In April 2023, over 9,000 academic workers walked off the job on all three Rutgers University campuses in the largest public sector strike in New Jersey history. Punctuated by the brass section and the perfect pitch of singers from Mason Gross, the Rutgers art school and musical conservatory, our strike song and its refrain “Heyyyyyy Holloway / I wanna knowohhhowoh / If you’ll raise my wage” helped draw large crowds of undergraduates, onlookers, and supporters from the tristate area to our pickets. Drag performances, the Solidarity Singers, and a booming sound system lent the strike a certain flair that seemed fitting for a university that brought the world Fluxus, a form of expressive performance that revolutionized art practice in the 1960s and beyond.

Our strike represented the fruit of years of solidarity work and yielded a delicious taste of material victory that is all too rare in the neoliberal era. The Coalition of Rutgers Unions (CRU) was key to scaling mobilization across job category and campus. This wall-to-wall industrial formation united contingent faculty, graduate workers, New Jersey Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) counselors, and medical faculty and staff with tenured professors to demand better working conditions and a restructured pay scale prioritizing the most vulnerable workers. By stopping work at one of the state’s largest employers, the strike shut down whole swaths of the regional economy and forced Phil Murphy, New Jersey’s Democratic governor, to intervene. Our wins at the bargaining table ultimately exceeded what many of us thought possible. At the same time, the experience offered some painful lessons about the difficulty of integrating race and gender with an industrial model of organizing.

As the former New Brunswick chapter president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, I participated in round-the-clock organizing over the many years leading up to the strike. It was one of the most profound experiences of my life, showing me that big victories are possible with dedicated, sustained work with a committed group of people. One of the joys (and scourges) of labor organizing is that it is often done with colleagues with whom you share little more than a workplace. Creating supermajorities in a country with threadbare protections for worker rights means that you do not get to choose your comrades.

I still cherish the memory of arriving at the union hall on the first day of the strike while people streamed in from all over the state. Older workers (many white and male) wearing large buttons repping their unions and central labor councils came to participate in solidarity pickets. It touched my heart to watch workers from traditional craft and blue-collar unions rub shoulders with self-identified Marxist-Leninist undergraduates calling out U.S. imperialism at a large CRU rally held on the second day of the strike. I began to dream that strike waves and organizing drives at Amazon, Starbucks, K-12 schools, tech startups, and hundreds of colleges and universities might birth substantive political as well as economic change in the years to come. Could a revived movement of left unions incubate a multiracial, cross-class coalition to counter the ever-encroaching tide of racial fascism? That was my particular freedom dream.

Our wins included a 44 percent raise for adjunct teaching faculty (a group the contract reclassified as lecturers), a 33 percent raise for graduate workers, a transformative process to recognize graduate fellows as workers, and $600,000 in New Jersey state funds to create a not-for-profit organization fostering grassroots collaborations with the communities beyond Rutgers’ three campuses. In order to help restructure the pay scale, weighting it to benefit the lowest paid, full-time faculty accepted a flat sub-inflation wage increase of $5,035 for the first year. Raises for full-time faculty over the four-year contract totaled roughly 14 percent, which was equivalent to about half of the increase won for graduate workers and nearly a quarter of the increase for adjunct faculty. Besides the power of the strike, this act of solidarity at the bargaining table was key to our win. Finally, by negotiating with Governor Murphy, we also won a $24.5 million increase in Rutgers’ state appropriation to cover the raises in the contract. Inspired by the Chicago Teachers Union’s Bargaining for the Common Good strategy, our victory established a precedent for other higher-education unions to win increased state funding for their universities.

None of this would have been possible without over 9,000 workers going out on strike. During those heady days, the collective power of organized resistance rooted in years of planning and outreach was unlike anything many of us had ever experienced. At the height of the weeklong action, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of classes were canceled. But the process became extremely fraught — and painful — as we moved from the strike to the bargaining table, the ratification phase, and then the ongoing fight to defend the contract. As anyone who has ever devoted themselves to sustained political organizing knows, internal fractures hurt the most. They are even more dangerous when combined with external repression.

A year and a half later, we are still processing the enormity of what we gained, what we lost, and what we learned along the way. Paradoxically, winning our historic contract ignited the union’s most serious internal conflict in recent memory. Whether it was rising expectations, negotiating an industrial formation at the bargaining table, or fractures along lines of difference, job category, and campus, the effects of internal strife were sobering. The deep pain it caused has led me to write about it to help prevent such rifts from happening again at Rutgers and at other unions inside the higher-education labor movement and beyond. Fear of strengthening the hand of the boss, exposing our vulnerabilities, or even tarnishing our historic wins almost kept me from doing so — some truths feel too ugly to tell. But after communing with other Black female organizers and member leaders around the country who have suffered parallel fates, I decided that it is crucial to talk not only about our successes but also about our challenges.

Building and sustaining an industrial labor coalition in 2024 under circumstances that have given employers nearly boundless power is difficult. The massive scope of management’s prerogative is rendered invisible because it is simply experienced as everyday reality. Given this asymmetry, turning on fellow organizers is all too easy. Racial and gendered scripts that blame individuals and specific groups of people for drastic declines in American living standards are saturating American political culture at every turn.

Unions are not immune. One need only look at Teamsters president Sean O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention in July. Given the Grand Old Party’s longstanding hostility to organized labor, it was the first time that the head of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters had ever addressed the RNC. Meanwhile, at the other end of the political spectrum, colorblind approaches to class have proliferated in segments of the socialist left where people reflexively dismiss “wokism,” arguing that it is identity politics, not white supremacy, U.S. militarism, or our settler-colonial origins, that are the true bulwarks against transformative social change.

To make matters worse, the use of trolling as a political medium on platforms both public (such as X, formerly known as Twitter) and private (such as Slack in the case of our union) has furthered the rightward march of U.S. political culture. Burdened by the intersection of race and gender, Black women bear the brunt of online hate, harassment, and doxxing at much higher rates than other groups. In 2008, scholar Moya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” to explain the pervasive demeaning of Black women in the media. While multiracial coalitions are essential to fighting the rising tide of right-wing authoritarianism, the costs can be very high for Black and brown women in majority-white organizations that do not commit to true antiracist practices. Colorblind approaches to class and a lack of courage in confronting racist behavior ensure that unions will never have the power and reach they need and deserve.

As the first Black woman to serve as the New Brunswick chapter president for the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, I drew on my love for independent Black radical formations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panther Party, and the Dream Defenders. Since Covid-19 made campus door-knocking impossible, I created a new way to connect with the membership during the shutdowns. Starting in the fateful summer of 2020, I worked with staff and graduate workers to launch a digital Freedom School that debuted union programming for the Scholars Strike in support of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor uprisings, the largest in U.S. history to date. In 2021, I also published a piece in The Guardian touting the importance of intersectional labor organizing by exploring how Black feminist principles could be applied to workplace struggle in K-12 schools and higher education. Looking back, this piece was an attempt to summon into being what I hoped our union  might become with sustained work.

Rutgers has the top-ranked African American history program in the nation. The Douglass campus is also a legendary birthplace of women’s history, and the Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden campuses have nurtured pioneering Africana studies programs. I was deeply invested in uniting the rich legacy of Rutgers alumnus Paul Robeson with one of the country’s oldest higher-education unions, begun in 1970. Yet in a half century, the union had failed to produce a leadership that reflected the racial, gender, and ideological richness of the Rutgers campus. When Deepa Kumar served as a co-president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT from 2015 to 2019, her focus on race and gender equity marked a shift that I built on utilizing tools from the Black radical tradition. Invoking Panther iconography, integrating Black thought into practice, and using a method of political education created by the African American freedom struggle were intended to bring more Black and brown people into the union leadership — particularly among contingent faculty and graduate workers at New Brunswick, where the BIPOC leadership was much smaller than among the tenured ranks.

The roots of that disparity can be traced back to the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election in 2016. Kumar actively sought out tenured faculty of color for the 2019 contract campaign through a targeted race and gender equity program. The union’s sponsorship of a march against Trump attended by thousands also played a crucial role in shifting the racial composition of the union’s tenured leadership years before our 2023 strike. These actions reimagined the union not just as a service provider and contract enforcer but also as a political shelter from the overt white supremacy of the Trump years. As a result, a significant number of tenured faculty of color (including me) joined the executive council, which senior white men had previously dominated.

On the fifth day of the strike, as we approached the next stage of the contract campaign, the joyful days came to an end when the bargaining team, and later the executive council, voted to pause the strike in order to adopt a legal framework after winning core demands for each job category. Once labor and management have agreed to the core economic articles, this legally binding method allows them to negotiate the remaining non-economic issues as a preliminary stage to a tentative agreement. In early October, the International Longshoremen’s Association used this method to pause its strike, which included 47,000 members across 36 ports.

In mid-April, the tenured, contingent full-time, and adjunct faculty voted overwhelmingly in favor of the framework, while graduate leaders raised substantial objections. They feared that management would not honor the legal framework and lobbied to have a majority of graduate worker raises applied retroactively to the first and second year of the contract rather than distributed over three years, topping out at $40,000 in the final year. At the time, this would have been among the highest wages for graduate workers in public universities in the nation. But it lagged behind what was offered by some elite private colleges in the New York/New Jersey metropolitan area, which was up to 20 percent higher salaries and fellowships after successful strikes and work actions (in one case even the mere threat of a job action sufficed). The ever-widening financial disparity between public and private institutions contributed to the internal conflict that emerged.

Leaders of the Graduate Steering Committee, a governing body within the Rutgers AAUP-AFT, pushed for a longer strike with maximalist demands modeled on graduate student victories at Columbia University, New York University, and other peer institutions. Under threat of a court injunction, the members of the executive council outvoted them by a two-thirds margin. The majority recognized that not all of our demands could be won in our first strike. Infuriated elected grad leaders started reaching out to the general membership (particularly tenured faculty), including in strike communications channels, to criticize the contract.

At the height of this discord, as New Brunswick chapter president, I led an informational session introducing the legal framework to thousands of union members by having a representative from every job category speak about specific contract gains. It was not easy — we had an incredibly broad mix of people with varied levels of knowledge about the negotiations and the legal framework — and the tension was palpable. A rank-and-file graduate worker halted the proceedings to call me out by name for depriving him of “a living wage”; according to him, I was responsible for his inability to support himself and live independently. He fixated on me — not management, not the union president, not the bargaining team — as the obstacle between him and the life he wanted. That might have been the end of it were it not for the online encouragement of several dozen grad members and a warning from an elected graduate leader that I would probably retaliate against him for speaking up. The vicious tone, histrionic words, and escalating rage made me increasingly uncomfortable. I wasn’t the only target — another Black female leader in the union and a Black female graduate worker who had raised concerns about the racialized language and imagery that was being deployed against Black women in union spaces were also attacked.

Unbeknown to us, while the union meeting took place on Zoom, a group of graduate worker leaders and rank-and-file members in the graduate workers’ union Slack channel used derogatory race and gender insults against me and others, ranging from charges of incompetence and undeserved salary to expressions of personal disgust. One person wanted to nominate me for “whatever position is the opposite of a president.” Another called for a union “action plan” to write fake online teaching reviews. A truly offensive comment declared that I was “giving big Kanye interrupting Taylor Swift energy,” presumably because I had not treated a white female grad with sufficient respect. On and on it went, with dozens of examples. The barrage of insults continued, accusing me of gaslighting and mansplaining. When I responded to a question in the general channel, one person commented in the graduate workers channel, “Donna responded to my Zoom chat, I need a shower” and elicited five vomiting and four laughing emojis. One Black second-year grad worker asked, “What are you gaining from fighting right now? This is what management has wanted all along. We have to [be] smarter than this.” These attacks continued throughout the contract ratification phase and came to light only after three graduate students of color grew alarmed at the abuse, took screenshots, and reported it to the top union leadership.

For those who have not experienced it, there is nothing quite like being demeaned in front of hundreds of potential onlookers, many of whom you know. Rather than intervening or confronting this kind of racist and sexist speech, people I had worked with for years said nothing. Some actually joined in. What upset me most was the repeated “ungendering” (using Black feminist Hortense Spillers’s term) of me, treating me as a person who, unlike a “real” woman, is not vulnerable and cannot be hurt. After I announced in a union meeting that I was aware of the racist Slack posts, some of the most egregious examples were deleted. We have a partial archive of the abuse only because rank-and-file graduate students of color documented it.

While the grad worker Slack channel was raging, I was working with Black historians across the country to pressure Jonathan Holloway, Rutgers’s first African American president, not to seek a brutal injunction on our strike that could have led to individual fines and jail time. Over 1,200 academics signed an open letter expressing solidarity with the union.

Looking back, it saddens me how swiftly and reflexively racist and misogynist tropes about Black women arose as frustrations over insufficient wage gains at the bargaining table mounted. In the deluge of misogynoir directed at me and other Black female leaders, the Rutgers administration disappeared entirely from the controversy — instead we became the embodiment of an overclass of tenured faculty who prevented graduate workers from winning a living wage. During a time that should have been one of celebration, our union was plunged into discord and trauma that obscured our transformative wins.

Strikes are tools, not revolutions, and they must always be used as part of short- and long-term planning. It is essential that we focus not only on our immediate goals but also on the future health of the organization. Unions and the people who volunteer enormous amounts of their time to work within them are precious resources that must be preserved and strengthened over time. That in turn requires fighting racism, misogyny, misogynoir, and bullying, especially across job categories.

Trying to defuse this situation proved quite difficult for the Rutgers AAUP-AFT leadership. The vulnerability of graduate workers — who do not have permanent jobs and depend almost entirely on recommendations from tenured faculty — was a crucial consideration. Leaders hoped to align people by highlighting our commonalities. While that approach worked for a time, the refusal to confront the specifics of what happened directly hurt us profoundly. Moreover, by allowing a small group of graduate workers to stand in for the whole, the union alienated entire segments of graduate workers of color outside the union’s inner circle.

All the years of work I had put into trying to diversify the union leadership was damaged by these careless actions and misdirected rage. Two Black graduate workers I had hoped might join the union leadership told me that they would never put on a union strike T-shirt again because of the painful memories it evoked. This really hurt — I helped design its scarlet sunburst rays, Black Power fist, and the word “Solidarity” emblazoned across the front.

In response to the turmoil, the Rutgers AAUP-AFT leadership insisted on hiring an outside DEI consultant, claiming that the problems we faced were too complex to resolve internally. The union’s BIPOC committee and I strongly objected, insisting instead that they practice true solidarity and directly address what had been done by forcefully communicating to those involved that it was unacceptable behavior. I genuinely believe that if they had taken immediate action and shut down the Slack channel as soon as the attacks were exposed, I would not be writing about these events now because the episode would have come to a swift end.

The experience reminded me of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva writing that in post–civil rights America, there is only racism, not racists. Racism is a mysterious disembodied force that can never be fully named, understood, or pinned down. It is always outside, never inside, and it cannot be reduced to the concrete actions of specific people. Whether they work for corporations, unions, or not-for-profits, too often people in positions of power summon outside consultants to avoid taking unpopular but necessary positions that might alienate segments of their base even as they alienate others — in this case, Black women like myself and our allies.

The Black feminist historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham argued in 1992 that race functions as a global sign or metalanguage that “lends meaning to a host of terms and expressions, to myriad aspects of life that would otherwise fall outside the referential domain of race.” The traumatic events of the strike led me to look back critically at my six years in the union leadership. The contract campaign was not the first time that people or groups experienced a perceived loss in power and status and mobilized misogynoir in response.

In the years of preparation prior to the strike, an ad hoc committee rewrote the union bylaws in order to give individual job categories greater representation. An additional tier of leadership would provide every job category — including EOF counselors, contingent lecturers, postdocs, and graduate workers — with its own elected vice president. Tenured faculty previously held a majority of union leadership positions. When the new policy was rolled out to the executive council, I spoke out forcefully in favor of the restructuring. A former union president objected: “If you believe Donna, what will come next? A vice president for women of color?” He was not alone.  A tenured white man reflexively understood a perceived loss of power through the veil of race and gender, with nonwhite women considered the ultimate diminution, even though it’s hard to imagine a more clear-cut expression of class than job category.

Multiple full-time white faculty members, largely male, stepped down from the union leadership. They did not go quietly, though, and complained of “identity politics” and factionalism inside the union. We went to an outside labor consultant to develop a process for dealing with internal conflict. That led us to adapt solidarity principles from the Chicago Teachers Union as a baseline for how we treat one another inside the union.

Stuart Hall wrote that race is “the modality in which class is ‘lived.’” The long-term effect of abusive behavior during and after the strike is that the union hemorrhaged several key leaders of color, while others retreated from regular participation. Despite my years of work with the Freedom School, recruiting people from different ranks and using Black liberation iconography wherever possible, the public nature of the conflict within the union made it difficult to continue diversifying the leadership. We must get to a better place so that Black and brown women and men of all ranks can lead without being demeaned in the crassest of ways.

The challenges we encountered in our contract campaign extend beyond Rutgers University’s faculty graduate union and campuses. Creating multiracial coalitions that can effectively fight for living wages and reinvestment in essential public goods such as education, housing, and health care is urgent business. It may be the only way to halt the accelerating march toward right-wing authoritarianism and racial fascism. But as our union experience shows, a revived left movement that refuses to acknowledge the power of race, gender, and other lines of difference cannot sustain itself in the long term.

Divisions across race, gender, and workplace hierarchies were far from the only challenges that we faced during our strike. The essential power asymmetry between management and labor shaped every aspect of our campaign. Management and its armada of lawyers insisted on round-the-clock negotiations that exhausted our team and precluded regular member updates. The substantial hikes in Rutgers’s state appropriations that Governor Murphy offered to fund our raises should have made bargaining easier. But balancing the needs of multiple categories of workers nevertheless proved difficult. Part of what created painful internal fissures was the externally imposed structure of bargaining itself. We needed greater communication among the negotiating team, the executive council, and the rank and file so that members could receive regular updates in real time from the people at the table. In future strikes, this must be a standard practice. Only those at the bargaining table can speak with true authority about ongoing negotiations, including explaining the constraints, the possibilities, and what the absolute non-negotiables must be for every job category.

Like the Chicago Teachers Union, we should have short meetings every morning and evening with the bargaining, organizing, and communications teams so that the different arms of the union work in tandem. And it is crucial that every job category determine and rank its top priorities in ways that incorporate representation from all campuses well before calling a strike. These decisions need to be made and practices established before entering the iron cage of high-pressure bargaining.

UAW Local 4811 president Rafael Jaime has proposed assembling a workers’ congress the year prior to the contract campaign in order to democratically determine priorities that reflect a layered and diverse membership with multiple classes of workers across different locations. While maximalism has its allure, ranked priorities are essential. It is also crucial to understand that not winning everything is not the same as winning nothing.

Equally important are finding ways to talk to one another about strategy and analysis without devolving into personal attacks or trolling. While our fractures fell along fault lines of race, gender, and job category, other organizations suffer analogous internal damage with different particulars. “Like the rest of society, our movements exist within a general climate of anxiety, despair, and anger without the necessary support to process such massive emotions, individually or in community,” explains veteran organizer Maurice Mitchell. We must find more productive ways for people to express their exhaustion, disappointment, and frustrations rather than civil war or nihilism. “Recognizing the challenging terrain on which we struggle and grow can allow for more compassion for our comrades as well as clarity about the urgent mandate at hand,” Mitchell writes.

Not everyone agrees on what union democracy entails. Some groups in the higher-education labor movement view elected leadership itself as inherently destructive. They view the fight for “rank-and-file unionism” as paramount and call for a lateral organizing structure in which every bargaining decision must be put before a larger group in real time all day, every day. While this does sound radically democratic, in practice it means that whichever group happens to be assembled at that time has disproportionate power. Lower-income workers, people of color, and those with families and other responsibilities face barriers to participation in this nonstop form of unionism. Over half a century ago, radical feminist Jo Freeman warned that informal practices of leadership that eschew concrete mechanisms of accountability for the whole inevitably benefit the few.

I am embarrassed to admit this, but I first entered the union sharing some of these beliefs. After researching social movements for years and being serially disappointed by leaders I had once lionized, I was wary of forms of hierarchy that too often rewarded the most ruthless. And of course the dumpster fire of U.S. electoral politics is not exactly an advertisement for representational democracy. But as I became involved in the day-to-day work of sustained organizing, I truly understood that the process of being drawn into an organization, taking on ever greater responsibility and participating in leadership development, was the lifeblood of unions and other forms of social justice organizing.

To be clear, I am not arguing against transforming our unions and pushing them left, nor am I saying that elected leaders are sacrosanct. Overturning staff-led, racially discriminatory, bread-and-butter unions is urgent business. The question is how to do this and produce not only immediate wins but also long-term stability, enabling organizations to fight for change beyond a single contract and endure difficult, tumultuous periods of repression and intra-organizational conflict. The period after transformative wins is arguably the most vulnerable time as employers and other opponents of change try to claw back victory by violating agreements, firing workers, going to the courts, calling in law enforcement, and deploying other forms of slow and fast violence. It is crucial to maintain personal relationships and bonds of solidarity that last beyond moments of struggle.

I am down but not out. Working with the Coalition of Rutgers Unions to launch a powerful strike resulting in a transformative contract with gains for over 9,000 workers is one of the proudest events of my life. I am also profoundly grateful to the rank-and-file membership, staff, and leadership that made it happen through hard work, planning, and collective struggle. I still love working for the union, both local and national, and will continue to do so. Yet we need to take a hard look at what we are building, who is being left out, and what the long-term consequences are for the abusive behavior that is damaging our unity and limiting our future.

Union busting and attacks on social movements rely on shattering solidarity and interpersonal relationships inside institutions and activist groups. The hostility of forces arrayed against the union bred hostility within it as well, because it created an internal culture of fear. Nevertheless, we survived, won a historic contract, and are already planning for the next fight. As the country lurches further and further right with racism and misogynoir as ever-renewable political resources, we need to think about how to build deep collectivity. Solidarity is our superpower and resentment is our undoing. Winning is hard, but it is absolutely necessary.