Abstract
On March 14, 1944, Governor Thomas E. Dewey signed legislation establishing Cornell University’s New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Its mission was to improve industrial and labor conditions in the state. When the ILR School opened the following year, the challenge of improving industrial relations was an urgent concern as more than five million workers were engaged in massive strikes in virtually every sector of the booming post-war economy.
Over the next 75 years, Cornell ILR faculty educated more than 13,000 students for careers intended to advance the world of work. Ironically, in the 1980s one of those students helped unionize a thousand low-paid Cornell employees to improve and transform their own world of work at the university. Al Davidoff, an ILR student leader who became a Cornell custodian and labor organizer, has written a personal and collective memoir that tells the story of how essential workers who made the university run confronted unconscionable conditions, united to fight for their dignity, built an increasingly powerful union, and ultimately succeeded in winning justice. Unionizing the Ivory Tower: Cornell Workers’ Fifteen-Year Fight for Justice and a Living Wage is a finely crafted book that offers a rich and granular case study in worker organizing, union building, and the transformation of labor-management relations.
Cornell’s beautiful and sprawling campus is a dominant feature of Ithaca’s landscape. And, for many years the university was the dominant force in the socio-political ecosystem of Tompkins County. The author vividly describes how the well-endowed university treated many of its employees—custodians, cooks, gardeners, and mechanics—with arrogant disregard. The evidence that Davidoff provides demonstrates that many workers on Cornell’s payroll earned significantly less than employees at comparable institutions and lived in dire poverty in the rural areas surrounding the university. The administration’s claim that the university paid market wages to its employees was disingenuous because Cornell was the largest employer in central New York and itself set the market standards.
In addition to poverty wages, Cornell employees endured arbitrary bosses and oppressive conditions that robbed them of their dignity. The author describes this reality in detailed and explicit ways that serve two valuable purposes. First, he tears away the veil that often makes indispensable work invisible and offers the reader a window into a world of cleaning bathrooms, cooking meals, driving buses, and serving students that comes alive with colorful characters, hilarious stories, heart-wrenching travails, and human drama. Second, he draws a graphic picture of one of the essential pre-conditions for workers to make the difficult and risky choice to confront a powerful employer and organize a union: a deep dissatisfaction with their working conditions generally tied but not limited to low wages. In the case of the Cornell employees in this struggle, their poverty wages were inseparable from the indignities they suffered every day on the job.
Davidoff learned a lot about labor relations as an ILR student, but a new phase of his education began when he took a job as a Cornell custodian. Growing up in a modest neighborhood near Buffalo, New York, he was not unfamiliar with the working class. But joining the ranks of Cornell’s low-wage workforce gave him a more intimate introduction to the common folks who lived in dilapidated dwellings, worked full-time for a rich and prestigious institution but relied on public assistance and second jobs to keep the electricity on, rose before dawn and scrambled to get their children fed and off to school, and then spent their days serving privileged students their meals and cleaning their dorms. Their managers often exercised arbitrary power over them and practiced favoritism that was infuriating. All of the workers confronted class oppression, but women and workers of color faced particularly harsh conditions as they were generally denied access to higher skilled and higher paying jobs and were subjected to sexual harassment and racial discrimination. Davidoff was inspired by co-workers who grew increasingly frustrated and made the courageous choice to organize. That’s where this David versus Goliath saga begins.
Unionizing the Ivory Tower provides one of the most nuanced and detailed depictions in the literature of an organizing campaign. Davidoff recounts the painstaking process of nurturing relationships with co-workers, cultivating leaders, identifying issues that were deeply and widely felt across the workforce, acknowledging the loyalty some employees had for Cornell, overcoming the fears workers had about taking on their bosses, and building solidarity across the differences among workers.
In response to the campaign, Cornell was not an enlightened or benevolent employer that welcomed its employees’ free choice to unionize. On the contrary, the university behaved like so many other businesses that face a union organizing drive: It resisted the will of the workers at every turn, intimidating union supporters through captive audience meetings and other typical tactics.
At its heart, this story is about building and exercising collective power through escalating steps that engaged workers in creative and energizing actions designed to strengthen their resolve and to induce Cornell to recognize their union. But winning recognition through an NLRB-supervised certification election was just one battle in a fifteen-year struggle. Compelling Cornell to negotiate in good faith and securing a decent contract that delivered tangible improvements in workers’ lives required striking the university and disrupting its operations. In fact, over its formative years the union struck Cornell five times as it made steady progress in elevating the conditions of life and labor of its members.
But while the Cornell employees demonstrated remarkable courage and determination in their fight for justice, they confronted a reality that workers often face in trying to unionize a well-resourced, sophisticated, anti-union employer: Their collective power was not sufficient to win on their own.
First and early on, the Cornell workers carefully evaluated what unions they could join and eventually chose the UAW. They wanted to affiliate with an organization that had a history and tradition of struggle and found a welcome home in an industrial union that had recently begun to unionize universities. This decision was one of many consequential choices Davidoff explains, and it was not without its challenges. On the one hand, the UAW provided material resources, strategic acumen, and experienced organizers to support the campaign. On the other hand, the feisty and disruptive tactics the local deployed sometimes irked the more conservative UAW business unionists. They hoped the Cornell union would settle into a more “mature” and responsible stage of organizational development that would focus on servicing its members by negotiating contracts with incremental improvements, handling grievances and prosecuting arbitrations through a quasi-legal process. Davidoff shows how he and his fellow activists were committed to building a democratic union that kept its members engaged in the fight. He analyzes this tension between an organizing and servicing model of unionism and shows how their UAW local learned to provide essential services in ways that continued to activate and empower members in their struggle for justice.
Even with the support of the UAW, the Cornell union could not muster enough power to tame the university. The author offers a master class in strategic and comprehensive campaigns. Their local union unearthed every form of additional leverage to enhance the power of its mobilized membership in their multi-year fight for a living wage. They figured out how to involve students and their families as allies, enlisted the support of progressive faculty members, organized the broader community to demand that Cornell become a more responsible player in the city and county, and eventually engaged influential alumni to support their winning cause.
Davidoff devotes two important chapters to the issue of race. While Cornell’s low-wage workforce was overwhelmingly white, a number of Black workers played important roles in this story and the reality of racism was inescapable. For example, when the union sought to reverse the unfair dismissal of a Black member for absenteeism, leaders needed to overcome the resentment of some white members whose objections were driven by their racial bias. The author shows how the union created a space to directly challenge racism not as an abstract discussion but as an active struggle that was inseparable from the larger unifying fight for justice.
Revisiting this issue in a powerful Afterword, Davidoff addresses the contemporary threat of a right-wing populist movement energized by racism and challenges commentators “who have concluded that the white working class is unredeemable” (p. 235). Reflecting on his own experience organizing among a largely white, rural, culturally conservative workforce, he offers this: “I humbly believe that there are lessons imbedded in our granular, workplace-based struggles for justice at Cornell that provide some guidance and hope about building organizations that confront racism and sexism and increase class power” (p. 235). Given the incisive analysis in his Afterword, one might wish that the author went a bit further within the book, weaving these larger lessons more explicitly and consistently into the narrative.
But one of the great strengths of this book is its detailed and textured telling of a very particular case study. That strength is enhanced by very thoughtful discussion questions that the author offers at the conclusion of each chapter. These questions are designed to encourage readers to consider transcendent issues arising from this story, issues related to organizing a dynamic and democratic union, building and exercising collective power, shifting the balance of power between employers and employees, transforming consciousness through active struggle, and making difficult tactical and strategic decisions along the way. As such, Unionizing the Ivory Tower should be required reading for labor studies students, union leaders and activists, social justice organizers, and everyone wishing to advance the world of work.