Last week, the Indiana Grad Workers Coalition announced preparations for a strike vote in early April.  This step was provoked by IU administrators, who have stonewalled recognition of a grad workers union, despite the supermajority of IU grad workers who have signed union cards.  This sequence, including recent grad workers’ protests at the IU Board of Trustees meeting, reminded us of the last time IU went on strike in 2013.  Today, we are sharing an Interchange episode covering the lead-up to that strike, originally aired on March 5, 2013.

Two undergraduate organizers, Sam Harrell and Tucker Lang, describe the political context and strategy of that strike movement, which was borne out of anti-student debt protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement.  In 2012, undergraduates took over the IU Board of Trustees meeting and turned their back on the trustees, using Occupy-based methods of non-hierarchical communication to conduct an assembly exposing the tragic cost of high student debt loads.

Later that year, mass assemblies called for a strike in the spring of 2013, eventually catalyzing undergrad and grad picket-lines, a sick-out strike by staff, and the occupation of Woodburn Hall by hundreds of students and faculty members.  As the two interviewees describe, the strike was a method to bring together wide-ranging discontent at IU, from anger about tuition hikes, to the staff wage freeze, to the historic underrepresentation of Black students.  Some of the demands have shifted since 2013, yet we are glad that Interchange was able to preserve some of the reflections from that struggle in order to put them into dialogue with the contemporary grad workers movement.  Here is WFHB’s news director emeritus Joe Crawford, interviewing Sam and Tucker.

https://wfhb.org/news/interchange-samantha-harrell-and-tucker-lang-strike-at-indiana-university/