“And so, this is about the choir and about those who might be bold enough to join it before another wretched year arrives to erase another handful of us. This is, more than anything, about those still interested in singing.” —Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us
Shortly after starting her PhD programme in comparative literature at Columbia University, Joanna Lee accepted an invitation to join her union, the Student Workers of Columbia (SWC). “I always had left-leaning politics and it was really clear: when you get to your PhD, you join a union, it wasn’t really a question for me because that’s what you do.”
She didn’t really participate at first. “Honestly, meetings were so boring. We’d vote on very dry, procedural things, things that didn’t matter to a lot of our workplace conditions.” But after a while, something just wasn’t sitting right. “The union reps kept telling us that ‘the threat of a strike was more important than the strike itself,’ which I didn’t agree with. Nothing is more powerful than a significant number of workers withdrawing their labour.” The more meetings she attended and the more she heard from her union reps, the more she understood that the union wasn’t particularly interested in pushing for its members’ rights—it was more concerned with appeasing the university.
Like many other academic institutions in the US, Columbia University has spent decades pushing staff wages down, shrinking benefits, and giving faculty members temporary contracts. Given that Columbia boasts one of the largest endowments and one of the highest tuition rates in the country, its actions constitute the funnelling of profits to those at the top through continued extraction from those at the bottom. Joanna’s early experience with SWC suggested that such unions were apathetic towards upending these dominant power structures.
And then the Covid-19 pandemic happened. “People started organising organically and stopped relying on the union. I got connected to people who were organising around campus health, campaigning for proper PPE [personal protective equipment] for all healthcare workers in the university hospital; the university was pulling people’s fellowships so I got involved in mutual aid too. Trump said something about changing people’s visa status so I organised around that too.” Conditions were becoming increasingly appalling and so these groups of organisers decided to go to their union representatives, the Bargaining Committee (BC), to discuss the possibility of a strike.
The BC declined. “When you have people who want to go on strike, you don’t shut it down!” Angry, tired and desperate for change, Joanna and the rest decided to ignore the BC. “That’s when I learnt the most important lesson of my organising work: you don’t need an official body to strike, you can just do it. If your strike will stop work, stop things from functioning, who cares if it’s official or non-official.” Workers went on strike—to hell with authorisation. Directly involved in reclaiming her university, her space, Joanna became a key organiser in a series of student worker strikes from 2020 to 2022. The last of these was one of the largest in the US at the time, with 3,000 picketing over 10 weeks. This resulted in a massive win for all Columbia graduate student workers.
How did a Singaporean PhD student in New York City end up playing a critical role in such a seminal instance of college labour activism? I was keen to talk to Joanna—to find out how she and the union won, to ask her about teaching and pedagogy, to learn from her for my own left education. Although left-leaning discourse and activism are starting to resurface in Singapore, there is still a history of demonising the left, and the current realities of ideological and institutional inertia to reckon with.
In 2020, about a year before I moved to London for a Masters of Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London, I came across a quote by Marxist geographer David Harvey, in Isabelle Lim’s essay in Mynah Magazine on Singapore’s eco-modernist approach to sustainability. Harvey, who is interested in how inequalities are created and reproduced in cosmopolitan and urban environments, beckoned us to think about our role in creating the kind of city we’d live to live in:
“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kind of social relations we seek…The right to the city is, therefore, far more than a right of individual access to the resources that the city embodies: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city more after our heart’s desire.”
During my year in London, I got involved in various activist groups and labour organising efforts, including: supporting our university’s staff union in striking against unjust wages and staff cuts; and joining an anti-raid organisation focused on protecting undocumented people from being harassed and intimidated by law-enforcement. In these spaces, I experienced first-hand people invested in changing themselves by changing the city around them, asking for more, asking for justice.
It was strange returning to Singapore in 2022. Even though I was mourning the loss of verve I had experienced being an activist in London, there were some things to be cautiously optimistic about. A quiet, tentative confidence was murmuring in the civil society air: the ruling party had suffered one of its worst electoral performances since independence; the proposed rise in the Goods and Services Tax had agitated many, and frustrated workers were banding together in the form of groups like Workers Make Possible and SG Riders; and S377A had finally been repealed. Abroad, Singaporeans were getting involved in campus activism and taking up leadership positions in their university unions. We weren’t just imagining what was possible, we were building it, “changing the city more after our heart’s desire.” Singapore seemed to be slowly coming back to us.
The People’s Action Party (PAP) first attained victory with the help of trade unions and workers’ associations. In order to develop a mass movement that could overthrow British rule, the more Anglicised party members relied on charismatic union leaders such as Lim Chin Siong, Devan Nair and James Puthucheary to gain the workers’ trust. Labour activism was significant to the PAP’s eventual victory, with strikes and assemblies used to agitate, energise and galvanise the masses.
However, once the PAP took charge , this kind of activism was erased. When you decide that top-down leadership and control is the way to go, mass movements become anathema. Trade union laws were changed, unions were consolidated and union leaders—members of the PAP and Barisan Socialis, a breakaway party—were detained under Operation Coldstore in 1963. In an intimidating demonstration of power and control, Lee Kuan Yew himself quashed an illegal attempt at industrial action by members of the Singapore Airlines Pilots’ Association (SIAPA), producing a soundbite that many still know: “They know that I’m prepared to ground the airline. They know that I can get the airline going again without them. And let there be no mistakes about it. Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him...I spent a whole lifetime building this. And as long as I’m in charge, nobody’s going to knock it down.” Several years after this, with Operation Spectrum in 1987, labour union organising was entirely wiped out. The ghost of the detentions meant that concepts such as workers’ rights and Marxism—or even saying that you’re left—became taboo. Today, they’ve been locked away for so long that Singapore society has lost an understanding of these things.
Like me, Joanna is part of a younger generation of Singaporean activists. We don’t experience the same kind of reticence older ones have carried with them since Operation Spectrum. We don’t have to navigate that collective trauma in the same way. But what we do have to contend with is the recovery from that collective trauma: how do we reintroduce labour rights activism? How do we get Singapore residents to understand that workers have collective power? In a discussion with Vincent Bevins, Naomi Klein suggested that in a social justice resurgence, “it’s almost like the body returns first”: we demonstrate our voice with our votes, we organise LGBTQ+ rights, climate and labour rallies with successful turnouts. “But the effect on the mind, on the imagination, that takes longer to recover.”
So we must give attention and care to this imagination phase of the recovery process. Like Joanna, we must believe in the power of cultural work, we must speak things into existence. Even if labour rights activism and withholding one’s labour are not forms of dissent that are possible here, it is through people like Joanna that this knowledge, this intellectual history-in-the-making, can slowly start to seep back into our imagination and heal our collective mind.
Why would anyone choose to voluntarily go on strike, no less during the pandemic? And with no backing from union leadership? Often, people see striking as unnecessary and irrational. But the choice to go on strike is never an easy one. Joanna told me that striking while a global pandemic was engulfing the world was “an incredibly sobering experience, it sucks. It’s not fun.” There was a lot of waiting around, standing in front of picket lines and petitioning others to join, often without success. There were many moments when students would question the point of it all—were the bosses ever going to budge? Day in, day out, sometimes in the dead of winter—the dampness of the snowy ground seeping into their bones—students tried their hardest to maintain resolve. No one knew if a cough or a sneeze from a colleague was just the body faltering from fatigue or the beginning stages of this new, frightening virus. Under these circumstances, choosing to go on strike usually means other methods have failed. Petitions had been distributed, signed and delivered; workers had attended dialogues upon dialogues with administration; union meetings had ended up becoming fights, with members crying and begging for change. Joanna and others had been organising to no avail—the BC and the university weren’t budging.
The SWC, after all, had long adhered to a model of unionisation referred to as “Business Unionism”. It’s characterised by a lack of transparency, with decisions usually made by a handful of union leaders. The union is more interested in a collaboration with the employer, the boss. In SWC’s case, this was not only Columbia University but also, the global union that SWC sat within—the United Auto Workers. Business Unionism is not uncommon across the globe and it has been one of the reasons for unions’ erosion of power over the past few decades. This belief then, of cooperating instead of challenging, has resulted in numerous losses in rights for workers globally over the years, not least in SWC. Think about unions advocating exclusively for a certain class of workers, workers on permanent contracts or workers on a certain kind of visa: the lack of unity across all kinds of workers ultimately diminishes one’s bargaining power. In SWC, contracted workers did not get the same kind of treatment. Joanna and other SWC union members were largely resigned to the business unionism approach—until the pandemic, and their decision to ignore the BC.
But putting one’s body on the line is only one part of the overall strike strategy. Who is striking? How many people are striking? Those are the questions one must answer in order to truly ruffle the boss’s feathers. Prominent labour unionist Jane McAlevey argued that a strike will only be effective if you have a significant majority. That is, you need almost everyone in a specific sector or workplace to go on strike in order for workers to win. Joanna disagreed because her experience during the pandemic showed her otherwise. “Now I use the term ‘significant portion’.” Here, Joanna referred to having a strategic group go on strike, a group of workers that would seriously disrupt business-as-usual. Most teaching assistants (TAs), for instance, mark papers and help professors with simple tasks. The university can, for the most part, run without them. However, there are also TAs who teach the core curriculum and run their own seminars. If this group went on strike, there would be serious repercussions. “You must do a power analysis and see how you can create increased impact. And increased impact doesn’t necessarily mean increased numbers.”
Strikes, I’d learned, can be largely formulaic. You know whom you have to ask permission from, and you know whom exactly you were negotiating with: high-level corporate-types who eventually sit in a room with union representatives to discuss the workers’ demands. I asked Joanna whom exactly she negotiated with once they went on strike. “No one. That’s the thing. We didn’t meet anyone! We put our demands out on social media and because we had created such an impact, the university responded.”
Even though not all their demands were met—are they ever?—they scored some important victories. They won cash pay-outs (not the full amounts unfortunately), the university sanctioned a rent freeze (not the rent cancellations they’d asked for) and the international students office started providing more proactive support for students with visa issues. “To me this was the truest form of worker power and what negotiations should look like,” said Joanna.
The pandemic was indeed an agitating force, but that didn’t lead to the strike emerging spontaneously. “It takes a lot of relationship-building,” Joanna said. It also takes time and strategy. In his book If We Burn, Vincent Bevins argued that spontaneous movements can never dislodge power. If anything, they end up reproducing existing narratives, structures, ideologies—“they will grasp at whatever is already in the air.” To combat this, one must have a detailed and robust plan. “We knew that it wouldn’t work if someone from a different department went in to try and convince people. We mapped out and went after different people who had influence in the different departments. It takes people in the same working conditions to convince others.”
With a few vacant slots, Joanna decided to run for the BC as part of a minority faction that hoped to combat the business unionist candidates. This was interesting to me given that she is so militantly suspicious of conventional power structures. Globally, we are used to seeing power as coming from the people on top—statesmen, heads of universities, perm-sec officers and civil servants sitting in closed-door dialogues. But through that strike period during the pandemic and her time in the BC, Joanna learnt that if we all spent maybe just a fraction of our time speaking to each other about our workplace conditions, instead of trying to clamour around a Google Doc, writing a hypothetical policy paper that may never be truly considered, perhaps we could actually make our labour conditions, our lives better.
Even though Joanna is hopeful, she is also very realistic. “I was told that no victory [on the left] is permanent, it will continue to be a struggle.” And that’s exactly what happened. Discipline and strategy were tested again a year later, when they went on a fresh, 10-week strike. The concessions won in 2020 were just not enough as the pandemic raged on. The previous rent freeze ended just as rents started skyrocketing across New York City, with many tenants demanding that their rents be cancelled. In what seemed like an attempt to scare student workers from striking again, Columbia unilaterally changed their pay structure, only paying stipends semi-monthly when teaching labour was conducted, as opposed to paying them a lump-sum at the beginning of the semester. After much protestations from union members, the BC finally decided to authorise a strike request. This time, in 2021, workers had to strike virtually.
During these virtual pickets, one effective tactic was “e-mail zaps”. Joanna and other organisers would instruct groups of workers to e-mail the administration in coordinated waves, flooding their inboxes, stopping any other e-mail from coming in. Union members also worked with the Teamsters, a prominent US union, to turn away deliveries from Columbia, causing even more inconvenience to the university.
By the third week though, there was an internal impasse. Workers, backed by Joanna and the rest of the minority BC faction, wanted to keep going. But the majority faction wanted to call off the supposedly “ineffective” strike. They had secretly put together a proposal granting several concessions to the university administrators. Fierce debates involving over 500 union members on Zoom led to demands for a vote on the proposal. The majority faction of the BC eventually relented. Joanna and others in the “no” camp had about nine days to mobilise support.
“The union started sending out e-mails trying to convince people to vote ‘yes’, giving them misleading information.” Joanna and the others fought back. “Someone from Comp Sci scraped the university e-mail directory and sent e-mails to everyone telling them to vote ‘no’, pointing out the inadequacies.” People registered just to vote, leading to the highest turnout in the union’s history. The “no” vote won.
“We had shown the business unionists that concessionary bargaining does not work and workers will not stand for it.” The rest of the BC agreed to step down after repeated demands from union members. As Joanna stated in Spectre Journal: “This was a historic rebuke on two fronts. It simultaneously rejected Columbia and, crucially, the union leadership’s business union approach.”
“The strike went on for another seven weeks. We were exhausted by this point,” Joanna exhaled. “I don’t know if any of us got any sleep, if we ate much. After striking during the day, we spent nights planning and strategising. There were many times where it seemed futile.” I could see that she remembered the fatigue viscerally. “But it’s the principled thing to do. Every week, hundreds of us got into a room. And every week, when you think you can’t go on for another week, you look at each other and you realise, you just have to keep going.”
This is, according to Joanna, interpellation. Used by Marxists and Marxist Literary theorists, interpellation is essentially the creation of an identity by some kind of external ideological and cultural force. “In a strike, you get outside of yourself, you realise that you become someone else, you are part of something bigger,” she said.
At Goldsmiths, I saw the full arsenal of the university’s intimidation methods: contracted private security hired to (physically) break up strikes, defamation campaigns, threats to withhold staff’s pay and students’ degrees, the spreading of misinformation. Joanna and the rest of the grad student workers experienced the same thing. In those moments, you see yourself become something else. You experience interpellation. If you hadn’t realised it before, you have now become the worker. The worker that has been devalued. But as much as the worker is oppressed, the worker has power. How you read yourself is key. At Columbia, it worked.
“We won everything, we kept striking until we won.”
The union had achieved an “agreement with 33 percent raises for the lowest-paid student-workers, six to 10 percent raises for most other workers, 75 percent coverage of premiums for comprehensive dental insurance plans and an expanded healthcare fund, more than doubled childcare subsidies, access to arbitration for cases of discrimination and harassment, and full recognition of our union. Moreover, the university agreed to provide workers wages for making up work that was not done during the strike.
“I took a break after that to focus on my PhD.” We laughed, silently acknowledging that both of us had forgotten about Joanna’s schooling. The literature student, activist and labour union organiser has also become a mentor and teacher. “I still coach some younger organisers and do one-on-one calls with them.”
Joanna shared with me that some time in the 1970s, the CIA had plans to translate TS Elliot’s Four Quartets into Russian and drop copies by airplane all over the Soviet Union. This was part of a broader ideological project to win over intellectuals, artists and citizens, getting them to turn away from communism. As much as the humanities is being defunded and sidelined all around the world, the powers-that-be know that any political struggle is also a cultural one. To buy into certain narratives is to imagine, and imagining is an inherently creative act.
Lydia Liu, professor in the humanities at Columbia and Joanna’s PhD supervisor, reminded her that “literature is deeply politicised.” What then becomes important, as Joanna argued, is our ability to read. To read anything. To read each other. This is why Joanna wants her students to learn how to read. She wants everyone to learn how to read. Joanna referenced a “great teacher” at Columbia: Gayatri Spivak, the influential scholar, literary critic and feminist. “She said before that if you can’t read a text responsibly, how can you read another person?”
It is clear to me that Joanna’s activism and union organising are tied to her love for literature and her ability to read. She experienced her political awakening during literature in junior college (JC). “I read a lot of left-wing texts from Tolstoy and Lu Xun and those were what opened my eyes. JC lit showed me the power of culture and cultural work. It expands your imagination of what is possible. You are able to imagine the lives of other people.”
It is no surprise then, that the genesis of Joanna’s activist journey—literature—is her chosen field now. “A lot of [labour] organising…is building trust, affirming, holding space,” Joanna told me. “Literature allows us to explode into one another,” she said, or “extend into one another.” The more we read, Joanna believed, the more we were able to discern, and not just the stories in books but the world writ large.
Joanna also believed that if we can commit to understanding this notion of shared solidarity, shared humanness, we might be able to rebuild a formidable labour movement. “Sometimes on the left, we’re so siloed and caught up in individuality…We prevent ourselves from bleeding into one another. We don’t see our shared interests.” It is no secret that the left, globally, is losing. We live in an incredibly atomised world where individual productivity and optimisation are prized. Historically liberal or progressive governments have become more and more interested in kowtowing to businesses and the wealthy, ignoring the very real frustrations of working-class people whose jobs are being outsourced and taken away. This, coupled with identity-based activism sometimes being a bit too focused on representational politics, has caused many to look for solace in the right and in fascistic movements.
I asked Joanna for the one thing she hopes her students learn from her classes: “I learnt this from my supervisor…bad questions lead to wrong outcomes, bad outcomes. But good questions lead to so many possibilities.” This, I feel, is the point. Asking good questions is something we must reintroduce into our imagination. And if it was never a disposition familiar to us as a people, we must build what is needed, teach what is needed to develop this skill. Because limiting questions can fail us. This is already being done by Joanna and many others, certainly in Singapore too. Activists, labour organisers, educators—workers!—are getting people to ask questions about the systems that don’t seem to value them, that don’t seem to value a lot of us, that make decisions for a few but proclaim it’s for the many.
I write this piece out of a country that kills incarcerated people in my name, that destroys ecosystems and livelihoods by dredging up sand for our shiny new plots of reclaimed land in my name, that continues to maintain ties with governments accused of genocide in my name. The time is now to ask the good questions. What must we do, for everyone in Singapore to have a good life? What do we lose, when all we think about are gains? What should we stand up for, even if it is scary?
What kind of city do we want?
Kristian-Marc James Paul (he/him/his) is an activist and writer. He is a member of climate justice collective SG Climate Rally and is one of the co-editors of Brown is Redacted: Reflecting on Race in Singapore (2022), an anthology on minority race narratives. He has also written for CNA and Mekong Review. He was a contributing author to We Are Not The Enemy: The Practice of Advocacy in Singapore (2024). Kristian is a Diversity & Inclusion professional and facilitates intergroup dialogues, partnering with organisations to run community discussions on masculinity and male allyship.
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