Ended August with General Assembly where someone who is CLEARLY in the employ of the employing class gave me a terrible cold, came home to a struck U, started teaching, been out picketing, cooked some lovely yams, finally nearly over - but only nearly over - the terrible cold, doing a bit of reading of course and am joining a Capital v1 reading group which I’m very excited about both for the book and the people. More posts as I’m able, never fear.
And holy crap do I ever have the best wife there is. She just now as I was typing gave me a present of a hand-knitted finger puppet of a monkey holding a banana or maybe a corn on the cob, she bought it at Popcorn Festival when she was visiting family out of town last weekend and just remembered she’d bought it for me. Sometimes things are good, like finger puppets and turning away trucks while picketing docks and mashed yams. Sometimes things suck, like bosses and being sick and lack of adequate responses - from those who should know/be better - to fucked up picket line problems. Up with the good and down with the sucks! I gotta get me a banner and write that on it, or maybe tattoo it.
Details on the strike at uworkers.org and at workday minnesota. I’m off to bed, maybe a quick drink first.
Oh yeah, if anyone’s interested, here’s what I used as the basis for my talk at a thing in response to the strike last weekend:
Academic workers need to form a union. If we were really organized we would have more power to exert in solidarity with our other fellow workers and more power to improve our own jobs. In what follows I’m going to list a few things that need to change as part of organizing ourselves then speak very briefly about how I think we should organize.
First off, as part of organizing ourselves we need to debunk some myths that make up what I like to call the ideology of academic exceptionalism. Academic exceptionalism is the idea that working as an academic is somehow tremendously different than working anyplace else. One of these myths is the myth of the radical academic. This is the idea that teaching or writing or reading about some subject somehow changes the world. That’s false. As academics, our jobs are to read and write and teach. We may make the world a better place by doing our jobs, just like how nurses makes the world a better place by doing their jobs, but we’re not going to alter the power structures in the world by doing our jobs. This myth also inhibits attempts to exert power on the job, and it needs to be got rid of.
Another of these myths is the myth of meritocracy. This is the idea that you get into a university by being really good at something that really matters, and that you succeed in your educational and professional career in the academic industry by being really good at something that really matters. That’s false too. It’s true that being really good at things is one way to succeed in this industry. But some people succeed without apparently being at very much – due to patronage, favoritism, politicking, etc – and many people fail who are also really good at important things. This is important for two reasons. The myth of meritrocracy makes people think they need to compete with each other. It also makes people who work as academics think they’re better than other people, which inhibits solidarity across the line around the campus.
Along with rejecting these myths, we should try to understand, criticize, and eliminate institutional realities related to them, including tenure, merit pay, and competitive distribution of fellowships and jobs and other funding. Those institutional realities help segment and individualize the academic workforce. They should be gotten rid of an replaced with progressive union contracts.
Aside getting rid of these myths, those of us who work as academics should start paying more attention to the ways that academic jobs work as jobs, and the economic forces which shape condititions in the industry and its various parts. As part of this, we should pay more attention to the ways that academic jobs link with other jobs as supply chains and markets. This means not only trying to understand what’s happening but also more deliberate attempts to build relationships across job classes and across campuses and schools among those without the power to hire and fire - graduate employees and clerical staff at this university, graduate employees and adjuncts at other institutions in the area. We should also pay more attention to the labor movement today and historically in our industry, analogous industries, and generally. Ideally this should become part of the workplace culture. There are important lessons we’re not learning.
Two more points. One, someone needs to write the history of the graduate employee unionization attempt here and we should discuss it publicly and critically. I think the UE is a great union with a proud history but it was the wrong union for this campaign and it should have said so. It has a membership of 35,000 people, tops. For it to take on an election campaign of 4,000 people was irresponsible. This would be like SEIU trying to organize about 240,000 people in a one year election campaign. It was also a mistake to pursue an election as the route to unionization. I don’t know the figures for the public sector, but in the private sector if you got with the NLRB’s election process you have about a 1 in 10 chance of ending up unionized. Public sector employers don’t bust unions as viciously, but the process works very similarly.
Instead of the election route, I think we should aim for building a union of academic workers that can act – that can exert power in a non-symbolic way - without having a majority, without being an exclusive bargaining agent, and without a contract. These kinds of unions have existed and still do. Building a union like that will be a step toward a majority union with a contract. As part of this, a lot of need to admit that we don’t know how to do this - despite whatever political or theoretical or disciplinary acumen we may have, some of which I think may actually impede organizing - and that currently we’re not as organized and not as powerful as we should be. Let me be clear here that I am not proposing theorizing or writing or teaching or any of the other things that we get paid for. We need practical and organizational activity conducted on our time off work (and time on the clock stolen back from our employer by using that time in ways which could get us in trouble if we got caught), as with every other instance of workplace organizing. A few options we should consider include attending workplace organizing trainings, reading up on the relevant laws and court cases, starting a newsletter and circulating pamphlets, starting organizational projects like flying pickets and grievance committees, and seeking out examples of these that we can learn from and network with. A more simple starting point would be to map which units have local informal or formal organization and which don’t. Those which are organized should begin to network on a face to face basis and set concrete goals and timelines for improving our lives at work. We should also formulate demands we want on a unit by unit basis and in common with other units. For graduate employees, I’d like to see an end to the fees at the beginning of the semester, I think that would provide us with a good starting issue.
Comment by Nate — September 12, 2007 @ 10:55 pm
Thanks for posting this. It merits wide circulation (beyond your campus), IMO.
Comment by Andrew — September 13, 2007 @ 10:18 am
Yeah I think the points about academic exceptionalism and meritocracy are really important. I wouldn’t agree, though, that reading, writing and teaching _never_ has an effect on the power structure. In much academic work that’s true, but I think some is genuine political work, and it is important to defend those parts of academia that do produce radical content. Some debates at an academic level really are important.
Comment by Mike B — September 13, 2007 @ 8:46 pm
Thanks Andrew, Mike.
Mike, I don’t mean to say academic work can’t possibly be political. But like … “here’s this important social problem that needs changing, changing it will involve conflict with some entrenched powers. I want to fight that fight. So, I’m going to grad school!” That’s a bit silly, right? Now, if it’s like “look, I feel I can maybe make a minor contribution to this important stuff in the long term in a way which is also compatible with having a decent life for myself and family,” then yes absolutely. But the “I’m a radical, I make a difference to The Struggle, I teach classes on Marx (or Hegel or Deleuze or Derrida or whatever) at uni!” self-concept (surely you’ve encountered this sort of thing on occasion?) is simply false, and in a self-serving way. That’s what I’m trying to say.
I’m not convinced it’s all that important to defend those areas of academia, if by ‘important’ you mean ‘big pieces of the class struggle stand or fall with them’. I think the consequences are more likely to be smaller and more localized (despite the fact that a lot of that stuff is important to me in the way that punk rock and mexican food is important to me - those things are valuable and should be defended, but that value and that defense aren’t somehow of major political importance). They’re still important and should be defended, but no more so than decent unionized jobs or militant sections of the class.
Is that clearer?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — September 13, 2007 @ 9:06 pm
Hey Nate,
Couldn’t you say the same thing about most industrial conflicts or protests, though - that big pieces of the class struggle don’t stand or fall with them, and their consequences are likely to be small and localised?
At any rate I think we disagree over either 1) the importance of ideas in class struggle; or 2) the relative importance of academia in the realm of ideas. I don’t want to overstate either, especially not (2), but I certainly think _some_ elements of class struggle are at stake in _some_ kinds of scholarly work. I would definitely rate them politically more important than either Mexican food or punk rock (though I wouldn’t necessarily say punk rock is entirely without political consequence… on Mexican food I’m not so sure!)
Finally, I think it helps more than it hinders that academic workers believe in the importance of what they do. If you were organising most other kinds of worker you would hardly try to win them over by insisting that pride in their work was ridiculous and politically misplaced! From my experience pride in one’s work is more likely to lead to conflict with the employers than would otherwise be the case, because capital only has an interest in quality if it pays. Quality issues are especially important where the workers do not see themselves as materially disadvantaged, as is often the case in the university.
Comment by Mike B — September 14, 2007 @ 4:09 am
BTW I am possibly influenced here by the situation of my own department, which is a bit of an anomaly. Political Economy at Sydney Uni owes its existence in part to academic industrial action in defence of the academic freedom of some economics lecturers in the 1970s and 80s. Also, the Federated Australian University Staff Association, fore-runner to the NTEU, which to this day is the union representing all kinds of tertiary education staff nationally, first emerged with academics involved in the Political Economy movement. In this case academic labour organisation went together with a defence of radical scholarship.
Comment by Mike B — September 14, 2007 @ 4:19 am
I actually think Mexican food – specifically restaurants and grocery stores patronized by Mexicans – are far more important politically than either punk rock or politically motivated academic work. The immigration movement of the past two years has made extensive use of taquerias and tiendas as organizing locations, and the growth of immigrant communities in smaller cities and towns across the US has been fed, literally and figuratively, by the broader availability of Mexican food in areas that were previously all-white.
Comment by MIke — September 14, 2007 @ 10:37 am
Mike B,
Sure, some elements of the class struggle are at stake in scholarly work. I think you missed my point about very little standing or falling w/ academics, though. I think “the class struggle rests on this!” is a poor argument for any particular conflict, including those in other industries. In my experience though academics are more likely to say that nonacademics should care a lot about them and their fights (academic freedom etc), the claim being that the fights of academics impact nonacademics’ lives in some important way in a way that (many) other sectors don’t. I think that’s unconvincing. I think nurses and their industrial disputes are WAY more important to non-nurses than academics are in relation to non-academics, for instance, at least in the US. That said, I’m all for pride in one’s work especially as an organizing tool. I for one am proud of how I handle a classroom and how much time I dedicate to my students. That’s different from saying the propositional content of my work makes a massive difference in the world. In my experience the latter kind of thing is more like turning radical ideas into an ideology (”we’re lucky to get to do this radical shit for pay, besides our real contribution is in the realm of ideas so we shouldn’t waste our time on industrial disputes” is how it plays out more frequently in my experience). And yes, we disagree about 2 more than 1. In the US, academia is largely irrelevant to and divorced from movements, it’s connections are mostly after-the-fact (chasing the movements and their ideas/problems) and often careerist. (By ‘academia’ here I mean people doing academic work that relates to movements, unlike someone like say Chomsky whose academic work is as a linguist and whose political work doesn’t count under that heading.)
take care,
Nate
ps- Mike S, we finally found a Mexican place we like here in Mpls, ate there tonite… quite nice mole’. (Great to see you in Chicago by the way, though way too brief.)
Comment by Nate — September 14, 2007 @ 10:17 pm
Hey Nate,
I don’t think we’re too far apart on this really. Hey, what happened to the plan to read Gramsci? I think it would be a good way to get to discussing the ideological dimension of politics.
Comment by Mike B — September 16, 2007 @ 5:46 pm
Citeulike seems to be down at the moment, so real quick
books
A Woman’s Wage: Historical Meanings and Social Consequences
By Alice Kessler-Harris
US History as Women’s History: new feminist essays
LK Kerber, A Kessler-Harris, KK Sklar
Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic -
CL Tomlins
Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Liberal Development in the United States -
K Orren
The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America -
CL Tomlins
Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays -
CL Tomlins, AJ King
The Accidental Republic -
John Witt
Comment by Nate — September 21, 2007 @ 8:28 am
Indispensable Outcasts: Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930
FT Higbie
Comment by Nate — September 21, 2007 @ 8:31 am