After the Strike: Silence, Stratification, and Ethical Refusal
Author’s Note
Like all the others on this website, this essay is a threshold text. It sits between blog post and journal article, between personal account and structural analysis. What distinguishes this piece from the others, however, is that it lends analytical framing of structural functions within justice-oriented spaces. It emerges from my experience as a librarian-faculty member within a large public university system and its affiliated faculty union. And like with the other works on this site, lived experience is the point of entry, not the object of argument.
What follows is not a private grievance. It does not attempt to adjudicate individual actions, resolve the tensions it names, or try to provide a comprehensive account of the institutional dynamics involved. Rather, it isolates and names, makes visible a pattern: how stratification persists inside organizations that hold justice-centered principles and name solidarity as core; how silence operates as a structuring force; and how relational harm can be minimized and dismissed by recoding it as individual feeling or interpersonal misstep.
The union taught me to name power. I take that lesson seriously here. I write this as someone shaped by relationships with union women who taught me what solidarity could be. My critique emerges from that lineage, not outside of it.
Yes, more granular analysis is indeed necessary. Heavier citation and documentary evidence are appropriate and called for. This piece does not attempt that work.
It is written in the spirit of diagnostic fidelity. I am trying to describe what I see clearly enough that others might recognize it too (Ahmed, 2012).
When Silence Settles
When strikes end, something predictable follows: silence.
It’s not the quiet of recovery. Not the quiet of collective breath after exertion. It’s a different kind of stillness. More akin to narrowing, constriction, a wordless re-consolidation. The disruption fomented by the labor strike is reclassified as an interruption rather than received as a diagnosis. Attention moves quickly to “resolution” (the scare quotes are intentional here). The conditions that made withholding labor necessary recede from view. Institutional memory is remarkably short when remembering would require structural change.
Strikes dramatize solidarity. They make visible the fact that labor is collective and that institutions rely upon it. They temporarily flatten differences. On the picket line, we are university workers together.
But once the spectacle recedes, stratification reasserts itself.
What becomes especially visible in these waning moments after a high are the gaps and fissures. Not only between management and workers, but within the unions themselves. This is complicated by the fact that many faculty union members are precarious: lecturers working without tenure protection, often under conditions of chronic insecurity. That precarity is consequential and real, acute and ongoing (Kezar, 2012). It shapes organizing strategy, risk tolerance, and what feels survivable.
And yet, precarity does not map cleanly onto power. This realization carries a tension that is not easy to hold. It disrupts the familiar narrative that precarity and power travel tightly together.
Those of us classified as faculty librarians, “non-instructional faculty,” and operate under a twelve-month academic calendar often hold tenure-line appointments. We are fewer, have greater tenure density, and have more stable contracts through the same faculty collective bargaining agreement.
Librarians, in particular, are not unfamiliar with silence. We know it as a professional condition rather than an absence of speech: being present, but not consulted; contributing labor that becomes visible only when it is withdrawn; being thanked privately and bypassed publicly. Silence is not foreign to librarianship. It is one of the ways legitimacy is managed and survival is negotiated inside institutions that rely on our work while marginalizing our authority. That familiarity makes silence feel ordinary, even necessary. It also makes it easier for silence to be mistaken for consent, and for withdrawal to be read as acquiescence rather than constraint.
Non-instructional faculty.
That designation is not neutral. Classification systems organize value (Bowker & Star, 2000). This is something I live with daily and professionally as an academic librarian. I am viscerally aware that classification and sorting systems structure mindsets, the pathways of actions that are seen and decided on, and how they are both understood. In this case, classification and sorting systems structure how labor is imagined, how contracts are written, and how political leverage is interpreted. Classification, therefore, determines whose labor is presumed central and whose is supplemental. Extraction follows those lines.
Collective bargaining agreements are often written primarily around instructional labor. This reflects numerical weight and historical precedent. But it also reveals an internal hierarchy: instruction as normative faculty labor. All else is derivative or auxiliary (Bourdieu, 1984/1988).
Framed in this normative view, we see academic librarians occupy a structurally subordinate professional role despite comparatively higher tenure density. Tenure, in this context, does not confer authority, agenda-setting power, or epistemic legitimacy. Librarian labor remains adjunct in dominant faculty imaginaries. We are often treated as support rather than scholars with expertise and domains of inquiry and research, infrastructure rather than authorship. Even so, librarians are expected to translate, stabilize, and legitimate collective projects.
Lecturer contingent employment. Librarian subordinate roles. These positions coexist rather than cancel each other out. Lecturers may experience acute employment precarity while still participating, intentionally or not, in professional dominance over librarians. Librarians may have greater formal protection through collective bargaining agreements while remaining symbolically marginalized and structurally sidelined. The result is not a simple hierarchy, but a cross-cutting asymmetry in which vulnerability and authority are unevenly distributed along different axes.
It is precisely within this complexity that extractive dynamics can take hold.
Under the Quiet: Cross-Cutting Asymmetry
Faculty unions exist to resist extraction by administrations and governing boards. Yet extraction can reproduce internally as well.
Extraction is not only economic. It is relational and epistemic. It occurs when some members are expected to give care, labor, and political loyalty without reciprocal recognition (Tronto, 2013). It occurs when organizing labor is taken for granted. It occurs when inclusion is rhetorically affirmed but materially deferred.
Extraction does not always look like opposition. Sometimes it appears as selective amplification, symbolic inclusion, or time-bound support that expires once discomfort sets in. I have seen it in meetings where role boundaries are earnestly questioned (what would a librarian know about curriculum development?), and subsequent consultation quietly disappeared. Sometimes it looks like absorbing the moral force of a struggle without absorbing its risks. Or relocating those risks onto others positioned to carry them more quietly.
In librarianship, this dynamic is intensified by what Fobazi Ettarh (2018) calls “vocational awe,” the expectation of self-sacrifice in service of an idealized mission. Vocational awe can migrate into union spaces as well, normalizing asymmetrical contribution.
In the university ecosystem, librarians often perform bridging labor: drafting language, interpreting policy, building relationships across departments, ensuring compliance infrastructures function. Much of this work is invisible until it fails. It does not fit easily within strike imagery, yet it sustains the institution daily.
Non-instructional faculty.
When instructional faculty are treated as the implicit subject of faculty politics, others become modifiers. This reflects broader higher education assumptions about what counts as intellectual labor and what counts as support (Bourdieu, 1984/1988; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004).
Librarians often occupy a paradoxical position: structurally secure yet symbolically peripheral. That paradox produces a specific form of marginalization, one that is easy to miss because it does not look like precarity.
Absorption
Silence stabilizes hierarchy. It stabilizes by avoiding open conflict about internal stratification; recasting structural critique as interpersonal discomfort; allowing well-intentioned actors to remain unimplicated.
When harm is acknowledged only as feeling, without naming obligation, the structure remains intact. This is not cruelty. It is organizational maintenance.
Institutions, including unions, are oriented toward continuity. Even counter-institutions carry embedded assumptions from the systems they resist (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). The university’s internal hierarchies—disciplinary prestige, instructional centrality, weighted teaching units, enrollment metrics—do not disappear at the union threshold. They travel inward.
The quiet after the strike allows those hierarchies to settle back into place.
When bridging labor, already rendered invisible and peripheral, is bypassed, when well-meaning decision-making bodies proceed without consultation, when communication collapses into apology without obligation, the injury is subtle but cumulative. The harm is easily reframed as hurt feelings. The structural terrain disappears.
This reframing is part of the work silence does.
Silence narrows analysis to affect. It individualizes what is patterned and structural. It converts stratification into temperament (Ahmed, 2012). When analysis narrows to affect, remedy narrows to reassurance. Structural obligation dissolves into interpersonal management. Without public naming, responsibility is not redistributed. It is absorbed.
This is when refusal becomes structurally necessary.
Against Absorption, Refusing Silence
Without refusal, asymmetry remains unmarked. Without marking, it remains unaltered. Refusal, in this sense, is not a withdrawal from care or solidarity. It is a refusal to allow one’s intellectual, affective, or reputational labor to be used to normalize arrangements that remain fundamentally unchanged. It is a refusal to smooth over conflict in the name of unity when unity itself is unevenly distributed, and when consent is treated as absorbable rather than consequential.
Institutions—and movements—are highly skilled at absorbing disruption. They are equally skilled at declaring it finished. But closure controlled by those least affected by harm can function as abandonment.
When ethical refusal is acknowledged interpersonally but not processed structurally, when campaigns proceed uninterrupted and without reckoning, the cost is simply redistributed downward. Ethical refusal then is the insistence that solidarity account for internal stratification, not merely external opposition. Refusal, as feminist and critical race scholars remind us, is a political act of boundary-setting and truth-telling (Ahmed, 2017; Simpson, 2014). It carries risk. It can be read as divisive. It can be dismissed as oversensitivity. It can label the speaker as “difficult.”
But without refusal, silence continues its work.
After Silence: Relational Accountability
After the declarations of doneness, there is that residual, unsettled feeling that something is just not quite right. That lingering sense of unfinishedness is not sentimentality or personal grievance. It is diagnostic data. Information. It marks a failure of accountability, a gap where pause, recognition, and shared ownership should have occurred but didn’t. Forgetting does real work here. It is often enabled by those positioned safely enough to move on.
The question, then, is not whether movements can continue. They almost always do.
The question is whether they can reckon honestly with the asymmetries they reproduce—and who is expected to bear the cost when they do not.
If solidarity is to be more than episodic, it must include explicit recognition of faculty classification hierarchies, structural revision of contract language that marginalizes non-instructional faculty, material inclusion of librarian labor in bargaining priorities, clear articulation of reciprocal obligation. Not just validation. Validation, here, is merely a promise and beginning.
Relational accountability requires more than apology. It requires redesign (Tronto, 2013).
The strike demonstrated collective power. The aftermath reveals collective limits.
If we are serious about solidarity, we must ask not only how we confront administrative extraction but how we address asymmetry within our own house.
Silence will not do that work for us.
Speaking After Silence: More Notes From the Author
I know how this may be received. I understand the instinct to protect what we have built. This analysis is not a critique of current leadership, nor of any individual actor. It names structural patterns that exceed any one person’s role or intentions. To name structural harm is not to assign individual blame, but to insist that responsibility does not disappear simply because harm is routinized, unspoken, or absorbed. The impact of harm accumulates beyond any singular intention. It is merely rendered fainter, almost imperceptible, except to those who carry its effects.
I can imagine the familiar responses: that I never said I felt this way, that the harm was not made clear, that silence should be taken as agreement. I can also anticipate the quieter worry beneath those responses: that the union cannot survive this kind of criticism. But asking, expecting people to remain silent so an institution can endure is a familiar tactic of extractive systems. It is how organizations preserve themselves by shifting cost onto individuals, treating institutional stability as a shared obligation while harm is managed privately by those who bear it.
The union explicitly positions itself as aware of these dynamics of extraction and asymmetry, and is committed to doing differently, to creating an alternative. Resisting extraction, practicing solidarity, acting with care. And yet, in this moment, the same patterns of differential obligation and muted accountability, the same ones I had described earlier here, reappeared. And they felt familiar. I believed in those stated values and invested time, care, and political labor in good faith. What followed was silence, then being passed over, then the quiet fading of organizational obligation once my labor was no longer needed. Over time, it became clear that my history of contribution did not generate reciprocal obligation or care. It revealed how easily I could be set aside. I understood that had I stayed, more would have been taken, with little willingness to share responsibility or risk. My refusal is not anger or abandonment. It is an attempt to align my participation with the values the organization publicly affirms. It is a decision to stop participating in conditions that required my silence in exchange for belonging, and to name that any solidarity that depends on unspoken sacrifice, especially by those it renders disposable, reproduces the very harms it claims to oppose.
My loyalty remains with the values of mutuality, reciprocity, community, inclusion, and solidarity.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University Press.
Ahmed, S. (2017). Living a feminist life. Duke University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1988). Homo academicus (P. Collier, Trans.). Stanford University Press. (Original work published 1984).
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.
Ettarh, F. (2018, January 10). Vocational awe and librarianship: The lies we tell ourselves. In the Library with the Lead Pipe. https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/
Kezar, A. J. (Ed.) (2012). Embracing non-tenure track faculty: Changing campuses for the new faculty majority. Routledge.
Simpson, A. (2014). Mohawk interruptus: Political life across the borders of settler states. Duke University Press.
Slaughter, S., & Rhoades, G. (2004). Academic capitalism and the new economy: Markets, state, and higher education. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tronto, J. C. (2013). Caring democracy: Markets, equality, and justice. New York University Press.