Mothers’ Labor: Organizing and Parenting in Neoliberal Academia

In this article I reflect on my experiences in my university’s labor union, United Campus Workers (UCW), both before and after I became a parent. Labor unions—especially wall-to-wall unions like UCW—are an important site of solidarity and resistance against the neoliberal policies of university administrations. UCW, a union without collective bargaining in a state hostile to labor, has won important fights for better working conditions. This work takes time, however, and a long history of cultural depictions insists that political activism and parenting, particularly mothering, are opposed to one another. I examine some of these depictions, their embeddedness in my graduate training, and how they make me worry that I am abandoning my young children when I choose to engage in union work. Ultimately, we need to reject this dichotomy as part of capitalism’s false narrative of individualism and embrace labor organizing as a place for family in multi-faceted ways.