A GUIDE TO DEPARTMENT AND LAB MEETINGS

The Editors
27 April 2026

Introduction

Even though in many ways we work in solitude as university instructors and researchers, our workplaces are composed of groups of workers organized into labs, departments, institutes, etc. These groups anchor us both relationally and materially to each other in the workplace — because we have the same supervisors, collaborate on the same work functions, and have daily interactions with the same coworkers. These interactions, moreover, are the primary mode through which most workers digest and deal with issues at work. As such, it is critically important that, as workplace organizers, we attend to these groups in our organizing. 

One of the ways we can do this is to create spaces for collective analysis, deliberation, action, and reflection at the department and lab level. Our employers directly and indirectly discourage workers from engaging in collective discussion and decision-making on the job. So when we establish these sorts of practices at work, we challenge the prevailing hierarchical power dynamics that characterize the university. Consistently practicing these activities within our work groups deepens the experience, courage, and trust necessary for fighting the boss and resisting the ways in which the boss fights against us. 

Our emphasis on workplace deliberation stems from the need to go beyond “one-on-one” conversations if we want to do serious organizing. Anyone who has been trained in workplace organizing will have learned that the most fundamental and important skill for organizers is one-on-one conversations. Given the wide-ranging popularity of Jane McAlevey’s training programs, in particular among progressives in the labor movement, more and more workplace organizers have adopted the view that workplace organizing is, most fundamentally, a series of individuated conversations. Each conversation has the goal of getting the worker to agree to take some particular action, whether that’s wearing a red shirt on the same day as their coworkers, signing onto a petition or pledge, or voting yes in a strike authorization vote. This approach to organizing conceives of our workplace as a collection of disaggregated individuals needing to be aggregated into as large a mass as possible. The organizer sees each individual as someone with more or less potential to be moved to a particular perspective and to take a particular place as part of a preconceived plan.

Many of us have come against the arresting limits of this approach through the course of our organizing. The dynamic between the worker and the organizer can feel insincere and at times coercive. The worker is often left feeling that the organizer is trying to sell or manipulate them. Instead of feeling more deeply a part of a community engaged in struggle at the end of the conversation, the worker agrees to sign their name to something without quite believing that signing is really as significant as the organizer emphatically assures them that it is. Following the conversation, the worker will go about their life at work as normal until the next structure test when the organizer reappears on the scene with another supposedly consequential request. And so it repeats.

As a starting point for our organizing, we might instead follow Stan Weir in conceiving of our workplace as being composed of multiple informal work groups. Rather than a list of individuals, each of which needs to be moved in a particular way on an individual basis by the organizer, we might think of our work as organizers as developing the coherence, capacities, and militancy of the informal work groups that make up the workplace. As Ellen David Friedman emphasizes,

“Whatever the setting, it’s in the give and take of group discussion that the confidence, clarity, and courage needed for collective action emerge. When people are invited to listen to each other in a respectful environment, they have a chance to hear other people’s experience, get a sense of shared purpose, and overcome fears of taking action. It can be transformative.”

Meeting occasionally or regularly with your coworkers in your department or lab is one important way that you can start to foster a culture of militancy. Establishing such a culture will likely be slow to start, and may even require the building of social relationships in low-stakes contexts first. Your meetings might only draw a handful of people; or attendees might focus less on working together than on expressing personal complaints or rationalizing the employer’s actions. Just as we develop and sustain relationships with our coworkers by engaging them in numerous one-on-one conversations over the course of years, as organizers we can also develop and deepen our collective capacities to think and act together.  

The role of department and lab meetings during strikes

While regular group discussions at the workplace level often focus on immediate or day-to-day issues workers face, they also form the backbone for larger collective actions like strikes. We have seen this process take hold and develop to great effect within our graduate worker unions. Collecting strike pledges by phonebanking and doorknocking helped us pass strike authorization votes, but the collective mapping and deliberation that happened at the department and lab level before and during our strikes is what allowed us to move through long and hard strikes, to maneuver in the face of counterattacks from the employer, and to develop a lasting culture of militancy when the strikes were said and done. How do workplace meetings support strikes? 

First, a strike’s leverage comes from withholding labor to disrupt the functioning of the university and impose costs on administrators. We do not work abstractly in the university, but collaboratively in departments and labs with concrete labor processes, challenges, and cultures. These are the settings where classes are not being taught, labs are not functioning, results are not appearing, and grades are not being entered. The department or lab is also where supervisors can scab or retaliate, and where the relationships that matter the most to strikers can either be fractured or strengthened in solidarity.

Second, when workers see their immediate coworkers, those who they know and who have to confront the same workplace challenges as them, it helps overcome the fear of taking action. Strikes are fundamentally experienced at these levels. 

Third, department discussion provides a moment to invite more workers to become part of the granular organizing (like power mapping) needed to sustain a strike. Workers know the most about their department’s conditions, the relationships within the department, and who is a good person to reach out to specific co-workers about joining the strike.

Fourth, well-organized departments can contribute new strategies, ideas, and examples that other departments can emulate, and can bolster the confidence of other departments. This can include collectively drafting and circulating department strike-readiness letters, innovative picket-line shifts and activities, creative solutions to recurring problems, etc. These dynamics enable us to better confront two challenges needed to stay out for a long-haul strike. First, being able to turn to each other to withstand employer retaliation, and second, as Lydia Hughes and Jamie Woodcock put it, “to be able to cooperate with the union bureaucracy when they are aiding the struggle, and to act independently of them when necessary.”

When to call a department meeting

Here are some scenarios when you might gather your department or labmates together for a meeting:

• To try to understand something that has recently changed in the workplace and to determine whether and how you want to respond to those changes as a group. 
• To make a plan for how to support a coworker facing retaliation or repression.
• To identify the issues that are most pressing to your department/lab in the context of a contract campaign. 
• To reach a shared perspective on a decision confronting the wider union, such as whether to go on strike and for how long. 
• To map your labor in order to assess your strike leverage as part of strike preparations. You can read more about how to map your labor here. 
• To reflect on an event you’ve recently experienced together or action you’ve recently taken.

Department and lab meeting best practices

• Make sure the meeting is about something substantive, that it is worthwhile for people to take the time to attend.
• Come prepared with any relevant information, but let the group figure out what the information means through discussion. 
• Keep the agenda simple. Focus on posing relevant questions that get at the matter at hand.
• Make space for people to honestly express their fears, concerns, and disagreements.
• At the end of the meeting, identify concrete next steps and point people to take those steps. 
• Don’t stress if the meeting does not feel buoyant or high energy. The signs of a successful meeting are often subtle: evidence of genuine listening, respectful interactions, sober thinking and analysis.

Sample agendas

The links below lead to sample agendas that have been used in department and lab meetings for different scenarios. For each agenda, you can read a bit about the circumstances that gave rise to the meeting. The particularities of any given meeting and the decisions that will be within your power to make depend on the context, but we hope these examples can provide a jumping off point that can be adapted to unique contexts. 

If you have led a meeting that you would like to submit as an example to add to this list, email the editors at highered@longhaulmag.com.

Strike Preparation

• This template agenda can be used in the context of a contract campaign as part of strike readiness efforts. The goal of the agenda is to introduce the idea of striking in the context of a group of workers that do the same kind of work and that would strike together, for example, all of the researchers from a particular lab or all of the TAs in a particular department. Importantly, the possibility of striking is introduced alongside a collective inquiry of the possible strike power that the specific workers in the room could leverage based on their specific job duties. The agenda also includes time for coworkers to discuss what kind of retaliation they anticipate and to make plans for how to protect each other. This is especially useful for immediate coworkers to discuss since retaliation often comes from the PI or the Instructor of Record, individuals who serve as the supervisor for multiple workers in the department and with whom members of the department will have preexisting relationships. Meetings like this were centrally important for developing the strike strategy used by graduate workers at Dartmouth when bargaining for their first contract.
• This townhall agenda was created by graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz as part of their process of deciding whether to go on strike in Spring 2024. The purpose of the meeting was to have a discussion about the possibility of striking and to work towards arriving at a departmental position as to whether the union should move forward with a strike in Spring 2024. The agenda includes a brief overview of the legal considerations of a possible strike and shares communications from the union. Most of the meeting involves discussion of whether attendees want to go on strike, when they think the strike should start, and what striking would look like in that specific department. At the end of the meeting, next steps include writing up a department position on the upcoming Strike Authorization Vote (SAV), mapping the work that could be struck in the department, making voting plans in advance of the SAV, and asking the department chair for a non-retaliation commitment. 

Making Bargaining Decisions

• This slide deck was created by graduate workers at the University of Michigan after receiving an “exploding offer” from the University’s bargaining team. The exploding offer required that the workers accept the University’s terms within 72 hours or the offer would be rescinded. Rather than adhering to the University’s deadline, graduate workers across the union took one week to meet at the department level to discuss whether they found the offer acceptable or not and what the department would be willing to continue striking for. 29 departments held meetings to discuss and deliberate. The meeting agenda included providing an overview of the University’s most recent offer, some interpretative framing regarding what the moment reflected about the union’s power up to that point, and posed three key questions for the meeting attendees to discuss. The slides prompt the attendees to write down their individual reflections, read and discuss those reflections, and draft a departmental position statement. Statements from departments were then shared with the entire union in advance of the subsequent mass meeting. 

Navigating Pressure from the Parent Union

• Graduate workers at Columbia University circulated this meeting agenda to help their coworkers parse the expectations and requirements of their parent union, UAW, as the local union was deciding to go on strike. The meeting plan includes informing the attendees of the UAW’s recommendations and requirements. After sharing the information, the meeting proceeds with a discussion of (a) whether the attendees understand the UAW’s expectations, (b) whether the department wants to accept those requirements, and (c) what it could look like to move forward with fighting for a strong contract without UAW approval and support.

Making Urgent or High Stakes Decisions

• As the encampment movement in solidarity with Palestine began spreading across the country, organizers at UC Santa Cruz decided to discuss the possibility of a labor action responding to a call for solidarity from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. Union members voted in a Monthly Membership Meeting to hold emergency town halls discussing the possibility of a wildcat strike of differing lengths to begin May 1st. The meetings involved first clearly describing the different possibilities of action and analysis of risks, leaving extended time for discussion. Over 20 departments held meetings within a week, where they discussed the risks and gauged department member support for different actions. These department discussion results (which varied significantly across departments) were brought to an assembly of 250 workers, where the decision was made to walk out the next day, on May 1st, draft clear demands, and return one week later to vote on further labor action. Attacks on the UCLA encampment leading to an unfair labor practice strike, which is the direction the strike took. More on that strike here. 
• Graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz created this meeting agenda and accompanying packet of resources in Spring 2024 after a California court issued an order that UAW 4811 return to work while the courts determined the lawfulness of the strike. The resource packet provides information and analysis about the legal moves both sides had taken up to that point. The packet also identifies some ways that the UC could retaliate against strikers – docking pay and disciplining/firing workers – alongside ways of fighting back against those moves, including legal protections against discipline and the availability of strike pay from the parent union. The meeting agenda itself includes time to provide an overview and assessment of the current situation and then moves to a discussion of (a) whether the department wants to defy the court’s order and (b) different ways of determining that they had enough power and people to warrant continuation of the strike. By the end of the discussion, the goal was to write a departmental position statement on both of these questions to share at an upcoming campus-wide meeting.