Fall 2025

Greetings Colleagues,

There’s this run of trees that I love on Ellis Street right before it bends into Samish Way. This time of year, it seems like each is a different hue every day, from the darkest red to the brightest orange, sprinkled with some of the Pacific Northwest’s forever-green for good measure. Having been in education so long, first as a student then as a teacher, this always feels like my New Year. The move to autumn gives me the opportunity to slough off the things from the past year that I can’t take with me while forcing me to be forward-thinking about how to approach the year ahead. And then, of course, there’s both the hopeful and harrowing throughlines that continue unbroken.

And that is the context in which I write to you all today, trying to account for all of these things while also working to shore up a sense of purpose and grounding for the work ahead. So, I’ll begin in the most basic of ways: with an introduction. My name is Theresa Warburton and, last spring, I was elected as your UFWW President. Though I am also a scholar and teacher, for our purposes here I want to give
you a sense of my experience in union organizing. I began my work in the labor movement while I was in graduate school at the University at Buffalo, where we were a local of the Communication Workers of America (CWA). This work aligned closely with the advocacy work I did with New York Students Rising (NYSR), an organization that brought together students from across public universities after the 2008 recession to fight against austerity measures that were sweeping throughout higher education in New York State. That work has proven foundational as I’ve moved into a faculty position at Western, another public institution in a state that also seems intent on suffocating a higher education system that could otherwise be a crown jewel of the region’s infrastructure. In my eleven years at Western, I’ve served at every level of our union from rank-and-file to Steward to At-Large Representative to Vice President to
President, although not fully in that order. In fact, this is my second time serving as UFWW President. I first served in AY2021-2022, following my time as an At- Large Representative during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Reflecting on that time as I move into this year, what I remember most is the feeling that it never seemed as if we were in control of what we were doing—we always had to be responding to new developments whether from management, the state or federal governments, public health officials, and more. Some amazing accomplishments came out of that time, including Merit Raises for Senior Instructors and a restructuring of our Compression and Equity formula, which came from the hard work of rank-and-file members who served on the
related working groups and bargaining team. But the truth is that, for me, it felt tough to have something to ground us in the work we wanted to be doing in addition to the work we had to be doing.

Union work is always a combination of these and, as someone who has been elected to be in service of all the workers in our bargaining unit, I take it as a personal responsibility to maintain that balance in both principle and practice. Moving into my New Year, I am committed to working together to take back our control over our work, making sure we are nimble enough to respond to emergent issues while also being grounded enough to enact a vision of our own making.

This summer, I dedicated a portion of my reading to finding something that might be that grounding force for our organizing this year—something that could be timely, clear-eyed, and hopeful all at once. Kim Kelly’s history of American labor organizing in Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor helped me revisit the shoulders we stand on. Aaron Going’s Red Harbor: Radical Workers and Community Struggle in the Pacific Northwest and D.W. Gibson’s One Week To Change the World: An Oral History of the 1999 WTO
Protests helped root me in the movement histories of this particular place. Eve Ewing’s Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism helped situate these questions in the broader history of education in the US. And Valeria Lusielli’s The Story of My Teeth, which was created in collaboration with workers at the Jumex juice factory in Ecatapec who would receive chapters from the author and then send back recordings of their discussions, helped me reconnect all of this to my own
personal and scholarly interests in how literature is used in social movement organizing.

But it was Imani Perry’s Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People, something I picked up for fun, that gave me the one word that ended up striking in me the inspiration I needed to organize my approach to my term as UFWW president: movement.

Perry writes:

“Movement is a divine word. To call organizing for freedom ‘the
movement’ was a strike of genius. The moves
in our culture of art and performance—be they
dancing, playing jazz, blues, or hambone,
singing or hoofing—are all the art of living. And
forgive us...for the...sacrilege of sometimes
being mere spectators to that divinity. It
beckons participation.”

Perry’s reflection is a reminder that to be in movement together means to be in movement together, to be the atoms in constant motion that make up what matters in our work together as educators and scholars who serve the public. And that this kind of responsibility is not a burden but a blessing, one that calls for us to give what we can from our passions and our skills to participate in keeping that movement in motion.

Of course, all of this might seem a bit abstract for some and, in this, I thank you for your patience with reading a welcome message written by a literary scholar (at work) and a person obsessed with storytelling (in life). Now that you’ve granted me space to wax a bit poetic, allow me to turn toward the pragmatic.

This focus on movement has guided me towards two core organizing principles for the year, one internal and one external. These principles will guide the work of our executive board not in a prescriptive way but in a way that invites the participation of every single worker based on your particular skills and passions.

Internally, our movement focus this year will be on capacity-building. This means building up the ability of rank-and-file members to participate actively in both the day-to-day and long-term operations of our local union as well as informing the work of our regional and national affiliates. We’ll do this by providing more regular educational sessions to familiarize all workers with the provisions guaranteed in our CBA, as well as the processes we use to ensure their implementation. We’ll coordinate with partners across the university, region, state, and nation to provide information sessions on policies and practices that affect our unit, including the management of public
records, ensuring academic freedom, and protecting our digital security. We’ll convene working groups to stay attentive to how local and national affiliates are responding to the rapidly shifting political landscape, including coordinating to protect targeted members of our bargaining unit, especially immigrants and queer faculty. And we’ll facilitate ongoing opportunities for all of us to get to know and celebrate each other and the work that we spend so much time protecting.

Externally, our movement focus this year will be amplifying the message that “public education is a public good.” This means having more outward-facing work that clarifies our role as public employees and the importance of the work we do for the good of the people of Washington and beyond. Among the morass of things occurring daily that seem patently absurd to me is the notion that funding public education is a partisan issue. Whether coming from the federal government, state legislature, or our local administration, cuts that continue to shrink the support we have for our work is an affront to the very role that education plays in creating a democratic society.

We know that the value of the work we do extends beyond the career trajectory of any individual student or faculty member. This year, we’ll coordinate events that connect our work locally to other labor fights across the region. We’ll amplify how workers in our bargaining unit bring their work to the public and vice versa. We’ll partner with other organizations, both locally and across the region, to solidify the message that higher education is a public good. And we’ll work closely with all our affiliates to take this message to the legislature and
advocate for a stronger commitment to funding public higher education in the state of Washington.

I am glad that Western’s management team also has a vision for the year ahead, focused on growth and making public four-year higher education available to students who want it. But I continue to wonder how they intend to bring in thousands of more students without investing more deeply in the work of faculty and staff. Indeed, from my vantage point, it is the strength of our union protections that ensure the quality of the education they are marketing to potential students: when they laud our 17:1 student to faculty ratio and overall small class sizes, that’s possible because of our historic workload protections. When they amplify how our work is cutting-edge in our respective fields, that’s enabled by our professional development provisions including conference funding, research support, and professional leave. When they promise close working relationships with faculty that improve retention for students, that relies on transparent review and promotion practices that ensure stability in our employment.

The bottom line is this: the work that UFWW does to protect the work of our bargaining unit is about more than ensuring benefits to individual employees. Our labor protections are the fertile ground in which quality public education, and thus an educated public, grows. It’s time that our legislators understood this.

One thing that Imani Perry’s gift of the word “movement” has also given me is the reminder that when something becomes too institutionalized it also becomes stagnant. We are on the precipice of celebrating twenty years of UFWW and we are lucky enough to still have colleagues still working alongside us who fought for those of us organizing now. This year, we’ll convene an ad-hoc committee to find ways to celebrate this, to dig into our archives and let us see visions from the past, to hear from the folks who had a long enough scope to set us up with the strengths we have now, and to envision together how we can set up the future of public education at Western and our union to still be strong twenty years in the future.

I’m looking forward to doing this work together, especially because once my term as President ends in 2027, I intend to step down from leadership roles in our union. My time organizing with UFWW has taught me about the broader importance of what I do in my daily life as a scholar and educator. And it’s also taught me that the most powerful thing we can do in these roles is ensure that other people are ready to move into them—this is the power of movement. To be in movement, we must stay in movement. I’m excited to see what you
bring.

In the coming weeks and months, there will be many opportunities for you to stay updated, to participate, and to skill up our union. Here are a few small things you can do right now, and encourage others to do, to help contribute to what will hopefully be a groundswell of growth for our work together:

• Make sure you’re a member. If you aren’t sure whether you’re a member, you can make sure that you see dues being taken out of your most recent pay stub or contact UFWWorg@gmail.com and we’ll check.

• Make sure we have your non-Western email address. You can use this form on our website.

• Sign up for updates from our local and national affiliates. The Stand from the Washington State Labor Council (WSLC) provides great labor news from around the state; the Washington chapter of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT-WA) provides weekly email updates; and the Washington Education Association (WEA) has a regular newsletter to keep you updated on their work locally and in Olympia.

• Get to know the executive board and your Stewards. Our fall newsletter is coming up soon, with introductions from our board and our updated list of Stewards.

And most importantly:
• Pay attention to updates from the UFWW Exec and your stewards regarding opportunities to be in movement together, including calls for committee members, educational and informational trainings, social gatherings, and more.

I know that so many of us right now are plagued by feelings of helplessness, fear, and anger. I have had to dig deeply on a daily basis to find my way out of existing solely in that space. And something that helps me reframe my impulse to simply deny and power through those feelings is to remember the late organizer Jane McAlevey’s reminder that anger comes before organizing. Or, put a different way, organizing can be the thing that transforms our anger into the power to strengthen our work together. In my experience, labor organizing
isn’t about figuring out how to dig deeper than we have been or to perform miracles out of thin air. It’s about sharing the collective work, with its ebbs and flows, of protecting the conditions that allow us all to live with respect, dignity, and stability.

I am honored and looking forward to working with you all.
Talk soon,
TW