a short thought on an incident in bargaining

     I have been a bit busy for the past few months with the process of preparing for bargaining, which has affected my ability to communicate here.  We have been in countless meetings together, both in person and online and on the phone.  Additionally, we are now in the actual process of bargaining for the past month, beginning July 8th and 9th in Berkeley.  However,  I thought I would discuss a particular incident from bargaining since it is relevant to some of the conversations on the blog over the past couple of years.  Typically, the first topic of conversation in bargaining is the question of ground rules, or the rules that each side accepts when they go to the bargaining table.  The union and management will fight over topics ranging from times of bargaining to media access and other issues.  My counterpart from Irvine, Jessica Conte, wanted to make the issue of police presence an issue at bargaining, calling for an agreement that neither side would bring in the police.

   We wanted this agreement because of an incident that occurred earlier this year around health care caps.  A few months ago, the union had kicked off a fairly substantial campaign to get the caps on health care removed, and to get the university to live up to the fairly minimal standards of the Health Care reform act.  We got a lot of folks out to make this issue a concern, and formed useful alliances with other student organizations in the process.  Within that context, the university agreed to meet officially with the union on the topic in Irvine.  In response, we organized a number of rank and file folks to be in the room so they could hear about what was going on, and to let the administration know that this was an important issue to our membership.  In response, we got about thirty folks out to make the meeting.  In response, the university brought out a pair of police officers who followed us into the negotiation room and began to take photographs.  In response, our head steward, Jamie Rogers, asked that our conversation occur without the presence of the police.  The police officer stated that he did not work for her.  However, when labor relations official Nadine Fischel went over to ask them to leave, they did so, quickly.

     It's hard to argue that this difference of responses doesn't indicate a radically different power relation in regards to the police.  If the police don't explicitly work for the workers and students of the university, they seem to implicitly work for the administration of the university, for the management and the bosses.  In effect, the university has a group of primarily men with guns, who they can put between themselves and the people who they ostensibly work with.  Within our conversation, we tried to make this a central point for arguing for this provision of the ground rules.  In response, the labor relations folks tried to draw a stark line between bargaining and protests, implying that events such as the one that caused us to call for the rule functionally didn't happen (as if having a labor relations person establishing an implicit role of supervision to the cops was helpful).  In response, I noted that the administration called the cops in many cases when students and workers simply went to petition the administration.  Fischel's response was to refer to this sort of behavior as 'storming the chancellor's office.  Fischel went on to argue that the only legitimate way to enter in to the office was with an appointment.

        Within this context, it makes sense that university officials would call the police on small groups of students trying to deliver petitions, parents with children attempting to meet with housing administration to discuss dangers from construction on their housing, and, in one case, a student simply knocking on the door of the office of public information to find out about a public informational request.  It also goes along with the harassment of activists for legal activities by university administration and police.  However, it doesn't make a lot of sense if you accept the principle that the university is a public institution that is responsible to those individuals.  It's within this context that we need to understand the position taken by labor relations, a minion and lackey of the regents who have made it their mission to privatize the university.  The discomfort they claim is the discomfort of a class of individuals who refuse to recognize that they are a part of a public and democratic institution, which is probably due to the fact that the majority of them are used to the dictatorial powers they held and hold in their corporate positions.  It's approach to the daily life of the university that is created by the regents and the university of california office of the president (UCOP) and is filtered down through the ranks of the UC administration.  Within this context, this discomfort seems to indicate that the UCI administration is simply not competent to fulfill the basic roles of their employment, an issue likely not unique to them.  It's a sign that we need to get rid of them. 

On the recent housing fights in Verano

     The local branch of our union has been involved in the fight to defend affordable housing for graduate students for the past quarter.  For those who aren't aware of the situation, the cost of housing is far out of the range of our wages as graduate students.  In fact, housing costs are so high that the university not only has to provide subsidized housing for students,  but for faculty, staff, and administrators.  Over the past few years, the university has expanded that housing, but that expanded housing is largely privatized and often costs as much as our entire salary.  Affordable housing is typically considered to be 30%, and only a small percentage of the university's housing fits that category, all of that within Verano Housing.  However, that housing is increasingly disappearing.  The university has been increasing the price of the cheapest housing after minimal upgrades, and its beginning to demolish some of the cheapest housing despite no plans to build alternative housing.  In effect, housing prices are going up.  These decisions have translated into a lot of anger amongst graduate students, who have gotten involved in our fight to end the demolitions and to make our housing  genuinely affordable.

    Most of the work involved in the campaign has been very traditional organizing.  Organizers and rank and file activists have been going door to door in the Verano units, talking to folks in the affected units.  We have been making phone calls, passing out petitions, and holding meetings to discuss the problem.  It's been remarkable to see the transition of our local unit moving from an existence as a rotten borough into a real social force on our campus.  A lot of credit needs to go to our paid organizers, Alfredo Carlos and Tetsuro Namba, but they've hardly been alone in the fight.  We've seen impressive work from the majority of our elected leadership, along with a lot of rank and file folks.  If I were to be honest in representing the folks involved, this posting would look more like a phone book.  The rank and file has been energized through this work, and our meetings have been well attended and energetic. The Verano administration has not responded well to this campaign, harassing organizers, setting up meetings stacked with administrators to intimidate residents, and selectively enforcing regulations for leaving information on people's doors.

     The most recent incident in the administration backlash against this movement came in the form of an attack on families in the area.  Verano housing not only has the cheapest student housing, but it has the vast majority of family housing.  Within that context, the various porches of the ground level housing are frequently littered with the various toys, cooking equipment, and jungle gyms of those families.  The truth is that this level of mild disorder contributes to the quality of living in Verano, and makes the space feel like a place where people live, rather than sterility that defines the majority of the planned community of Irvine.  Up until the present, the administration has let this chaos of life pass, but for reasons only explicable to the current folks running Verano, this has changed.  One family was told by the administration through written communication that they had to move their swing set or the administration would demolish it.  This set up had been in place for at least two years without comment from the housing administration.  We we brought in to support the family by Bron Tamulis, a longtime activist and friend of the family.  With that, we decided to play the role of an ally in this struggle.  Before I move on to the events of the day, I want to emphasize the fact the administration made no effort to have a conversation with the family, to treat them with the respect that they deserve.

    A group of us met at the house of the family in order to support them in a non-confrontational manner.  The family decided to move their playground equipment off the grass onto the cement porch in order to cooperate with the admin.  It's important to note that the common space that they were using was not accessible to residents and was largely unusable, but the family wanted to make a good faith gesture to their landlords.  Unfortunately, this gesture was not reciprocated by the administration.  Instead of appearing to have a direct conversation with the family, they only appeared when we left for the Verano office in order to find out what was going on.  When we reached the office, we were met with a lot of defensiveness on the part of the staff.  They wanted us to move out of the waiting room into the common area in order to take us out of the public eye.  We were not told when the director would come back and when we sent a small delegation to find out more details the administrators threatened to call the police on us, which they later did.  When the director of Verano, Beverly Chaney, did eventually show up, she was immediately hostile, refused to talk while students were taping her remarks, and fled from the room almost immediately.  When we attempted to return to the waiting area to read our statement.  At that point a group of three police officers appeared, and we read the letter to a silent staff, and went outside to have a conversation with the police.

    It's important to note that our group remained calm throughout this process.  We consisted of graduate students and a number of children, requesting answers from the staff.  Some folks brought cameras precisely because of the nonsense that started the situation itself, the refusal to directly engage with the family, and to indirectly send orders that contradicted the informal practices of the space.  Rather than dealing with this situation, Chaney brought in three men with guns to act as a barricade between herself and the residents she ostensibly works for.  I want to linger on the point for a while, because it represents the dominant response of the administration.  Whenever students or workers petition their grievances with the university, we are met with a phalanx of men with guns, irrespective of actual behavior.  We are always  a potential threat, and are undeserving of the respect that comes from any sort of actual engagement, because that phalanx was inevitably brought in to allow the administrators to escape out the back door.  When on the few occasions that we do see these individuals for limited amounts of time, they lie, prevaricate, and dissemble.  In my eight years of being on camps, I've come to the point when I hear from a representative of the university that their inevitably punitive decision has a long precedent, I know that the decision is probably without precedent.  We need to see this combination of deception, force, and lack of engagement precisely as a de facto system of collective and disempowerment, and an effect of the privatization of the university.

    I want to make a point before I continue on.  We as graduate students are far from the most poorly treated group on campus.  After all, we haven't had to face the sorts of threats posed to the groundskeepers and janitors as they went through their years long campaigns to become insourced university workers, but despite that relative privilege, we are treated like shit by this university.  As a final point, there was a curious interaction between us and the police officers at the end of our event.  One of the administrators came out to imply that we were intimidating them by attempting to enter their offices.  Our criminal behavior evidently consisted of attempting to use the same hallway to get to the waiting area that the staff had initially sent us through.  Upon hearing this, the officer told us that we should respect the privacy of the admin, and asked us if we would like it if they (the admin, I presume) came into our kitchen.  It's difficult to see how a workplace for a public university is the equivalent to the space of a private house, but perhaps more significantly, these folks send people into our kitchens, bathrooms, and bedrooms all the time.  Our houses are constantly under inspection, often without meaningful warning, and early in the morning.  The same individuals who feel free to enter into every aspect of our lives to the point of threatening to demolish children's play things, react with indignation when their public workplace is treated in that manner.  If there is an argument for the category of privilege, it might be found in this hypocritical contradiction.

     Our fight for a public education is tied into the fee hikes of privatization, but we need to recognize that those fights are the same fights as the fights for our ability to have a say in our living and working conditions.  Economic fights are immediately fights over the structures of social relations, and the structures of domination implicit within capitalist structures of exploitation.  To put this a little less abstractly, our fight for a public education is not only a fight for access to free education for all, but for the ability for us to have a voice in the direction of that university, and the freedom to express ourselves without threat of discipline or violence.  We also expect to be treated with a respect that the administration of UCI shows no inclination to show us.

On the Contract Campaign

     This posting might only have a limited audience, but I want to make a few remarks about the upcoming contract campaign.  The limitations of the last contract negotiations, and the vote on the contract were the central events that brought us together as an opposition caucus.  The former leadership of the union showed no substantial interest in bringing the rank and file into the bargaining process, either through sustained agitation on the campus level or through participation or observation at the bargaining table.  Additionally, the rank and file was given very little information about the process of bargaining.  Updates were infrequent and uninformative.  The contract that we accepted in the end was substantially the same as the contract that we as the rank and file were told was absolutely unacceptable a week earlier.  When the vote on the contract occurred, a remarkable amount of anomalies occurred, and the former leadership voted down any investigation into the process of the election.

      My purpose in bringing up that history has less to do with a desire to open old wounds than to remind us why we got into this process in the first place.  The next contract comes up in a year, and I want us to approach the process in a substantially different manner than before.  We're going to come across complications and are going to need to improvise, but the present is the time to begin to think of a different approach to the process.  The point of this post isn't so much an attempt to draw up a cohesive plan, but to throw out some ideas of how we can shift our approach to the process.  Our initial concerns with the process focused on the participation of members and their access to information, but I also want to begin to think about ways that we can incorporate the goals of the public education movement into the bargaining process as well.  To put it differently, our ability to win a good contract is dependent on the general health of public education in the state.  There certainly has been some real conversations on the reform list, and I'm going to try to incorporate some of that work into my comments as well.

     The question of access is a significant one.  We've kept out the rank and file from the bargaining process of the most part.  The former leadership used to defend this practice as necessary to the process, as something that allowed for the free exchange of ideas, but, in practice, this has translated into the ability to make concessions without the input of the rank and file.  It also translates into the inability for the rank and file to play an active role in bargaining.  They're only ability to act occurs with the instructions of the leadership, which follows the dominate model of the UAW.  When I previously brought up these issues, I was told that we were a grass roots organization, and members should show some initiative if they want to act on the campus level, but how could the rank and file act without any meaningful knowledge about the contract process?  How could they act without resources or meaningful ways to communicate with one another?  Within that context, the need for information is crucial, along with more avenues of communication.  Katy Fox Hodess is absolutely correct to note the need for both open access to bargaining for rank and file members, and for greater communication about the process itself.  But Jason Ball is also correct in his assessment that we need a greater level of education to go along with that access, a process that needs to take multiple forms from emails to meetings to one on one conversations.  These two views need to be seen as complementary, as two aspects of the same process.

     To turn to the question of the defense of public education, our caucus has done a lot of work over the past year in the movement for the defense of public education.  We've challenged the administration of our university system to the point where they have been unable to discuss fee hikes, let alone pass fee hikes.  We've contributed to the fights not only at our own universities, but the struggles at the CSU system as well.  Furthermore, the reform caucus has done a lot of good work in forming alliance with other progressive forces such as ACCE and some of the other public employee unions around the ReFund California movement, and have made ourselves a significant voice in those conversations.  (Not significant enough to be included in conversations around the millionaire's tax compromise, though.)  However, I haven't seen us incorporate these issues into our everyday organizing, which has operated in isolation from a lot of this work.  The contract could be a place to bring this important work into the conversation.  We could bring quality of education issues into our demands, focusing on issues of classroom size, access to resources, etc. along with the normal membership issues.  I don't think that this approach is alien to the concerns of our members, who are continually discussing these issues within the context of their everyday lives in ways that more typical union issues such as arbitration or grievances, aren't.  Some folks have within the caucus have brought up the idea of a corporate campaign, which would both involve inside rank and file actions along with getting allied support as outside support around pressure points such as the regents.  I strongly support this.

       One of the initial ways we might be able to communicate this idea to the rank and file is through the survey that we are currently developing.  Surveys are a very typical way for unions to bring rank and file members into the process of bargaining.  The truth is that the primary purpose of surveys isn't really gathering information.  Most experienced organizers will tell you that they can already guess the answers they receive long before the evidence comes in.  So why do this?  Surveys allow for a couple things to happen.  1.  It brings up the possible issues that might be brought up during the contract campaign, and 2. Let's folks recognize the multiplicity of interest that exist in the workplace, even ours.  As Charlie Eaton puts it, the survey allows us to begin creating a narrative around the contract process, to create spaces for participation, and to agitate for more informed rank and file involvement and psychic investment in the contract process.  Within that context, I think that its crucial to move away from the traditional approach of the survey, which focuses on the rank and file as an interest group, and begin to bring in issues of social justice, which are in the day to day conversations of our members, issues such as access to education, quality of education, classroom sizes, etc.  We need to frame this battle in terms that transform our fight from a group of special interest concerns to one that defends the rights and access to one of the most important institutions in the state.  Our caucus understands this at a meta level, but they seem to miss out on the ways that the survey can be used to move in this direction, slipping into a set of representative questions that operate within the servicing model of unionism, rather than a participatory model.  This is something where I think we can even get some of the more thoughtful elements of the former leadership on board, particularly Rob Ackerman from Santa Barbara, who seems to understand the pedagogical and agitational aspects of the survey form, amongst others.

      As a final note, the contract campaign also would strongly benefit from a strong organizing theme.  Jason Ball has suggested, "Enough is enough" but I also could see us adopting a theme such as "A Contract for a Public University."  (I'm a big fan of the rhetoric of the public university, but I can understand why some think that this rhetoric has been overused.)  This thematic unity could be used to link together a broad set of tactics and strategies together into a united fight.  It could also be used to inspire actions, rather than to inhibit them.   This is however bringing us into a set of topics, tactics and strategies, that I would like to leave for a later conversation.  I'll leave things as they are for now....   

Insourced Workers Fired at Irvine

     I had thought I had written my last blog posting concerning the insourcing campaign with the successful integration of the janitors as UCI employees, but I once again underestimated the venality and mendacity of the administration of our school.  The administration is using the probationary status of the newly insourced workers to legitimate layoffs of a workforce already devastated by earlier cuts.  At this point, 30 workers have received warnings, and Sylvia Diaz, a leader and committee member of the insourcing campaign has been fired.  These folks are already considerably understaffed, and this action only continues to make the work of those remaining harder, in addition to the obvious hardship of the fired workers, who have worked on the campus for over 15 years.  Please contact the UCI administration to stop these unfair practices.

     If you want more information about the long running attacks on these workers, attacks obviously influenced by the racist environment of Orange County, follow the links above.  This nonsense needs to stop.

Chancellor Michael Drake
chancellor@uci.edu
(949) 824-5111

Human Resources
949.824.5210

Photos of the November 9th rally in support of public education in Irvine

     In response to proposed tuition increases, protests took place across the UC system. For more information about the current situation, I would recommend UC Santa Cruz's website.  The UCI protest didn't have the spectacular dimensions seen at UCLA or Berkeley.  We stayed on campus, and didn't attempt anything ambitious as an encampment, but we managed to have a fairly successful protest.  We estimate that we probably had about 600 people involved in the event over a span of three hours.  I thought that it might be more interesting if I offered some photos of the event, rather than narrate it.  These photos are roughly in chronological order, moving from the set up of the rally, through the speakers, and onto the march.  I was busy with the bullhorn, so I don't have as many pictures of the march itself.  I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves, but feel free to ask questions in the comments section

Some initial comments on demands

      There has been a lot of talk about demands, lately.  Most of this conversation comes out of the Occupy protests occurring in a variety of cities across the United States.  A number of commentators have found the phenomenon confusing, claiming not to understand the goals of the movement or its methods.  To tell the truth, a lot of these folks, most notably the mainstream news industry, are engaged in deliberate obfuscation.  But some of these comments are coming from people who are committed to counter-systemic movements, such as Doug Henwood and Jodi Dean who have made some comments worth taking a look at.  My views on the question are a little more ambiguous, primarily because of some of the misunderstandings about the role of demands on the part of those who oppose them, and because of some of the exaggeration of what demands can accomplish in regards to organizational clarity on the part of those who support them.

      To open up the conversation, I want to make it clear that I support the idea of making demands.  You can call those things any number of things, goals, policies, etc.  Any serious social movement needs to develop a sense of what its goals are, what it's trying to accomplish, in the short term, the mid term, and the long term.  Obviously, these projects aren't going to stay the same over time, but they provide a type of critical, cognitive mapping of where a movement is, and where it wants to be.  You might notice that I haven't made any statements about 'speaking truth to power' here, or even 'speaking to power.'  That's because demands are a way of organizing, of constructing 'constituent power' to use the language of Antonio Negri.  Rather than talking to members of congress or the bourgeoisie, demands allow for movements to communicate with potential participants, as well a allowing for a healthy internal debate over the direction of the movement.  They create the drive for projects, and allow for the success of those projects to be measured.  Our militancy and collectivity create space for reform amongst constituted power, while our communications are designed to foster those forms of militancy and collectivity.  Demands also can separate a movement from very problematic elements who want to appropriate it.  Exclusion may sound bad until you realize that the people being excluded are racists, conspiracy theorists, and libertarians, folks who are going to derail any social justice movement.

     The demands made surrounding the spring sit in in 2009 is a good example of how demands can be used.  (see here for a listing of the demands.)  The demands created by the group to link the demand for a public university to a variety of struggles on the university, making both immediate and long term demands.  They effectively challenged the economist interpretation of the movement by the local paper, by linking the struggle to fights against racism, militarism, and workers' struggles occurring on the campus.  More significantly, the demands created a lot of buzz on campus, and the various demands were discussed extensively by students and faculty.  We can effectively see a moment where demands allowed for a shift in political conversations, and took a small action (albeit a very militant and energetic one) and made it the talk of the campus.  It also managed to express the goals of the movement in a much more accessible and simple language than the often overwrought occupation manifestos of northern California, creating a non-sectarian and intersectional political project for the movement.  Finally, it set out a wide variety of demands, some which were very realizable such as the demand for unisex bathrooms, but also demands for larger structural changes that are not immediate available for appropriation.  In effect, it created demands that could create immediate victories, but without the illusion that those immediate victories were sufficient for the movement to succeed.

      At the same time, I think that there are some mistakes made by those who put their faith in demands.  Most significantly, this is a new movement, and the political goals of that movement have to be created through the struggles of that movement.  They can't be the creation of a few folks in a small room, to paraphrase Rosa Luxemburg.  I also think that it's a mistake to think that any genuinely political movement can be made immediately coherent with a few slogans or a couple manifestos.  As Adorno and others would point out, there's nothing radical about common sense, and therefore, any radical movement is going to seem strange and unfamiliar to the common-sense of our society, which largely operates on hegemonic norms.  To give a practical example, many of the demands for the action discussed above, often confused and alienated the students, particularly demands for non-economic concerns. Additionally, while we want to make our political projects accessible to potential members, we don't necessarily want to make our actions immediately accessible to dominant institutional structures.  Confusion frequently allows for us to accomplish better actions, ones that create larger effects, that attract more attention, that challenge the expectations of everyday life.  In effect, movements need to make themselves coherent to build themselves, but actions frequently benefit from forms of innovation and confusion.   Moreover, most real social movements constitute and represent themselves in struggle.  'Demandless' events can contribute to that process.