By Levi McGarry, College of Arts and Sciences
Gavin Doyle, a doctoral candidate in rhetoric and composition in the Department of English, is compiling a working archive and special collection chronicling the unionization of academic student employees at Washington State University. Titled “Reigniting Labor in the Palouse: Recording the Voices, History, and ongoing struggle of UAW 4591,” the collection is being compiled through partnership with the WSU Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections (MASC).
“The goal is to capture the voices and stories of the people that helped to build this union and use that as a text to help inform labor consciousness within our communities,” said Doyle.
On February 1, 2024, the first Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between academic student employees and Washington State University came into effect. The result was the culmination of several years of organizing by graduate teaching and research assistants, and the CBA fundamentally changed working conditions for student employees across various campuses and research extension centers.
“When I first arrived at WSU in the fall of 2021, I heard about a unionization effort by graduate students, and it was at the card drive stage,” said Doyle. “I entered the collective effort then and became part of the organizing committee, and I later joined the bargaining team. Now I’m on the executive board for our union.”
Doyle applied for and received funding as a Publicly Engaged Fellow to complete a special archive documenting the rise of UAW 4591, the local affiliate formed by student activists.
The archive will consist primarily of oral interviews with graduate students and labor organizers who were instrumental in forming UAW 4591. The recorded audio files, as well as physical ephemera like promotional flyers and contemporaneous personal notebooks, will eventually form the archive slated to be housed at MASC in the Terrell Library.
“Hopefully, this archive can serve as a model for how others can approach organizing within their workspaces,” said Doyle. “That’s what a lot of these stories and histories will be about, is how these organizers really got involved in the first place.”
Each year, the Pollart Center for Arts and Humanities partners with the Washington State University Graduate School to host the Publicly Engaged Fellows program for graduate students. Created with funding from a National Endowment for the Humanities NextGen grant, the Publicly Engaged Fellows program supports students by providing the training necessary to work equitably with community partners and develop an independent summer project of engaged scholarship.