Tag Archives: academic labor

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Dean has locked down the SEIU and AFSCME endorsements. As I noted before, I have my reservations about parts of Dean’s policy record, but out of the current crop of candidates he’s distinguished by full and unapologetic rejection of each of the major outrages of the Bush administration, his willingness, deftness, and passion in articulating an alternative vision for this country, and his capacity to organize effectively around it. And as Nathan Newman notes:

I’m left a bit stunned at what could be a consolidation quite early of Dean’s innovative online organizing with the powerhouse on-the-ground operations of SEIU and AFSCME (along with the other unions that will soon fall into place). Janitors and computer jockies organizing together is an amazingly powerful idea.

And we ain’t seen nothing yet. We are a year from Election Day, yet Dean is starting with an online organization of over 500,000 people, while the SEIU, for example, has already held multiple national meetings of thousands of their top activist organizers to be sent back into the field to mount the largest political mobilization in history. Thousands of SEIU members will be taking a one-year leave of absence to go organize in swing states on the payroll of the union’s political operations– a cross-state organizing effort that’s never been done and being started orders of magnitude earlier than any previous political year…

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Breaking news from Business Week:

Howard Dean’s Presidential ambitions are poised to get a major lift on Nov. 6 when the AFL-CIO’s largest union, the 1.3 million member Service Employees International Union, is set to endorse him, BusinessWeek has learned. The SEIU’s action, coming shortly after Dean won pledges from two small unions, the International Union of Painters and the California Teachers Assn., goes a long way toward completing the transformation of the former Vermont governor from a niche candidate backed by limousine liberals, antiwar activists, and tech-savvy young people into a mainstream candidate who can also connect with blue-collar America. Says SEIU President Andy Stern: “It’s clear that Dean has gained the most support amongst our members and local leaders.”

For all my reservations about Dean, I do see truth in Jacob’s argument that

if anyone is going to win against Bush, that candidate needs to unite the foreign policy left wing of the party with the economic policy left wing of the party, and combine all that with a strategy that gets people riled up, donating money, and voting. I’d happly back anyone I thought could do that, from John Edwards to Al Sharpton. Kucinich tries to to the part where he unites the two important parts of the party, but fails at actually running a campaign. Gephardt was thought to have the unions but his wishy-washy politics on the war, combined with his proven record of failure (most recently in 2002) make him a poor candidate. Dean is the man to unite around, and now it seems that the biggest unions in the country agree

As I’ve probably said here before, Dean is the candidate who has had the most success so far in building a left “Contract with America” – mounting a (generally) coherent, passionate, and resonant critique of the current administration and articulating a vision of a more (if insufficiently) progressive alternative – and he knows better than many of the other eight how to organize around it. Shame that he has a record of prioritizing balanced budgets over social services.

One place where I agree with Jacob wholeheartedly:

…it’s nice to see SEIU, AFSCME, and CWA working together on something. If only SEIU can get AFSCME and CWA on board with the New Unity Partnership…

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This front-page story in the YDN focuses on the committee formed in Local 35 which will consider fines – along with other approaches, like new organizing approaches – as a response to the 1 to 2 percent of the membership that continued working during the strike. It’s quite similar to a story the YDN ran a couple weeks back on the same topic, also as a top story. What’s missing is a conversation with any of the hundreds of members who’ve pushed for a response; their absence contributes to the sense that setting up a committee is some kind of autocratic punitive stratagem by Bob Proto. That sense, and the erasure of workers from the narrative, are furthered by the absence of any mention of Bob Proto’s uncontested re-election as President of Local 35 yesterday, or of the race for Chief Steward.

Also misleading is this front-page analysis which continues the YDN’s narrative of GESO of late: GESO sinned by organizing and was punished by losing the referendum last spring, and has since redeemed itself by pushing issues instead. While this account has meant some less openly nasty coverage of GESO by the YDN of late, it demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the way the labor movement works, one shared by too many students. Unions don’t choose between pushing issues to make members happy or organizing to make their leaders happy. Unions organize by bringing workers together through common experience and interest and shared issues, and unions bring change on issues through the power of their organizing. GESO has, as the YDN acknowledges, been responsible for substantive change in the benefits and resources Yale makes available to its graduate students. But only through the power of its organizing, and the threat of unionization. So while it’s true, and admirable, and GESO has conducted an exciting series of surveys, produced damning and enlightening reports, and generated its first unified platform over the past months, pushing for change on the issues which affect graduate students is not a new development – and organizing and fighting for recognition are not only old news.

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The most telling part of this piece in today’s Times is the end:

And even some who oppose the union drive acknowledge that both sides bear responsibility for the current climate.

James Terry, president of At What Cost?, a campus group opposed to the union, said that the university had grown increasingly inflexible on labor issues and that he was among many on campus who have been alienated by the stubbornness and language of union organizers.

“They have some intrusive recruitment tactics,” Mr. Terry said, adding that a graduate student he knows was approached by organizers about membership nine times after she initially refused. “I don’t think that Yale is treating us so bad that we need to compare ourselves to Birmingham in 1963,” he said, “and that’s what GESO will do, and I find that personally offensive.”

Still, even union opponents like Mr. Terry see some cause for alarm in the suggestion that some students, rightly or wrongly, feel threatened if they speak out. “There is reason to be concerned,” he said. “The academy runs on different precepts. Differences of opinion have to be respected. If even one of these cases should be true, that’s something people at all universities should be concerned about.”

Terry’s first comment sets forth the tired dichotomies that GESO opponents of all backgrounds have relied on: between a historical epoch in which real injustice existed and a modern period of mere political differences; between poor sympathetic workers who have the right to organize and wealthy sheltered ones who don’t. But his more interesting contribution, following At What Cost’s line before the Academic Labor Board, is his politically smart refusal to defend the intimidation tactics of Yale’s administration. AWC has also declined to endorse Yale’s stonewalling through refusal to meet with GESO and refusal to agree to acknowledge even the results of an NLRB election. As long as AWC wants to frame itself as a grassroots operation interested solely in democratic deliberation (a difficult mantle to take on, even if all the charges nationally of faculty members making illegal contributions to such groups are true, simply because AWC is benefiting in fighting GESO from the pressure power of the entire University apparatus), it saves face better this way. But it leaves the Yale administration, in its most aggregious violations of its own principles – intimidation of students and refusal of the right to a vote – without any semblance of student support.

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This editorial from the new board of the YDN repeats the usual anti-union catechism: GESO is ideologically “tainted,” dangerously “single-minded,” and suspicious for its concern with, say, the job security of graduate students. It also suggests, falsely but popularly, that arguments against casualization of academic labor – the transformation of teaching jobs into low-wage, no-security, short-term positions – are about impugning the quality of graduate student and adjunct teachers, rather than about improving their conditions, lessening their workload, and brining in more ladder faculty to contribute to the academic work of the University. Even the YDN Board, however, is forced to conclude that GESO’s new report on casualization, “Blackboard Blues,” raises urgent issues that undergraduates would do well to be aware of and speak out about, and about which Yale’s administration has been suspicously silent. As the Board writes:

TAs don’t replace good professors, and an overreliance on visiting faculty can create a revolving-door of professors that leaves students in the lurch. Visiting professors should supplement full-time professors, not replace them. These concerns warrant a critical examination of the role of non-tenured faculty, and we are disappointed the academic review did not include one. We urge the administration to expand tenure opportunities or consider ways to increase institutional support for deserving faculty. At the same time, however, the contributions of our non-tenured faculty should be recognized.

UOC undergrads and GESO grad students hosted a forum this weekend to discuss this issue with visiting parents, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. We’ll be bringing those conversations to parents’ homes around the country in fora next month. Check out the schedule here.

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CNN has coverage of the March on Yale this morning, as well as other real Labor Day events, here.

“This is the site of national Labor Day outrage,” Jackson said. “This is going to be for economic justice what Selma was for the right to vote.”

The march began shortly after 9 a.m. and ended in a rally at Yale’s Beinecke Plaza and Woodbridge Hall, which houses university President Richard Levin’s office. Police said between 1,000 to 1,500 people marched with Jackson, including Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz, who graduated from Yale, and state Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, a Yale Law School graduate.

Jackson and about 30 others then blocked traffic. To the cheers of protesters, Jackson was the first to be handcuffed at about 11:30 a.m. and led onto a bus to be processed at police headquarters.