The Contradictions of Organizing at a Catholic University
For members of the Education Division of CWA 1104, Fordham University is unique in its Catholic and Jesuit identity. In the context of higher education labor organizing, particularly interesting are the contradictions and paradoxes of the University’s performative commitment to Catholic Social Teaching in juxtaposition to its union-busting and anti-union practices.
Catholic Social Teaching involves basic commitments regarding the right of working people to engage in mutual aid and form unions, etc. There is not supposed to be anything particularly difficult about accepting this teaching, nor is it considered to position the Catholic church politically.
Nonetheless, while most of the lower and upper administration would not hesitate to speak highly of Fordham’s commitment to social justice, it became clear that the performance demanded by the institution does not include adhering to Catholic Social Teaching when it comes to work as such (which includes The Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers). Instead, Fordham as an institution promoted rather than refrained from union busting to the point of enacting Unfair Labor Practices that violated basic Section 7 Labor Rights.
While more recently St. John’s University is drawing attention by abandoning its principles and commitments to its workers in initiating an attempt at derecognizing its decades-old unions (you can tell their President and Board of Trustees to knock it off here), Fordham’s controversial union-busting stretches back to at least the Fordham Faculty United (FFU) election campaign, where Fordham security was accused, by members of the Fordham community, of assaulting students peacefully protesting for FFU. The incident was severe enough to result in a third-party investigation.
It is also the case that President McShane, the prior President of Fordham, is not the only faith leader within Fordham who spoke the words of Catholic Social Teaching (CST)—even publishing on it—while going to great lengths to engage in union-busting and banning legitimately recognized student groups through relentless legal challenges. In other words, Fordham’s upper leadership, even its President, contradicting CST and the rights of its students is not a new development. For example, this letter by Catholic academics and clergy concerning the banning of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) shows how Fordham regularly contradicts its Jesuit values.
What FGSW learned in its study and experience with this strange paradox of a Jesuit institution is that, while the University falls significantly short of embracing its own values, the principles of Catholic Social Teaching are a source of power in any contract campaign where workers' rights are not respected. For example, faculty sent letters drawing upon CST to Tania Tetlow. FGSW quoted CST during union negotiations and when speaking to allies and our members. FGSW’s embodiment of CST helped members of the Fordham community to see the union and its members as a part of itself. Members also bonded over their shared values from different faith traditions and other backgrounds, driving their conviction that they could change the institution for the better and bring it into alignment with its purported values.
Addressing Anti-Union Tactics
In line with its broader anti-union strategy, Fordham retained labor attorney Ray Pascucci, who publicly argues that employers need more rights and has been cited by the NLRB for his bad-faith bargaining (at least twice). In contrast to Fordham’s treatment of FFU, part of Pascucci’s strategy, apparently, was to treat graduate workers with more disrespect than the non-tenured faculty FFU union. While most of our union members are instructors like the members of FFU, all of the good faith bargaining practices I witnessed in FFU’s bargaining (e.g., preparing a room for bargaining, offering Zoom bargaining during a pandemic, and bargaining open to the public) were rejected by Pascucci.
Rather than establishing consistent meeting locations for bargaining, Fordham’s bargaining team created a quasi-Kafkaesque experience, replete with a shifting array of rooms too small for our committee (sometimes in violation of the fire code). Moreover, like proposals with tracked changes timestamped minutes prior to the meeting, these rooms were often scheduled at the last minute, despite FGSW often having agreed to times a full semester in advance. Members reported that one Fordham bargaining team member spent the majority of sessions playing Candy Crush.
When FGSW members spoke of their experiences of being unhoused, the response was either pure sophistry, a form of radical skepticism (akin to ancient Pyrrhonism, which suspends judgment in the face of any claim), gaslighting, or silence. When Fordham’s commitment to cura personalis (the Jesuit value of care for the whole person) was raised with respect to responsibility, Pasucci, representing the University, said that houselessness due to late payments was merely a “personal problem.” Realizing that cura personalis, along with Fordham’s stated values, were either less than substantiated or left at the door of the bargaining room, FGSW realized that CST and Jesuit values appealed to the Fordham community. FGSW’s attempt to enact them and Fordham’s resistance to acknowledging them allowed us to leverage the already-existing wedge between community members who are critical of the University’s exploitation of Jesuit values and empty rhetoric. At the same time, because Fordham’s bargaining committee was impervious to CST or otherwise preoccupied with Candy Crush, to address Fordham’s bargaining team, a different tack would need to be taken.
Despite the shock and agitation felt by our rank and file when getting their first taste of the Fordham team’s callousness, we were prepared for Pascucci’s tactics. Many organizers and bargaining committee members had been briefed on training that covered some key bargaining strategies. Something touched upon, and worth noting, was that Pascucci’s strategy of dragging out negotiations was not merely due to the massive hourly wages he put in his pocket; rather, after one year, the employer can challenge the union’s legal right to continue to represent its employees.
While University spokespeople touted the average time employers take to bargain a first contract to rationalize their anti-union tactic of delaying bargaining, the reason this average is so high is precisely a result of anti-union law firm strategies that involve decertifying the union after one year. Had they wished, the University could have started accepting our proposals from the first session, but chose to reject proposals or counter with bad-faith proposals that restated the status quo and were thrown together minutes before the sessions (per the Google Docs revision history).
It is precisely for this kind of bad faith bargaining, though, that we were prepared. In Offensive Bargaining: Negotiating Aggressively in Contract Campains, David Rosenfeld presents some important bargaining strategies that are meant to coincide with campaign escalation.
One key strategy that we made extensive use of involved utilizing the employers' duty to supply information. This forces the employer to spend time collecting and turning over information that can be strategically used for bargaining. Using ‘Request for Information’ templates drawn from Rosenfeld, we had them deliver information about our unit, working conditions, and those of other units. Fordham was slow to give us the information. They delivered documents with incorrect and incomplete information, and also used FERPA to constantly block and challenge large portions of our requests (something Vanderbilt University also appears to be weaponizing against its workers).
While at first they simply did not respond to anything they could claim was related to FERPA (most of the information we needed), they could not refuse the willingness of the entire unit to waive FERPA. This was a small challenge, but their obstinacy required them to process all of the FERPA forms and the RFIs for those forms piecemeal. While it ended up being faster to get most information about our unit through organizing conversations connected to FERPA waivers, it allowed us to force their hand to engage in good-faith bargaining.
Along with their bad-faith refusal to produce requested information, generating an Unfair Labor Practice (which would allow for a ULP strike), all of the errors and the exchanges over who had and had not filled out FERPA forms also offered more opportunities to obligate Fordham to bargain in good faith, even if it meant one incomplete list after another. At one point, an exasperated member of their team asked us whether we understood how difficult it was to fulfill our requests for information. While they were rather content ignoring Fordham’s stated values, they felt pressure to do their job when required to meet this NLRA obligation.
Strike Power without Striking
FGSW members have a wide range of different perspectives on the final first contract, as is often the case with any contract. While Fordham’s team could have agreed to our demands as early as the first day of negotiations and the 19 months that it took to win our first contract was excruciatingly long, we managed to make the best use of the time that we could: drafting articles in advance, planning counter-proposals, and, most important of all, organizing through face-to-face conversations.
Winning the contract we won could not have happened without our strike threat, and FGSW’s right to strike importantly distinguishes us from our union siblings across most of the Graduate Student Employees Union (GSEU). Still, it is also important to recognize the importance of our ability to win a strong contract without having to endure an open-ended strike.
From the final day of FGSW’s 98% strike authorization vote to the ratification of our first contract, it took only 22 days. In the span of a month encompassing this time, which included a number of practice pickets and the training of strike captains, Fordham made drastic bargaining concessions to increase that increased the economic package. We had already demonstrated our capacity and willingness to strike with our 3-day walkout, so, despite Fordham downplaying the role of graduate instructors who teach 10% of Fordham’s core courses, Fordham’s upper administration understood the significance of the 98% figure. Disregarding their earlier protests, they conceded most of our financial proposals.
The minimum funding of the lowest paid members of our unit sits lower than, for example, Boston University Graduate Workers recent contract ($45,000) (FGSW donated what remained of its own strike fund during their 7-month strike). However, we managed to win a strong contract without missing out on wages during an extended strike.
While the average strike lasts around 40 days, graduate workers in recent history have had to strike anywhere from weeks to months to make the kinds of wins that bring wages closer to a living wage. Missing wages or losing insurance was a major concern for our international workers who cannot take jobs outside of the University.
Wins beyond the Economic: Building Union Power from the 1st Contract
Another dimension of FGSW’s first contract is the extent to which our bargaining and the final product revolve around the non-economic dimensions of our working conditions as much as the economic. Rather than allowing ourselves to be bought off with a modest raise and nothing else, the work that we did in the direction of worker’s inquiry and power mapping went a long way to help us to understand what dynamics needed to change to protect workers from overwork, abusive PIs, and general non-responsiveness to graduate worker inquiries.
Our industry-changing campaign for a University-wide ban on NDAs, which attracted the attention of student news and undergraduate publications, stands out both in that we negotiated an article that contravened management’s resolute stance that they would not bargain any article that would change conditions of non-union members and indicates the broad analysis of power dynamics our membership was concerned about.
That said, in the minds of most of our members, it is perhaps the host of articles written to address the specific concerns of international workers that will make enduring improvements to everyday working conditions.
It is not hard to understand that workers within a union want a living wage, and it is not difficult to calculate the difference between one’s current wages and a living wage. Much more difficult is understanding the myriad problems workers encounter in their working conditions and the bureaucratic systems that perpetuate them.
FGSW’s organizers earnestly worked to collect information from international workers on their particular labor issues. This allowed us to formulate contract language that recognized these issues as grievances. Organizers shared and built deeper knowledge of the workings and failures of the University, met with faculty and other University unions to gather more information, and made ample use of RFIs.
Considering an earlier period prior to FGSW’s nearly unanimous (94%) election, the election campaign took off during the pandemic when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was authorized to deport international workers who did not have in-person course credits. A petition signed by many graduate workers, many of whom would go on to become early members of the Organizing Committee, received no response from the administration. (See our more recent petition demanding President Tetlow make the required changes necessary for Fordham to be a sanctuary campus and a follow-up letter asking Tetlow to say sanctuary.) In response, workers organized collectively and successfully pressured a department of the University to offer at least one in-person course for international graduate workers. It is in this way, proceeding issue by issue, conversation by conversation, that FGSW came to understand the indifference of the University towards its graduate workers, what needed to change, and how to change it.
Before the CBA, it was also the case that international workers' pay could be delayed by more than 3 months. International workers trying to remedy this problem found that various offices in charge of the payments would either pass the problem off to some other office or simply not reply at all. In response, our CBA article on Timely Pay was meant to (1) ensure that workers are paid as soon as possible when they arrive in New York City and (2) offer recourse and a reliable resolution to anyone missing payments.
Apart from the immediacy of timely pay, this contract article was also necessary to structurally address a material reality for international students: for these workers, often under-resourced and without a social safety net, payments delays would cast them into extreme financial insecurity and even houselessness during the first months of challenging new employment.
To say that this affected workers' ability to perform their jobs and mental state would be an understatement, but this problem also affected workers in the student government, the people who housing-insecure students were often passed off to with the apparent expectation that unpaid and unhoused international students could simply live in another student’s New York apartment until the University got around to processing their pay.
Along with ensuring timely pay, the CBA also includes an emergency fund and insurance fund to which all workers (including international workers) can apply if they are facing housing insecurity, houselessness, or another kind of emergency.
While many members of FGSW see the carefully crafted articles addressing international worker concerns as one of the strongest highlights of the first contract, another win that shows the power of non-economic bargaining is the security agreement. Especially relevant to the enforcement of the first contract, it requires that all new employees sign a card as a condition of employment which, apart from normalizing membership of the union, means that new members can contact us with questions and that we can contact new members early on. While there is always the option to trade one’s rights to union membership for pennies (.2% of pay), the union can now speak to new employees about the decision to leave their union. These conversations have resulted in most new members seeing the value of remaining a full member.
We Won the First Contract. Then The Fight to Make it Real Started.
Avoiding a long strike didn’t end the fight. It pushed it into a new phase. Winning the contract did not resolve these contradictions. It clarified them.
Under a weak or disabled NLRB, we are now facing something every union eventually learns: the employer doesn’t just fight you before the contract. They fight you through it. Fordham signed the agreement. Then they started testing its limits and clawing back what they felt they could. The clearest example is tuition.
Fully funded workers are supposed to pay no tuition. That’s what “full funding” means in practice. But after ratification, the University began introducing new charges and reinterpretations of this phrase (e.g., nonrenewal of offer letters, partial credits, summer tuition). For some workers who were charged more than $10,000 in tuition, it “forced me to return home because I could not afford the tuition.” At the same time, when the workers come with questions, the administration hides behind bureaucracy: “this is an academic matter,” “this belongs to another office,” “this isn’t covered.” Or, they threaten to call Public Safety.
This is how employers take back what they lose at the table. Not with open confrontation, but through fragmentation and ambiguity. They turn a collective guarantee into a seemingly individual problem.
The University delays. It denies. It claims issues fall outside the contract. It leans on the idea that academic structures are somehow separate from labor.
A contract doesn’t enforce itself. Without organization behind it, even strong language becomes something management can reinterpret, ignore, or stretch until it breaks.
Fordham’s recurring core defense is that tuition, funding, and degree requirements are “academic,” not labor issues. Like its union-busting, Fordham’s approach to enforcement is impossible to square with its stated commitment to cura personalis, care for the whole person.
Fordham treats us as if we are two separate people (a student and a worker) even creating separate systems and email accounts that don’t cohere on their own terms. But graduate workers do not experience issues that way.
Funding packages determine whether we can live. Tuition waivers determine whether we go into debt. Course assignments determine our workload. Visa status determines whether we can stay in the country. Calling these things “academic” isn’t a neutral description. It’s a strategy to remove these issues from collective bargaining and isolate workers from each other. Our answer has to be clear: If it shapes our working conditions, it’s a union issue.
During bargaining, we built toward a strike. Now we have to build something harder: sustained pressure that doesn’t depend on a single breaking point. That means treating enforcement as organizing work, not just legal work. Grievances aren’t just filings—they’re opportunities to talk to members, map where violations are happening, and identify patterns. Tuition issues aren’t isolated cases—they’re a coordinated employer strategy that requires a coordinated response.
The same organizing conversations that built the strike have to continue, now focused on enforcement. Otherwise, the contract becomes a ceiling instead of a floor.
That’s not a sign of failure. It’s a sign of what contracts actually are. They’re not settlements of perpetual peace. They’re a terrain of ongoing struggle.
Employers sign them when they have to, and then look for ways to claw back ground where they can.
As Joe Burns argues, unions win not by securing cooperation from management, but by building the power to force concessions and defend them. The biggest shift for us has been understanding that the campaign didn’t end with ratification. It matured.
Winning required a strike threat. Enforcement requires something more continuous: a union that can identify violations quickly, connect them across the workplace, and respond collectively. Because the employer is still organized. And unless we are too, the contract becomes something they can tear up in front of us instead of something we enforce.
Preston Carter is an ABD Ph.D. Candidate at Fordham University, Business Agent of Fordham Graduate Student Workers-CWA 1104, and volunteer organizer and researcher with EWOC. His scholarship focuses on labor, colonialism, and collective resistance, drawing on the philosophy of Édouard Glissant and movements such as the syndicalist organization Liyannaj Kont Pwofitasyon (Alliance against Colonial Profiteering).
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