the author’s note for Office Hours that I wanted to see depictions of academics who looked like me, my friends, and some of my colleagues. I wanted to see faculty of color who cared about their students of color, who sometimes felt uneasy in their positions in lily-white institutions based on their exclusion. But in SABBATICAL, I wanted to show those same faculty members stepping off-campus.

So much of OFFICE HOURS happens in hostile spaces (committee meetings, classrooms), but in SABBATICAL, we see Toni and Mike safe in her home because one important part of union activism is to protect the life you live when work ends. The early language around the need for worker protections and unions was about achieving what we might today describe as work-life balance. The point of an eight-hour work day was to give workers time for themselves; to spend with their families, to find a partner, to rest, to be in community, to dream. Toni is not amazing at work-life balance, because there’s so much work that she thinks there’s no time for life.

Thankfully, Mike is good at life, especially if he gets to spend it with Toni.

As it happens, there are unionizing efforts happening RIGHT NOW that I am watching as closely as I can.

Graduate students in the University of California system and workers at HarperCollins are all currently striking. Unions don’t fix everything, but they’re a damn good start.

And because I love talking history, here’s a random list of books about union organizing that doesn’t even scratch the surface.

And don’t forget to preorder Sabbatical.

xo,

kat