Background on Ferd Wulkan
As an undergraduate in mathematics at MIT (SB, 1968), Ferd Wulkan was active in the Tiddlywinks Club and Students for a Democratic Society, the latter of which became a truer guide to his future course in life. A leftist, Wulkan chose to follow the path of many other members of the New Left of the 1960s, to become a committed workplace activist, hoping to spark a Socialist transformation in American society. He began his career as a labor organizer by taking a position as an orderly at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, joining Transfusion, a Socialist healthcare worker's organization. Building a union at Mount Auburn, however, would not be an easy task. Transfusion imploded over disagreements about whether the intention of organizing was to build a union or seed a revolutionary movement, leaving just five members to continue as the aptly named Red Blood Cell. Although most members of Transfusion become part of the Party-building wing of the New Communist movement, members of Red Blood Cell founded the insistently non-sectarian, Organizing Committee for a Boston Area Socialist Organization. Never considering itself as leading the working class, and believing the time was not yet right for a new Communist party, OC/BASO organized as a "cadre" rather than "vanguard," and focused on discipline and organization, developing clear political positions based on rigorous study and analysis.
After six years at Mount Auburn, Wulkan sought more fertile ground at Boston University, taking a clerical position in the Economics Department in April 1979. There he was thrown immediately into a fraught struggle with the university's reactionary president, Jonathan Silber, to win recognition for clerical workers organizing under the radical District 65 of the United Auto Workers. Barely two weeks after he was hired, he found himself on strike, side by side with faculty and librarians, who were on their own campaign for union representation. After two and a half up and down weeks, the union won.
At BU, Wulkan experienced levels of both success and frustration. Although largely supported by the Economics Department, his labor activism frequently pitted him against the administration, as did his activism against apartheid in South Africa and U.S. intervention in Central America. A turning point of sorts for him case after District 65 succeeded in winning an agency shop at BU in 1985 and sought to expand by organizing clerical workers at several of Boston's private colleges. Outmaneuvered by management, they failed profoundly. At the same time, the long decline and ultimate dissolution of District 65 led the Boston University clerical staff to affiliate with UAW Local 2324, which proved to be more bureaucratic and unresponsive.
In 1989, Wulkan accepted a full time position at UMass Amherst as staff member and field representative for Local 509 (and later, Local 888) of the Service Employees International Union, serving non-faculty professional personnel at the university. From the outset, he found Amherst entirely unlike Boston, discovering a markedly less oppositional environment for organizing and a solid base of experienced organizers with whom to work. During his time in SEIU, he took part in campaigns against merit pay and to organize a graduate student union, but his greatest struggle came after SEIU reorganized its Massachusetts locals, creating a new local (888) for UMass, where Wulkan became the higher education coordinator. The president of Local 888 did not share the democratic style of the professional staff unit nor Wulkan's inclusive style of leadership, setting off a lengthy struggle. After trying to reconcile the differing approaches and fighting for the member-run vision, Wulkan resigned his position and set about organizing the rest of the local (primarily outside higher education) for a democratic process. After exploring the formation of an independent union, he negotiated with SEIU's national leadership and struck a deal whereby 2,300 members left SEIU in 2004 to join the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), the union for faculty and librarians at UMass Amherst.
From 2004 to 2016, Wulkan worked for the Massachusetts Society of Professors (MSP) and as an organizing director for PHENOM, the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), advocating for public higher education at the state level. Although he retired in 2016, he has remained true to his roots, staying active in PHENOM and other causes.
