Literary Theorist to Union Organizer: An Interview with Robin Sowards

Abstract

Literary Theorist to Union Organizer:An Interview with Robin Sowards Jeffrey J. Williams (bio) Robin Sowards is an organizer and researcher for the United Steelworkers (USW), focusing on higher education. Founded in 1942, USW is a quintessential American labor union, first centering on the steel industry, with headquarters in Pittsburgh. But it has also organized in other workplaces, including healthcare and education, especially after the decline of US industry. Sowards has had a hand in the successful organization efforts at Point Park University and Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, a thwarted attempt at Duquesne University, and the recent successful vote to form a faculty union at the University of Pittsburgh. Himself an adjunct, Sowards was a spokesperson for adjuncts at Duquesne in 2012, and from 2013 to 2021 he served as vice-president of the New Faculty Majority, the leading organization of contingent faculty, established in 2010. Sowards started out on an academic path, doing graduate work in English, linguistics, and German at Cornell University, with a dissertation on "The Metaphysics of Syntax in Nineteenth-Century Lyric" (PhD, 2006). He has published several scholarly articles, including one on John Keats in Stylistics (2007) and one on Christina Rosetti's "Goblin Market" in Modern Philology (2012). He also published review essays on theorists such as Walter Benn Michaels and Stanley Fish in Minnesota Review, as well as "Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics" (Minnesota Review 68 [2007]), taking to task the lack of knowledge about current linguistics among literary critics and arguing for his syntactic approach. Despite his qualifications, he experienced roadblocks in attaining a tenure-track position. After engaging in the union effort at Duquesne, he went to work for USW in 2012, first as a part-time researcher, moving up to a full-time position as organizer and researcher. Born in 1976, Sowards grew up in Oregon, moving east for college at NYU (BA, 1998). After college he worked as a legal assistant in New York for two years before returning to school at Cornell. Upon receiving his PhD, he taught as a non-tenure-track assistant professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges until 2010, when he moved to Pittsburgh to be [End Page 453] with his partner. He taught at Duquesne until 2015, and teaches linguistics as a part-time adjunct at Chatham University. This interview took place on February 24, 2022, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was conducted by Jeffrey J. Williams and transcribed by Skyllarr Trusty, an MA student in the Literary and Cultural Studies Program at Carnegie Mellon University. jeffrey j. williams: While you were trained as a literary critic, you've been an organizer and researcher for USW for a decade now. Why do we need unions? robin sowards: The purpose of forming a union is for you and your colleagues to negotiate with your employer as an equal. Fundamentally, if you are an employee, you are always in the position of negotiating your terms and conditions of employment—how much you get paid, what working conditions are like, benefits, all that. But we aren't usually active participants in the process, because we're negotiating as an individual with our employer. For example, all by yourself, you, Jeff Williams, are negotiating with the entire institution, Carnegie Mellon. That puts you in a fundamentally unequal bargaining situation. But if you join together with your colleagues and negotiate collectively, then you meet as equals across the negotiating table, and as a result, you can get better terms and conditions of employment for everybody. It's a difference between being in the position of pleading as a subordinate for improvements to your work life versus being able to negotiate as an equal. jjw: You recently worked on the Pitt campaign, which was very successful, with a large majority voting to unionize this past fall. One thing that I thought was striking was that the union encompasses faculty as well as adjuncts and graduate students. rs: Faculty and grads are in separate bargaining units, and some of the campaigns are still in process, but the one that we won in late 2021 was the main faculty bargaining unit. It didn't include faculty in the School of Medicine...