Tag Archives: academic labor

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The YDN on the administration’s response to yesterday’s “Dissertation Derby”:

An estimated 300 graduate and undergraduate students rallied on the steps of the Hall of Graduate Studies Thursday to protest what they claim are overly stringent Graduate School registration policies and pay inequities.

…Butler, who will assume the Graduate School deanship this July, said the current extended registration policies are designed to help students. “It is to every student’s advantage to complete a superb dissertation as efficiently as is possible,” Butler said. “History is imposing no new time deadlines and it’s erroneous to suggest otherwise.”

But according to an internal History Department memo obtained by GESO and released to the News Thursday, Yale’s largest department may require graduate students to submit half of their dissertations to proceed to the seventh year. “[Students] can petition for extended registration [after their sixth year in] the Graduate School in exceptional cases where unique personal circumstances or substantial difficulties in obtaining archival sources have prevented normal progress,” the department’s policy proposal reads.

What’s in every graduate student’s best interest, as a student and as an employee, is to have the full institutional support of the University for the full duration necessary – given the challenges dramatized in yesterday’s street theater but unfortunately undiscussed in the YDN’s write-up – to complete their academic work, and assistance in attaining gainful employment afterwards. That’s what GESO’s fighting for, and what Butler and Salovey should be working for as well, rather than working to accelerate the casualization of academic labor at one of the wealthiest and most prestigious universities in the world.

Oh – and then there’s this picture, with this caption:

A baguette-wielding man attends a GESO-rally…

Um, Weapon of Mass Destruction, anyone?

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Yesterday, undergrads joined graduate students in marching to David Swenson’s and Richard Levin’s offices to demand investment disclosure to shed some light on the truth about the impact of Yale’s money.

Today, undergrads set up three installations on Beinecke – eight hundred paper plates whose distribution represents the racial and gender make-up of Yale’s tenured faculty, a mini-classroom to discuss academic casualization, and a weighted game of juggling based on financial aid status – and talked with peers about the impact of these issues on our education and our community. Then we marched to join GESO at HGS and stand together in calling for a more progressive vision of the academy.

Oh – and the “Dissertation Derby” was pretty fun too, as well as a vivid demonstration of the disjuncture between administration policy and the best interests of graduate students and the academy.

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In this week’s Yale Herald (it’s a sidebar they haven’t posted on-line), a leader of the Yale anti-GESO graduate student group, At What Cost, warns Yale’s administration that its heavy-handed anti-union tactics are prone to backfire in the long run:

The Yale administration is opposed to GESO, and no one is going to change that one way or another. My concern is that when the Administration enters in the fray. It lends credence to GESO’s claim.

As well it should. At What Cost, at the Academic Labor Board hearing last year, declined to support the administration’s stated plans to have the results of an NLRB vote impounded and appealed all the way to the Supreme Court either. So it appears Levin’s anti-union tactics find little sympathy even among anti-union grad students.

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Yesterday, several dozen undergraduates and grad students met up to discuss the ways in which Yale’s graduate student pay inequity disvalues their work and our education, to deliver a letter to Graduate School Dean Peter Salovey, and to begin planning a larger mobilization for March.

Back home in Philly, U Penn’s superior-acronym-bearing graduate student union, GET-UP, has announced plans for a two-day strike next week to coincide with parade welcoming Penn’s new President to demand that Penn agree to count the ballots from the union election held by its grad students a year ago:

Rich Klimmer, an organizer with the American Federation of Teachers based in Philadelphia, said that, by contrast, when he was a graduate student at Northwestern University in the late 1960s, graduate students did not do any teaching until they had finished all their coursework. He said they also were given three weeks of training on how to prepare and give lectures and how to build and grade exams.

“Now, under the corporate model of running a university, they take anyone and put them in the classes,” Klimmer said.

Money and benefits are at the root of the bid to unionize. Graduate students, who are paid on average $15,000 a year, argue that they don’t earn a living wage for this region. Many graduate students are older, returning students who have families. Deirdre Martinez, 36, a graduate student in Penn’s education school, has two children ages 5 and 7 and a husband who teaches at Temple University. She said universities such as Penn need to treat adult learners with the same respect they would expect elsewhere.

Penn, Brown, and Columbia, at Yale President Levin’s urging, have all had the ballots from their NLRB elections impounded, pending a potentially decade-long appeal process as far as the Supreme Court. This is the legal limbo into which Levin has expressed his desire to shunt GESO as well. That’s why GESO continues to demand a fair process whose results can be recognized by both sides.

Democracy, Levin often likes to remark in disparaging the more democratic Card-Count Neutrality process, means voting. If democracy means voting, then surely it demands that the votes be counted, and the results followed. That’ll take the continued struggle of graduate students across this country.

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A co-chairman of U Penn’s graduate student union, GET-UP, calls on Penn’s leadership to let the ballots from ther election be counted:

Our movement is part of a larger pushback against the structural reform under way in the academic labor market. For several decades now, universities have been replacing full-time, tenure-track faculty with part-time instructors and graduate employees. Like adjunct faculty, graduate employees suffer unprofessional working conditions, crummy salaries and virtually no job security. We have little recourse if the terms of our employment are arbitrarily changed, and we have no grievance procedure if we’re harassed or abused.

We had hoped that President Rodin’s new willingness to engage with GET-UP would bring this impasse to resolution. But despite an atmosphere of cordiality and some stimulating discussion at the mid-December meeting GET-UP’s leadership held with President Rodin, the song remains the same: Penn’s graduate employees voted in a democratic election, and College Hall continues to abuse the loopholes in labor law to deny our basic rights.

The legal limbo in which graduate students at Penn, Brown, and Columbia find themselves is exactly the one which Levin has committed himself to inflict on Yale graduate students should an NLRB vote be held. While he’s argued for an NLRB process over the Card Count Neutrality on the grounds that “democracy means voting,” Levin continues to act as though he’s forgotten that democracy means counting, and following, the results of the vote.

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A couple thoughts on the Iowa caucuses, a topic on which much ink (real and virtual) has and no doubt and will be spilled:

As someone who, despite significant reservations, believes Dean would be the best of the leading contenders for the Democratic nomination, I was disappointed to see him come in third. As someone who believes with great conviction in the organizing model that Dean has employed, I was disappointed to see that it was not enough to win him the Caucus. That does little to take away from the tremendous progress the Dean campaign has made and the ways it which it’s destabilized some of the unfortunate Clintonian paradigms of building power in the Democratic party. I’d also argue that losing Iowa does less than many think to hurt Dean’s chances of seizing the endorsement. One of the ways the press has hurt Dean over the past months, besides applying a level of cynicism and scrutiny to him denied in coverage of, say, the sitting President, is by raising the bar for his importance impossibly high. It’ll be interesting to see whether Dean is as effective as Clinton at seizing on and drawing momentum from underdog status. Some have argued that losing Iowa is better for Dean because it leaves several “anti-Dean” candidates in the running going into New Hampshire and stymies efforts to coalesce behind one Dean alternative – I guess we’ll see how that plays out as well.

It’ll be interesting to see what Kerry makes of the new attention and the new media narrative offered to him. Specifically, I wonder to what he and his staff attribute his late surge. The role he takes over the next weeks may hint at who it is they he thinks is propelling his rebirth as a candidate.

Looks like the zenith of Dick Gephardt’s political career has passed. The interesting story here may be his failure to marshall stronger support from the labor movement – instead of garnering the endorsement by the AFL-CIO as a body some expected, he saw the two largest unions in the body go to Dean. I think the Cold War AFL-CIO (there’s a reason they used to call it the AFL-CIA) model suggested to some by his support for the war in Iraq, and the tension it created, speaks to shifts in the American labor movement.

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This issue of In These Times includes compelling pieces by Andy Stern and Gerald McEntee, Presidents of the Service Employees International Union and the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees, the two largest unions in the AFL-CIO. SEIU and AFSCME, the leading private and public sector unions respectively in the US, surprised many pundits who view them as rivals when they together endorsed Howard Dean a few months back. Stern argues rightly that the Democratic party cannot survive without the labor movement:

At our best, unions are one of the few institutions with progressive values that have millions of members, multimillion dollar budgets and the ability to do grassroots organizing on a large enough scale to counter the power of today’s corporations.

The 2000 presidential election clearly showed the difference unions can make.

* Bush won in nonunion households by 8 points, but lost in union households by 37 points.
* He won nonunion white men by 41 points, but lost union white men by 24 points.
* He won nonunion gun owners by 39 points, but lost union gun owners by 21 points.
* He did 16 points better among nonunion people of color than among union people of color.

So if more workers in Florida, Missouri, Ohio and other states that went narrowly for Bush had been union members, the past three years in this country would have been very different.

He offers three priorities for organized labor: legal defense of the right to organize as a human right, alliance across movements and communities in fighting for just causes, and prioritizing organizing. The latter two are arguably what accounted for the historic success of the CIO before and during the New Deal period, and are central to the New Unity Partnership Stern is spearheading with the Presidents of HERE, UNITE, the Laborers, and the Carpenters. The decline in the first, from the Taft-Hartley Act (which only Dennis Kucinich among the Democratic candidates has promised to repeal) to Reagan’s crackdown on the Air Traffic Controllers, is at the centerpiece of the counter-revolution against the labor movement over the past decades. And Bush, as McEntee argues, has pushed that counter-revolution further:

Indeed, at no other time during my 44 years in labor have I seen members of my union-the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME)-nor the House of Labor, more dedicated to getting one person out of office.

And we all know why. Three million jobs lost in three years-the most since the Great Depression: 66 million Americans with inadequate healthcare coverage or no healthcare coverage at all; a median household income that has fallen for three straight years; 3 million Americans who slipped into poverty in 2001; ergonomic rules scrapped; overtime regulations attacked. The list goes on and on…the Bush administration invoked the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act-an action that hadn’t been taken in 25 years and never in a lockout. President Bush’s shameful use of Taft-Hartley sent a message to other employers: When the going gets rough at the bargaining table, the federal government can always step in-to help the boss.

But McEntee’s central argument, which Stern alludes to as well, is that getting a Democratic President into office is not and never has been enough to protect the rights of working people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed a National Labor Relations Act to bring labor into his coalition and into the Democratic establishment becuase it was clear that otherwise the labor movement could have torn his Presidency apart. Real economic change in this country won’t be accomplished by a Clintonite who sees organized labor as a special interest equivalent to big business to be kept at bay with moderate reforms and kept out of corrupting the political process. As McEntee argues:

It is clear that we must defeat George W. Bush. But we must also grow our unions. And whomever the Democratic Party selects as its nominee-AFSCME hopes it is Howard Dean-we must insist that he support a comprehensive social justice agenda, job creation, quality and affordable healthcare for all, the preservation of Medicare and Social Security, civil rights and much more.

And the House of Labor must insist that the next president support an aggressive agenda for worker rights, including real penalties for violators of labor laws, creating a law that will make employers recognize their workers’ desire to form a union, establishing first contract arbitration and giving the National Labor Relations Board the power to enforce laws that
protect workers.

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Jacob Remes points out a History News Network account of the tension at the annual Business meeting of the American Historical Association, which he attended, over the successfully passed resolution calling on Yale to respect the right of its graduate students to organize. Yale History Chairman and candidate for Yale College Dean Jon Butler made the unfortunate argument that it was “presumptuous” for historians to concern themselves in a dispute over free speech and the right to organize and the specious argument that calling for a fair process to determine whether GESO represents the majority of graduate students is unfair to any other potential graduate student organizations, and finally tried and failed to stall the resolution on procedural grounds.

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The National Council of La Raza offers a blistering and trenchant critique of Bush’s immigration reform proposal:

The President’s proposal is limited to creating a potentially huge new guestworker program for immigrant workers with no meaningful access to permanent visas or a path to citizenship for those working, paying taxes, and raising their families in the United States. Immigrants would be asked to sign up for what is likely to be second-class status in the American workforce, which could lead to their removal when their status expires or is terminated. Labor rights for temporary workers have historically been weaker than those afforded to workers in the domestic labor force. Under this proposal, workers would be vulnerable during their temporary status, and even more vulnerable when it expires, which would also have a negative impact on wages and working conditions for their U.S.-born co-workers.

That said, President Bush, by adopting the rhetoric of the left to advance a proposal unsatisfying to left or right, has created an opening for those concerned with true progressive immigration reform to hold him accountable for the failings of his proposal to live up to his rhetoric. Left advocates are effectively doing so – it’s time for left politicians to do so as well, particularly because this legislation will never pass without their votes. Let’s keep in mind that Bush pandering for votes by playing at offering more immigrants a path to legalization beats Clinton pandering for votes by throwing them off welfare eight years earlier. The difference has everything to do with the popular movements mobilizing since then for progressive change – and it’s those movements that will bring a reform far better than the one Bush offered today. As the Immigrant Worker Freedom Ride coalition argued today:

If there is any reform here, it is of “old” temporary worker programs, including the notorious and discredited “bracero” program…President Bush said our immigration laws must be “more humane.” But a policy that measures an immigrant worker’s stay in America in three-year increments is far from humane. Why buy a house or start a family, why open a business or put down roots in a community, why build up seniority on a job or train for higher skilled work, if you will have to leave it all after three or six or nine years? Why pull yourself up by your bootstraps only to have the boots themselves taken away when you’ve succeeded?

The IWFR Coalition will continue to work for comprehensive immigration reform based on the great American tradition of welcoming immigrants through an open door, not a revolving one.

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Dick Gephardt responded to Bush’s immigration plan today with a call for “comprehensive immigration reform that is fair to undocumented immigrants” rather than half-way measures. Here’s hoping other Democrats – including the others running for President – respond in kind.

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Josh Marshall just posted a transcript of a conference call between journalists and “senior administration officials” about the contours of the immigration policy President Bush plans to propose tomorrow. I’m glad to see a shift back towards the White House’s September 10, 2001 position on immigration, and have no doubt that the organizing coalition and voting bloc mobilized most visibly through the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides has been vital in that achievement. The framing of the problem – the imperative of family reunification, the centrality of undocumented labor to our economy, the humanitarian crisis – is improved, and the approach is certainly more consonant with the Freedom Riders demands than it once was. A “temporary worker” status, however, opens up new avenues for abuse and exploitation, and simply creating a legal process for undocumented workers to go “above ground” and air labor grievances does little to change the facts on the ground about employers’ power over immigrant workers. That would require the right to organize, which is conspicuously absent from the discussions of “senior administration officials.” Josh Marshall closes by asking whether “the president expects to or even wants this ‘policy’ to pass.” We’ll have to see. Meanwhile, the coalition for progressive immigration reform will have to keep fighting for an immigration policy that truly enshrines the best values of this country.

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David Bacon looks at the institutional and cultural forces behind the fight against labor studies:

The era of enlightened corporate self-interest is long gone, however, if indeed it ever existed. For more than two decades the country’s largest corporations have busted unions as a normal part of business activity, and have lost whatever interest they had in labor-management cooperation. It should be no surprise, then, that the end of union acceptance in the workplace should bring with it an end to the prestige of labor-management cooperation in academia. If employers don’t want it, who does?

As Bacon argues:

The controversy raises a fundamental question about labor rights–should joining a union be protected and encouraged by law and public policy, or are unions just a narrow private interest?

On this question, too many self-identified liberals – writing the labor movement out of its role in every social reform for which they credit enlightened governments – are on the wrong side.