“Working Women Unite”: Exploring a Socialist Feminist, Nonhierarchical Teachers Union
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we present and explore the case of the Teaching Support Staff Union (TSSU), an independent, directly democratic, and feminist labor union at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada. Operating continuously since the 1970s, we argue that TSSU is an important example of the ways in which gender and class have intersected within the history of the Canadian labor movement, and a fascinating case of a longstanding socialist feminist union. We also argue that alongside the historical relevance, exploring the constraints and possibilities of a feminist nonhierarchical organizational structure can offer important lessons for organizing in the twenty-first century. Adopting a socialist feminist framework, we speak from our experiences serving as TSSU executives, as graduate students, and as teachers within the larger academic machine. Marking its fortieth year in 2018, this active, young, and angry labor union can provide the labor movement and academics with a case study to reflect on how we can conceptualize social movement unionism; organize around and toward equity, diversity, and justice; and maintain a deep commitment to both feminist and class struggle.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.062 | 0.081 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".