Raising HELU, Wall to Wall and Coast to Coast

When Higher Education Labor United was proposed in 2021, the major issues facing higher education were rising tuition, student debt, widespread reliance on contingent faculty, attacks on tenure, threats to the exercise of academic freedom, and administrative bloat. To oppose these trends, activists undertook to form a coalition of local labor unions and a few labor-adjacent organizations. What made this project new was that it would include the whole workforce of higher education: not just faculty, but also clerical workers, health care professionals, custodians, librarians, counselors, IT, buildings maintenance, landscapers, dining services, and so on. They called it Higher Education Labor United, or HELU for short, and used the motto, “Wall to wall and coast to coast.”

Today those issues from 2021 seem manageable compared to what’s going on with the Trump administration as it whacks its way down the Project 2025 agenda and Republican state legislatures follow suit. But HELU is still the right idea for the times because of the strategy implied by its motto.

The Meaning of the Motto

The point of a wall-to-wall approach is recognition that a college or university depends on the labor of everyone who works in it. But it’s more than just that: The value of higher education as a public good is a product of the whole workforce working together. The point of a coast to coast approach is that we’re talking about a national, society-wide public good. Whether this stunningly obvious idea is revolutionary—in the sense of directly confronting the archaic hierarchical structure of academia and extreme state-by-state inequities, including unequal access to collective bargaining rights—will have to be worked out in practice.
HELU was an organizing project that planned to formally establish itself as soon as it had enough dues-paying local unions or labor organizations in its coalition. This happened in May 2024, with a founding convention at Rutgers University that welcomed delegates, elected the current leadership, started developing its committees, and soon hired two staff members.

Where HELU Came From

The energy behind the creation of HELU came from people in organizations like the Debt Collective, Scholars for a New Deal, the unions representing workers at Rutgers University (which were forced into joint action by the university’s austerity response to Covid-19), Jobs with Justice, the multiple arms of the contingent faculty movement, and the Bernie Sanders campaign. The campaign secured the inclusion of labor issues in the scope of the College for All Act, which was backed by Senator Sanders and Senator Pramila Jayapal, but those issues were eliminated when the proposed legislation was absorbed into Biden’s Build Back Better Act. However, the need to form an ongoing national coalition was growing. The people working on HELU wrote a “vision platform” laying out the details. This platform was soon endorsed by about 120 local labor unions and organizations. Of those, about 50 have become formal members, paying Solidarity Pledges based on membership.

Today’s Issues Are Different, But the Fight Is Not

Then the pot started to boil over. In the fall of 2024 many organizations were preparing for a Harris/Walz administration and were caught by surprise when President Donald Trump was elected instead. HELU, however, was prepared in the sense that the same relationships that made it possible for the organization to prepare for a friendly administration also prepared it to go up against a hostile administration. There is something very common sense about “wall to wall and coast to coast.” After all, the idea of national whole-industry organizing is at least as old as political activist and trade unionist Eugene Debs and the American Railway union, not to mention the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

In October 2024, HELU had enough credibility to bring national and international labor unions together to issue a Unity Statement on higher education. It was signed by 10 unions that represent higher education workers: American Association of University Professors (AAUP), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (ACSCME), Communication Workers of America (CWA), National Education Association (NEA), the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), United Auto Workers (UAW), and UNITE HERE. For people who have been around higher education labor for a while, the idea of getting these organizations, with all of their historic differences, to sign onto one statement was astonishing. Missing were the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), United Steelworkers (USW), and National Nurses United (NNU).

This statement, of course, was addressed to the Harris/Walz campaign. Its goals echoed the College for All Act. Along with full federal funding, expanded access, and a reasonable appointee as the head of the Department of Education, the goals also include improved working conditions: “…equitable salaries, benefits, and job protections for low-wage, part-time, un-benefitted, subcontracted, and temporary workers… the right to organize unions in all public higher education institutions… the free expression of ideas …and enforce federal laws protecting the freedom to learn, speak, assemble, and research.”

Those ideas are still the right ideas and probably won’t melt away. However, as of November 7, we were past the point where making a statement was enough.

In January, the Trump administration began to carry out its threats. The Department of Education was more or less eliminated. Hundreds of international student visas were cancelled. Copycat state legislation imitated Florida and Texas by changing tenure processes; wiping out diversity, equity, and inclusion services; threatening whole programs; imposing financial penalties; and literally outlawing the use of certain “controversial” words. The exercise of academic freedom was selectively labelled “antisemitism.” Demonstrations, mostly in solidarity with Palestine, that might have been tolerated 10 years ago were met with police violence. Most dramatically, international students were seized, transported out of state, and threatened with deportation, all without due process. From day to day, conditions zig-zagged, but never got better.

HELU as Two Coalitions

On this transformed battleground, how will HELU continue to carry out a campaign that stays true to its “wall to wall and coast to coast” motto?
Supported by HELU, the Unity Statement coalition of national and international unions re-formed as Labor 4 Higher Ed, or L4HE, and planned a sequence of escalating actions that would lead, ultimately, to May Day 2028, a date chosen by the UAW and its president, Shawn Fain, for a general strike, or at least a national coordinated action. There was pressure to choose an earlier date but after discussion, the coalition, including HELU leaders, agreed that laying the groundwork for such a national action, including lining up contracts so that many workforces would be at a critical point in bargaining on that day, was going to take all available time until then. For now, HELU will act as a hub between L4HE and its member local unions, using its resources to prepare for the escalating actions in the higher education sector.

In the meantime, the demonstrations have started. Elon Musk’s performance with a chainsaw at a conservative political conference in February was a gift to demonstrators, who needed something to laugh at. Postal workers held public rallies in late March. SEIU led nationwide protests. The enormous “Hands Off!” demonstrations took place on April 5, drawing more than three million participants throughout the country.

HELU organized a sequence of protests called “Kill the Cuts” in mid-February and early April and included a National Day of Action on April 17.

As of April 17, HELU reported that it could map over 200 higher education actions in 50 states and that the organization now has over 10,000 contacts signed up for mailings, up from just over 2,000 in January.

What Does It Take?

At this point, it is useful to think about what it takes to turn outrage into a movement that keeps going. HELU’s structure as a coalition of local unions has advantages. The real power of HELU is in its delegates, who are chosen by the local unions that send them. They report back to their local unions, which have power on the ground in their own colleges and universities. These delegates also vote in the HELU general assemblies, run for HELU office, and serve on HELU committees. This puts HELU in the center of a large number of workers who are organized.

However, inherent in its wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast organizing project are some particular hills to climb.

First of all, labor unions are slow; the strongest ones encourage discussion, debate, and consent of the membership before making decisions. While some unions can join HELU quickly, or join because they belong to an overarching union that is already a member of HELU, others may take six months or longer to work their way through to a decision. This delay is good for the local union but less so for HELU, which is ideally looking for local unions to join and build the coalition at a more rapid pace.

Second, the “wall-to-wall” motto unpacks the historic hierarchy of academia. At its ugliest, that hierarchy makes every tenured faculty member superior to every clerical, custodial, staff, adjunct, and other higher education worker. Enlightenment about the importance of worker solidarity sometimes occurs through a campus labor coalition or when representatives from one higher education workforce are invited to sit in on bargaining with another one, but those take a while to get rolling and are spotty nationally.
Third is the problem associated with the “coast-to-coast” motto: Almost half the states in the United States have limited or no public-sector collective bargaining for higher education. How do you build a coalition of local labor unions when there is no enabling legislation? So far, HELU is working with the CWA, which is building a network of local organizing bodies in non-collective-bargaining states called United Campus Workers. In addition, since the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) itself may be a thing of the past, we can all agree that a union is what its members decide it is, not what a government agency certifies it to be.

Injury to One, Injury to All

Solutions to these problems could still create opportunities to make enemies or exacerbate old rivalries. These range from competitive representation elections to historic resentments caused by the prestige hierarchy of academia. But this has not happened. Instead, and possibly because the attacks from President Trump are coming so fast, no one seems to have trouble understanding that we need a total, cohesive response, not a bit-by-bit, one-issue-at-a-time response.
The founders of HELU must have been thinking in terms of “an injury to one is an injury to all” when they settled on “wall to wall and coast to coast.” They somehow knew that a big fight was coming. We will see how the HELU structure holds up when more pressure is put on it as the movement rises.

Helena Worthen is co-author with Joe Berry of Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education (Pluto 2021) and other books and articles. She taught labor education at the University of Illinois, the National Labor College, and Ton Duc Thang University in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. She is co-chair of the Media/Comms Committee of HELU.

Sources: Labor for Higher Education, “Labor is Fighting for the Future of Higher Ed,” October 2024 (higheredlaborunited.org); Chronicle Staff, “DEI Legislation Tracker,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (chronicle.com); higheredlaborunited.org; Reuters, “47 signs from the anti-Trump Hands Off! protests,” April 6, 2025 (reuters.com).