Rick Perlstein writes to Alan Brinkley:
…though I sympathize with your dilemma, I?ve come to the conclusion that so long as you keep your position?one, the other, or both of your positions, I mean: your position against GESU, or your bureacratic position as provost so long as its duties require you to oppose graduate student unionization?I stand against you. I?ve enjoyed your company so much in the few times we?ve met that it pains me to say that I would have a hard time enjoying your company now. But you are now on the other side from me in a struggle over what kind of society America should become.
…Remember a few years back when you were good to allow me to join you and several other Columbia professors and graduate students at a dinner for a visiting scholar, and the subject turned to the Columbia grad students? organizing drive? One of your colleagues, another prominent scholar of liberalism–and, one would think, a liberal–made the by-then familiar point (call it the Eli Yale Shuffle) that unionization was a good thing for everyone except graduate students, who really are the blessed of the earth.
I told this professor he was saying the exact same things a benevolent but anti-union employer like Barry Goldwater used to say: that unions are hardly necessary where the workplace relationship is not just one of boss and bossed, but also one complexified by trust, familiarity, respect, even monitorship. I noted that since I was the only one present who had been a member of a graduate student union (during two years in the American culture program at the University of Michigan), I had some standing to personally confirm a general principle every fan of the Wagner Act would understand: that by formalizing a relationship that otherwise would have otherwise been grounded in the whim of the employer, the presence of a union seemed to increase, not decrease, the measure of trust between professors and graduate students at the University of Michigan. I don?t know if you agreed with me that night or not. I thought then that you did. I do know, however, that you understood the argument in its every particular–because you helped explain it to your colleague when he chose to act obtuse.
Are unions bad for some kind of workplaces and not for others? I really don?t care to argue the point; to try to change your mind. That would be an insult to your intelligence. You understand the argument I would advance better than I understand it myself. That?s the tragedy of the thing: you–and that other guy, both scholars of the rise and fall of the New Deal order–taught me the argument.
(Via Problem of Leisure)
Josh Eidelson 