Tag Archives: labor

Posted on by

Brian accuses professional students of “mooching”:

If you go to graduate school, you know going in what it’s going to cost. If you don’t have the means, and aren’t prepared to deal with debt coming out of it, then maybe you shouldn’t make the choice to attend that school. To my way of thinking, it is not Yale’s responsibility to provide anyone with an education — it is your choice to take advantage of a system, with full knowledge of your responsibilities. Even protesting tuition before you attend the school, I might understand. But once you’ve made the choice, you have to deal with the results. You have entered a contract to attend school for a certain price, and that includes the contract to pay back what you borrow to cover that fee. Seriously, if anyone can explain to me why these people are entitled to “forgiveness” (I’d call it mooching), please educate me.

There are a few perspectives from which to come at this. I’ll try (briefly) to make the case from the perspective of Yale’s own convictions about itself rather than an appeal to my more radical perspective on education and democracy. One is the social mission of the University, which the majority of people on this campus would agree includes extending educational opportunity to deserving students and creating strong national national leaders. Don’t take it from me – read Levin’s book on the topic (although I should warn you, it has some dull stretches). Yale is a non-profit educational institution and not, say, an elite private racquet club, and so while there may be disturbing parallels between the two at times, many within and outside of this community are rightly more indignant when Yale institutes or maintains policies which narrow the population to whom its tremendous resources are accesible. Because yes, it is precisely Yale’s responsibility to seek to provide education to qualified students. Ergo we have financial aid and a need-blind admissions policy in Yale College.

Accepting the conception of the academy which Brian posits – if you don’t have the means, you shouldn’t go – hurts everyone’s education here. It keeps exceptionally talented students with a tremendous amount to learn from and teach their peers and their teachers out of the University. And it further narrows and weakens the social and academic community experienced here by robbing it disproportionately of the perspectives of working-class students and students of color. That further divorces Yale’s students from the country they’re being trained (however much comfort some of us may or may not have with such a project) to lead, and does a disservice to everyone being educated here.

And accepting crippling debt as a consequence of professional education narrows the viable options for students to pursue after school, making careers in advocacy and non-profit work potentially untenable for many students and narrowing the career options for Yale’s graduates. This is, as they say, a double whammy.

That’s why professional school students will keep fighting for a more progressive policy that would both widen the opportunities available to them after college and widen the backgrounds of their incoming peers. They’re uniquely poised to do so as students already attending this school; discounting their advocacy because they chose to attend Yale is no more justifiable than discounting criticism of this country from immigrants who chose to come to the United States.

Posted on by

I agree with most of what Alyssa has to say here:

There is simply no precedent for the outpacing of C.E.O. compensation and other corporate profits in comparison to what the people who actually make companies run earn as it happens in America today. It’s telling that in the wake of major corporate scandals, rather than condemn Tyco executives, for example, for their terrible, destructive greed, jurors in their corruption trials dismiss accounts of profit gone mad as a waste of time. Our views on fair compensation, respect for employees, and the value of organized labor are vastly off-kilter.

…Unions will always have limited power if their strength is confined to the workplace, where they can fight employers, but lack the ability to define some of the structural constraints, like the minimum wage, that affect their members. It is vital that unions be organized well enough so they can make their members’ voices heard in both the workplace and the voting booth, and make sure that they are united behind strong, progressive policies.

I do have a couple points of disagreement or, at least, of divergent emphasis. First, I think Alyssa inadvertently minimizes the significance of the two moments she highlights which we agree offer new hope for American labor, the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides and the HERE – UNITE merger:

The former represents a willingness to be flexible in the face of party re-alignment and a recognition of the progress of globalization. The second represents a committment to getting leaner and meaner, and an understanding that you need both money and killer organizing to beat a strong resurgence of anti-union sentiment.

While there’s certainly a good deal of truth in the argument that the merger represented a union with members but no money and a union with money but no members joining forces, I think there’s a much broader point here, one that I’ve mentioned on this site before: Labor has to be as well organized and as unified as management, and as labor organizes across boundaries between nations, we must organize across boundaries between unions, something most folks who were watching and have the freedom to say so agree didn’t take place effectively in California. Nathan Newman has argued recently that union competition marked labor’s most effective period by providing a spur to all sides to organize; unfortunately, union competition also marked one of labor’s most tragic moments, its divided and self-destructive response to the growing Red Scare, in which all too often those very union competitions eased the process of conservative unions siding with Uncle Sam against their more radical counterparts. Among the biggest losers there, not surprisingly, were the workers of color whom only the left-wing unions of the CIO were effectively organizing. Of course there are good reasons for the AFL-CIO to be composed of different unions divided in some cases by job type, in others by region, in others by organizing strategy – but too often those barriers are arbitrary and costly. As has played out on Andy Stern’s blog and in its comments, finding innovative ways to foster broader strategic alliances while maintaining and building industrial democracy and democratic leadership on the local level is key (David Moberg explores this further in this week’s The Nation in an article which isn’t yet on-line). So the UNITE HERE merger, bringing together one union which launders the second union’s uniforms and a second union which serves the first union food at lunch hour, bringing together two unions with a proven commitment to progressive organizing, is an urgent model – although it may not have been carried out in a way consonant with the best values of these unions.

Speaking of progressive organizing, I think that to articulate the Immigrant Worker Freedom Rides as a response to a shifting national and international landscape both understates their significance and lets labor off to easily for a historically (up to the mid-90’s) anti-immigrant stance that at no time was in the big picture interests of union members. Daivided labor markets – be the axis of divison race, religion, gender, or immigration status – have always been lucrative for employers, who’ve proven all to eager to exploit a vulnerable group’s marginal position in society (and too often in the labor movement as well) to drive down their wages and benefits, and to use the threat of that group’s therefore cheaper labor costs to drive down everyone else wages and benefits and pit natural allies against each other in an ugly race to the bottom. Historical examples of course abound; here in Philadelphia, a union movement which had succesfully organized and won the ten-hour day screeched to a halt as first-generation Catholic immigrants and second-generation Protestants in different trades started killing each other in the Kensington riots. Organizing the unorganized workers, rather than engaging in a futile campaign to stop them from working is the only morally defensible and genuinely pragmatic approach. God bless John Wilhelm, Maria Elena Durazo, and the unrecognized others who brought the AFL-CIO around.

The other area where my perspective may differ from Alyssa’s somewhat is on the role of unions in politics. I’m a major proponent of the New Unity Partnership, which would enshrine organizing in the workplace and political organizing as unions’ major functions and major expenditures. But while Alyssa urges unions

picking politically viable candidates and proving that they can turn out large numbers of supporters for them…severe layoffs, a slowdown in organizing, and bad choices of candidates have made unions look less credible politically than they did in 2000…

let’s not forget what the Democratic party, after the Clinton years, which on the one hand brought the Family and Medical Leave Act and an increased minimum wage, and on the other wrought NAFTA and Welfare Reform, has to prove to American workers and American labor. Labor has been most effective in this country not by letting its support be taken for granted by Democrats but by organizing so powerfully that the Democrats (read: FDR) feared that if they didn’t find enough to offer labor it would sink them. I’m glad Kerry wants a Labor Secretary from the “House of Labor.” I’d like to hear more about this legislation on the campaign trail though.

That said, I’m stoked for SEIU to make history by devoting its resources this election not into soft-money TV ads but by getting thousands of its members leaves of absence to organize their neighbors to vote Bush out of office, and to hold our national leadership accountable through November and beyond. The party machines could learn a lot from them; today’s New York Times suggests they’ve begun to already.

Posted on by

Talked this afternoon to an eighteen-year employee in dietary services at Yale – New Haven Hospital. She described her anger at the Hospital administration’s attempts to divide reassign, and cow the Hospital’s union employees into settling for a humiliating contract, and its campaign to scare the rest of its workforce out of discussing a union. She recounted a manager’s response to the gash on her face from a broken door which slammed down on her at work: “I hope it knocked some sense into you.”

Posted on by

Looks like after Philadelphia’s unions refused to validate Bunim/Murray’s plans to dodge organized labor and stood down their threat of capital flight, the Real World producers decided to come back to the table and negotiate a deal after all. So much for those who said it was anachronistic for Philly’s unions to make demands of business to protect workers.

Posted on by

Evan, like me, founded yesterday’s GESO speak-out on diversity in the graduate school radicalizing and empowering.

Evan, unlike me, got to top it off by speaking justice to Graduate School Dean (and future Yale College Dean) Peter Salovey:

I asked if he was planning to ever respond to the letter 58 of my colleagues had signed and on which I was the contact person. He says the listening tour will be coming our way soon. What followed was a lengthy conversation about pay equity (“I prefer to call it a question of pay and not of equity”), this whole financial aid idea, the ideal world in which Yale would have tons of money (as if it doesn’t right now?) in which the graduate school would give us all $40k in the first three years and let us save or – worse -invest the money. Jennifer said she’d rather have a wage that would pay the rent. Dean Salovey said he thinks we should do only what teaching is necessary for our education; I told him about the Kutsinski Report’s reminder that staffing requirements should not impact teaching loads, and the Prown Report which states that hadn’t happened, and which also says our time to degree is longer because of our teaching. The dean replied that the point is to try to get you out sooner. I talked about the job market and how we are presently teaching ourselves out of jobs and that we’re looking at lectorships and adjuncting, and he said he likes to keep that a separate issue, so I pointed out again that the Prown Report shows the only reason grad students teach as PTAIs and TF IV’s is because the language requirement made the staffing need so great in the first place and that an adjunct caste had grown up around it… he was friendly as usual and we had some laughs that we fortunately kept interrupting with really disturbing facts about our standards of living (me: “If you want us to finish, what is the logic of financially supporting us less as our responsibilities to teaching and research increase in the later years of the program?”) Props also to Shalane Hansen for showing up in time to rip into the dean about mentorship and the gender imbalance in Religious Studies. It was amazing.

As an undergraduate, my education and my community are degraded as long as Yale’s institutional inertia and lack of institutional support keep women, working people, and people of color out of opportunities to be my teachers and to graduate and go on to teach others. And I have a stake in making that change.

Posted on by

Three months ago, newly-appointed Yale Vice President for Finance and Administration John Pepper told the Cincinnati Post:

At this point in my life, I feel like I can contribute to a team and an institution that in many ways is like Procter & Gamble.

The Yale community got a better sense of just what that means when Pepper announced (Monday’s YDN still not on-line) the lay-offs of a hundred Yale clerical and technical and managing and professional employees. Yesterday, members of the Yale community came together to protest the University’s breach of faith and call for a better vision of the University:

“We will not let John Pepper strip away all that Yale can and will be in this community under the guise of some fabricated budget deficit,” [Laura] Smith said. “With or without you, John Pepper, we will build a future for Yale that we will all be proud of.”

…Smith called forward approximately 20 laid-off workers to take the stage at the rally. “It’s difficult to go out and start a new career,” Stanley Kobylanski, a 52-year-old laid-off telecommunications worker, said. “I’d like Yale to rescind the layoffs. Our major concern is the battle we wage with subcontracting and outsourcing our work.”
Pepper’s response:

“I believe in dialogue on these subjects,” Pepper said. “Unions are important organizing units and should be respected as such. But we are all part of the Yale family.”

Unfortunately, Pepper is yet to translate his stated belief in dialogue in real partnership with Yale’s workers of the sort John Stepp called for in the RAI Report. Meanwhile, despite what Wal-Mart and other union-busting firms may tell you, paternalism does not a family make.

Posted on by

To the editor:

Shame on the editorial board of the Inquirer for once again painting organized labor as an inconvenient obstacle to economic progress in Philadelphia (“So close to a new reality,” March 18). Like their less subtle counterparts who wrote letters calling unions “a cancer in the livelihood of our city” which “just cost many people their jobs,” they make an ill-advised attempt to spin Bunim/Murray Productions’ obstinate refusal to negotiate with local unions. As your paper reported, (“‘Real world’ maker calls decision final,” March 18) despite repeated attempts by the Carpenters, Teamsters, and Electricians’ unions to make deals with the Real World producers, the Producers told the head of the Greater Philadelphia Film Office that “they were nonunion everywhere, and they did not want any deals with the unions.” For the Real World, whose website brags that no cost was spared to ensure that the current San Diego cast “got the hook-up in the house department,” to refuse to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement to justly compensate the hardworking men and women whose labor builds the house in which next season’s “four hot girls and three suave guys” will strut about and make out is the height of corporate hypocrisy. For the Inquirer to blame the unions for Bunim/Murray’s stonewalling is an offense against all the union workers whose decades of work off-camera built the American cities showcased on reality television. This is one of many members of the coveted 18-to-24 year-old demographic that won’t be tuning in to the Real World wherever its producers’ flight from accountability to organized labor may lead.

Josh Eidelson
Bala Cynwyd, PA

Posted on by

A majority of graduate student teaching assistants at CalTech have signed union cards under a card-count neutrality agreement, declaring their desire to be represented by the California Alliance of Academic Student Employees/ United Auto Workers (CAASE/UAW). Now they begin negotiations with CalTech. More power to them.

Posted on by

Earlier this week I got the chance to hear League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan present an impressively self-aware critique of the operation of LCV and other American environmentalist groups, in which she compared the 11 million Americans in environmental groups to the 13 million in unions and asked why the latter had representation that was so much more effective than the former. Her answer, in large part, was that the environmental movement needs to shift its resources from soft money campaigning into grassroots organizing. Amen to that. During the question period, I asked Callahan why a movement fighting injustices which disproportionately target people of color has membership and leadership that’s so overwhelmingly white. Her answer was part rationalization, part apology, and part putting forth the beginnings of a program to build a movement based around the people who, she argued, should be its real base: Harlem families whose kids all have athsma rather than wealthy liberals in San Francisco.

One step she mentioned was the funding and organizing LCV has invested in the past week in Barack Obama, the black state senator and former community organizer running in the heated Democratic Senate primary this Tuesday. Obama, who’s also been endorsed by SEIU, UNITE, and Jesse Jackson Jr., is a real progressive who’s pulled ahead of more conservative millionaires and demonstrated a strong chance of becoming the only African-American in the Senate come November. Check out his website here.

As Harold Meyerson argued Friday in the Washington Post, electing this man, according to all signs, would be a major victory not only for Illinois but for a revitalized Democratic party and America.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

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.

Posted on by

Phoebe ponders the Yale Herald‘s cover story on the search for the “Yale intellectual” and the different contextual meanings of the term:

here, “intellectual” as a term, as a marker of identity, is establishment, is upper-class white maleness. of course. but at ihs, intellectual, not those things already, was so entirely disestablishment, so entirely a rebellion against the student-governmentized majority (was it a majority, or did it just seem so, i wonder now?). intellectual was such a blatant marker of excludedness, a term infused with so much not belonging, a term disdainfully refused by the included…intellectual was not about the western canon (nobody gave a damn about a handful of white, european philosophers virtually no one read) but about the personhood of the less-formally-accepted folk. and owning the term was an empowering tool.

On the one hand, as I told the Herald,

I think that too often “intellectualism” is used as a convenient cipher to avoid discussing class – saying you prefer people who share an intellectual perspective is easier for many people than saying that you feel more comfortable around people who share the same amount of privilege. While intellectual may be an adjective that has meaning in describing activities, or spheres of individuals’ lives, I think it’s difficult to use intellectual as a noun to identify people without implicitly creating a boundary between those who count as intellectuals and those who do not.

And on the other hand – the part of the interview they didn’t print – I think “Anti-intellectualism” is also too convenient a mask for privilege, as it gives cover for the super-rich – like our current President – to feign a faux populism when shooting down progressive ideas by associating them with a mythical “cultural elite.”

Intellectualism at Yale has another meaning as well though – a pursuit of ideas divorced from their impact on the surrounding world – an unfortunate excuse for avoiding the education that comes from challenging your ideals in you interactions in the world. To me the letters I received from administrators during strikes here, telling me that my responsibility was to cross working peoples’ picket lines to get to class and learn how to be a leader, represent the worst contortion of intellectualism. And if being an intellectual college student means – as administrators here have suggested by their instructions in times of crisis – being sat on for four years in order to then hatch and go on to face the outside world, then I want none of it.

And yet, I know what Phoebe means when she writes,

i can’t but feel sad that the word has been taken away from me