Jacobin Radio: Organizing Outside the Tenure Track

About this episode

The episode discusses the unionization efforts of non-tenure-track faculty at USC and the broader implications for academic labor and worker rights.

Suzi speaks with Kate Levin, Janis Yue, and Sanjay Madhav, lead organizers of United Faculty-UAW, about their unionization drive at the University of Southern California (USC), one that would create the largest bargaining unit of non-tenure-track faculty at a private university in the US. Ballots go out April 24 and will be counted on May 18. The organizers describe two years of faculty-driven organizing, built one conversation at a time. Currently 75% of USC faculty are non-tenure-track, with no job security, no say over working conditions, and no recourse against healthcare cuts or wage freezes — the result of 40 years of academic corporatization. Now they’re fighting back. USC’s response? The administration has chosen to deploy the same constitutional wrecking-ball legal playbook pushed by SpaceX/Amazon, arguing that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional. No other university has taken such an extreme position. This is more than a labor story; it’s an account of the assault on democratic institutions, the NLRB, worker rights, and higher education itself at a moment when universities are under attack from federal funding cuts and DEI rollbacks. USC’s non-tenure-track faculty are…

People in this episode

Host: Suzi Weissman

Guests: Kate Levin, Janis Yue, Sanjay Madhav

Topics covered

• unionization
• academic labor
• non-tenure-track faculty
• worker rights
• democratic institutions
• higher education

Keywords

• USC
• unionization
• non-tenure-track
• faculty rights
• academic corporatization
• NLRB
• labor movement

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: United Faculty-UAW, University of Southern California, NLRB, SpaceX, Amazon

Places: USC

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