Election Results for UAW 2865

       I thought I would write a brief posting about the results of the recent triennial elections for my former local, UAW 2865.  At the statewide level, it was an immense success for the AWDU ticket.  AWDU and their allies won all of the executive board seats, along with 80% of the Joint Council.  I have to admit that I was very skeptical of their chances, but we saw some impressive organizing, and new reform slates arise in San Diego, Los Angeles, and Riverside that were previously doubtful.  A lot of credit should go to the activists involved who had to both negotiate a contract and win an election.  In terms of the bargaining team, they won in San Diego, Los Angeles, Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Davis.  Despite losing in Santa Barbara, we saw the first substantial reform ticket run for election there, and they had a fairly respectable showing, bringing in about 30% of the vote.  Merced saw a split vote between reformers and admin caucus activists, despite a lack of reform candidates running for local positions.  Riverside and Irvine were much more lopsided, giving landslide victories for the former leadership, who are often referred to as the administration caucus, despite their frequent re-namings.  Riverside had a small core of reformers, who have a good chance to impact the local despite their small numbers.  

     Unfortunately, I can't say the same for Irvine, which had no substantial reform effort on the ground during the election.  Part of that was due to the admittedly very successful efforts on the part of Coral Wheeler and Moshe Lichman to put together a decent full slate of candidates, and to construct an electoral machine.  I might not like the kind of union infrastructure that they create.  It's hierarchical and not directed to creating an active membership, but it is good at getting votes out at specific times.  My hope is that we see some of the reform tradition taken up by the new officers of the local, but I have to admit, I hadn't seen much activity out of them during the contract campaign.  The other part was due to the decision of reform activists to put their energy into other organizing endeavors, and move away from union organizing.  It wouldn't have been my choice, but I'm also no longer involved.  (edit: I'm also not sure that my feelings on the matter are terribly relevant.)  I also can't blame those individuals for wanting to find forms of organizing that are less frustrating and more meaningful to them.  Having been through the last triennial, I can't blame folks for wanting to avoid that ordeal.  I really hope they find those collective efforts.  (additional note: I should note that there were Irvine reform folks involved in the successful election  efforts at UCLA.)

     As a last note, I genuinely hope that we see a continued effort on the part of the new elected officials to actively contribute to the fight  for a new contract.  I suspect a number of them could be very good union representatives.  But if that effort doesn't happen, I would recommend that folks take up those tasks themselves.  Get a hold of me if that is the case, and I will get you in touch with people who can help you. (I also strongly suspect that despite not running for office; we'll see Irvine reform folks at the front of the contract fight.)

What Do You Call A Caucus That Refuses To Call Itself A Caucus? A Critique

       In the final months of my involvement in the union, I saw the revival of an interesting phenomenon, the former leadership who formed the USEJ (United For Social and Economic Justice) caucus during the last triennial election denying that they were members of that caucus, or that they were even members of a caucus at all.  It is a strange claim to make.  After all, that group continues to vote in a lock step fashion that puts the reform AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) caucus to shame, and their secret caucus list serve was accidentally leaked to the full union joint council list serve.*  It was pretty apparent that the group was still operating as a caucus, and that it was made up primarily of the remaining members of USEJ.  (Ironically, the group has existed in previous formations before USEJ as Adam Hefty noted, but USEJ was the first time that they opened acknowledged that they were in fact a separate and independent caucus.)  It was only a matter of a week or two that they finally acknowledged their existence for the triennial elections,** renaming themselves SWITCh, and erasing their past history.   Which brings us to the question, what are the implications of this refusal to acknowledge caucus behavior?

      I'd like to start off by saying that there is nothing wrong with being engaged in, or forming a caucus, in an of itself.  After all, forming a caucus is basic aspect of self-organization.  Caucuses allow for people to form groups to affect the direction of an organization or institution.  Often this involves a lot of communication, frequently in private, about the ways that they can affect the direction of the organization, what is possible and what is not possible, and how the group wants to orient itself within those possibilities.  Sociologist and labor studies scholar Judith Stepan-Norris, along with other labors studies scholars in fact have noted that the existence of multiple competing caucuses contributes to the health of unions, because the caucuses have to be more responsible to the needs of the membership.  After all, if a caucus doesn't fulfill those needs, the membership can simply vote in another caucus.  Historically, the decline of the labor movement can be linked to the expulsion of the communists from the AFL-CIO, which left the conservative leadership without competition.  In many ways, we formed the AWDU caucus four years ago to return to this democratic tradition of unionism.

      However, that system is dependent on an open and fair process.  The right to self-organize also needs to be linked with the responsibility for your collective actions within that caucus.  We can see this in play with the AWDU ticket, who has connected itself to a three year legacy, that has its flaws and contradictions despite some impressive successes.  But the former leadership is trying to short circuit this process with their rebranding campaign.  As I already noted, until recently, the former leadership group denied that they were even a caucus, and their current website refuses to acknowledge that a large percentage of their eboard candidates were involved in the last triennial under the USEJ banner.  A number of them had bargained on previous contracts, and had created the shell of a union that existed before the AWDU take over.  Two of them ran while not even being students in the previous triennial election.  Whatever you think about these facts, they seem fairly significant within the context of an electoral campaign, and the rebranding campaign is a pretty egregious effort to subvert that basic aspect of democratic governance.  At a basic level, you need to take responsibility for your own actions if you are a responsible member of a caucus, otherwise you are taking the democratic right to choose a political direction for the union from the membership.

       The problem goes further than that, when you start bringing in the context of the debates where the denials were initially made.  In each of the cases, the person denying the existence of the caucus would follow up with the statement that they were 'simply interested in the good of the union.'   The implications of the statement were fairly obvious, implying that the individuals who were involved in the AWDU caucus were not.  At a basic level, this sort of analysis is fundamentally flawed.  Workers' organizations are simply too complex to declare that one is 'simply interested in the good of the union.'  Unions have been defined by internal as well as external antagonism, debating over who should be a part of such organizations, how they should organize new workers, as well as what should be the goals of such organizations.  We've seen conservative unions and revolutionary unions, deeply democratic unions and cults of personality.  To claim you are 'simply interested in the good of the union' is an attempt to erase this rich history, and to place your conception of the means and ends of the union movement as the exclusive means and ends to that movement.  For more context on this tradition within the UAW as a whole, I recommend reading this essay by Barry Eidlin.

      It's difficult to avoid the authoritarian implications within the claim to 'simply act in the good of the union', however I'd like to spell that aspect of the claim out with a bit more clarity.  We can look at the relationship between election claims and on the ground behavior to do that.  In previous elections, many of the candidates linked to the former leadership group, such as Coral Wheeler and Moshe Lichman, have produced propaganda that claimed that they were opposed to caucuses per se, and wanted to abolish the caucus system.  It's a claim that generally indicates a position of moderation within U.S. politics, a desire to compromise and bring people together.  However, the behavior of those members has not contained those practices.  Instead, we have seen a lack of any interest to compromise on any issues, whether at the Joint Council or within the bargaining table.  Members of the former leadership caucus have even gone as far as to claim that AWDU activists don't support the demand for the rights for undocumented graduate students, giving management the impression we are divided on the issue, when this is an issue that both caucuses strongly support.  In effect, rather than creating a strong unity on this issue to win it at the bargaining table, which is still a strong possibility at this point, they have muddled the issue for partisan purposes.  We effectively find a situation in which the attempt to end caucuses is really the effort to end the reform caucus and return to the one party situation we previously saw.

      To make this point a bit more concrete, it makes sense to return to a rather contentious debate that occurred last summer during a the quarterly Joint Council Meeting.  That meeting had a surprise presentation by Coral Wheeler and Jason Struna about the implications about not focusing the bargaining process the summer.  The presentation argued two things, that we had succeeded more than other unions, and that taking a long time to bargain would have catastrophic results.  At least, that's what I got through the shoddy analogies to unions who had single digit membership numbers and scare tactics.  We saw the same threat of catastrophe on the former leadership's proxy blog, Paycheck First, who also promised catastrophe if we took the route we eventually took for bargaining, and the similar dire predictions being made regularly on the email list of the Joint Council.  At this point, it's pretty obvious that we're not facing catastrophe.  Instead, we're looking at a potential contract that contains no take backs, has unprecedented language in support of all-gender bathrooms and lactation facilities, and continues to fight for a voice on class sizes, rights for undocumented students, and a competitive wage increase.  The university is currently offering a pay increase, that while inadequate, is substantially larger than most of our previous contracts.

       Rather than admit their error, the former leadership have simply moved the goal posts, and are now insisting we could have achieved the same things.  Obviously, there's no way of knowing what would have happened in such a counter-history, but it's hard to imagine that we would have gotten so far on the issue of all gender bathrooms without the participation of hundreds of activists at and outside the bargaining table.  It's also hard to imagine that we would have the university genuinely discussing a competitive wage gap, and even make a pretense of discussing class size and the rights of undocumented students without such input.  It basically is an effort to erase the importance of rank and file activism from the contract process.  But more substantially, it's a moment where the individuals who made those claims have taken no responsibility for them, either to acknowledge their falsity, or the potential damage that they could have had on the bargaining process.  It subverts the possibility of having an honest debate over the contract campaign, or critically evaluating the goals and processes of the bargaining team, all of which are important to a successful contract campaign.  Instead, we are offered a debate in which one side continually makes outrageous claims and simultaneously denies its previous claims as they are debunked.

     More than anything else, this relentless campaign against the reform process has shown the strength and perseverance of the reform effort, which has dramatically shifted the conversation in the UC system from a system that offered only fee increases and shrinking class selection, to a system where we haven't seen a fee increase for two years, along with other reforms.  It would be a lie to say that this process has been drama and error free, but it's difficult not to be impressed.  We ended the perpetual cycle of fee hikes.  We accomplished that through demonstrations where our members were pepper sprayed and arrested, petition drives, and even lobbying efforts.  We've also seen a level of activity that has not been previously seen in our formerly moribund union, with most of elected position being filled. We've seen a bargaining process that successfully brought out student-workers in solidarity with AFSCME, and a successful strike in response to university intimidation.  Above all, we've seen a level of member participation in the bargaining that is unprecedented in union history thanks to the introduction of open bargaining, and the recognition that our ability to win a great contract cannot be simply won by nine clever individuals at the bargaining table. All of that has occurred in a setting where we have received  at best no support from a third of the union who still aligns themselves with the former leadership, and often opposition.  It makes you wonder where we could be if they had even offered a small amount of critical support on some of the issues.  (One added note: We reached none of these achievements alone.  It has involved a lot of cooperation with other unions, graduate and undergraduate groups, and other groups.)

    I hope everyone goes out to support their statewide and local AWDU chapters, rather switching back to the deeply authoritarian structure of business unionism we saw from our local in the past.  In Irvine, you should support Michelle Glowa for President, Mar Velez for Northern Vice-President, Ren-yo Hwang for Southern Vice-President, Erik Green for Financial Secretary, Leslie Quintanella for Recording Secretary, Henry Maar, Susan Richardson, and Beezer de Martelly for Trustees, and Katy Fox-Hodess.  At the Irvine level you should support Ana Baginski for Campus Unit Chair, Jordan Brocious for Recording Secretary, and Jordan Brocious and Jessica Conte for Irvine Unit Delegates (who will go to the International Union conference, where a potential dues hike will be decided on.)


*The Joint Council is the governing body of the union.  It is made up of the Head Stewards, Campus Unit Chairs, and Recording Secretaries of each branch of the union, along with the statewide executive board.  They meet quarterly to make decisions about the union, although they now also vote online for issues after AWDU took over.

**The triennial elections bring all union positions up for election.  We're about to have another triennial election April 29th and April 30th.

An additional comment on the Paycheck First situation

        I have noticed that I have received a number of visits from individuals from the Paycheck First blog.  I'm normally curious about how folks discovered the blog, and am appreciative of links.  However, I can't say that I feel the same way about these referrals.  I took a glance at the referring document, and found that my blog had been referred with the usual lack of accountability that I have come to expect from that blog, in an anonymous note at the end of a posting.  In addition, in typical fashion, the unnamed individual had offered a fairly inaccurate description of my posting, stating an assertion that I did not make, and ignoring the substantial issues that I had brought up with the blog.

        To briefly return to my initial comments, I had suspected that this might be something produced by former leadership supporters.  It contained a lot of the elements that have defined their output, including a lot of inaccuracies, statements made out of context, and a general absence of a political analysis, issues I would love to engage with once the individual involved publicly identified themselves.  However, I noted that there was no way to either confirm or deny this guess, given that the individual involved did not attach their names to their own blog.  It is difficult to take a call for accountability terribly seriously when the individuals involved couldn't even bother to take the time to attach their names to their own statements.  I suspect that they realize that their own credibility as activists and as members would be seriously damaged if they were associated with their own work.

     I'm quite interested in dispelling many of the substantial misunderstandings that the unnamed individuals have presented about the bargaining process, and in dispelling and correcting the many rumors that they have spread about the process, but for me to engage in that process here would involve them actually identifying themselves.  As I have noted in the past, I have never made a statement about the union anonymously.  I was public in my views when I was a rank and file activist, when I was in the minority caucus in the union as an officer, and now that I am a part of the majority coalition in the union.  I take union democracy seriously, and taking responsibility for your own positions is a crucial aspect of that democratic process.  I will be blunt, the Paycheck First blog both sabotages that democratic process, and potentially aids management in the process of bargaining.

      However, it is worth noting that the union's postings on the contract process already substantially undermine the claims of the blog's anonymous contributors.  I'd strongly recommend looking at those releases for a better sense of what is going on.  We are also discussing whether or not we should put out some material about these topics on the Irvine AWDU blog, as a way of dispelling the fear and superstition perpetrated on that blog.  I have mixed feelings about that though.  On one hand, we need more information out about the process of bargaining, and more places to discuss that information.  At the same time, I'm tired of being called out by people who have neither the willingness to put their names to their claims nor to do the basic research required to understand the most basic aspects of the bargaining process. 

Thoughts on the current state of the union (UAW 2865)

        I've been debating whether I should comment on the blog that an anonymous group of individuals put up about the bargaining process, entitled "Paycheck First".  I don't know who's writing, but the writing is largely representative of the sorts of distortions, misrepresentations, and nonsense that is largely representative of the former leadership's writing style, going back to their interventions defending the process of bargaining the 2010.  As far as I can tell, the individuals writing the blog want us to go back to the approach to bargaining the contract that was taken in previous periods, which was to see the role of the rank and file of the union in the bargaining process as fairly minimal and to be sharply controlled by the leadership.  It's important to note that the Irvine campus rejected that position, first with the vote on the contract and second when the membership had an opportunity to vote in the triennial election of that same year.  Additionally, a number of their posts are fairly close to the comments and positions that have been taken by labor relations within the bargaining process.  I've come to expect very little from the former leadership, but I was a little surprised by their open capitulation to the logic of management.  I'm open to a substantial conversation about the process of bargaining, but the writing in this anonymous blog doesn't warrant much in the way of engagement.  At very least, the individuals writing this blog could show the courage of attaching their names to the various accusations they have made.

        To turn to the more substantial issue of actual bargaining, rather than the shadow theater of anonymous comments, we're moving out of the summer period of bargaining into the fall.  We've put a number of different proposals on the table, but our ability to put pressure on the administration substantially increases with school back in session.  We take our jobs at the bargaining table fairly seriously, but our ability to bargain a good contract is dependent on the active support and participation that we receive from the rank and file membership.  Along with the work that we have put at the bargaining table, we have been starting the process of getting folks involved at the campus level, including tabling, fliering, and talking to folks at their offices when we can find them.  We're looking forwards to getting in touch with a lot of folks during orientations.  We've also been working to make stronger alliances with the other student groups on campus, and with a number of unions as well, returning to the informal union coalition that tentatively got formed last year.  Those alliances were quite evident at the bargaining that occurred in Irvine, with union and student allies speaking up in support of our various demands.  The contract that we're fighting for, one that would contribute to the defense of a genuinely public education, and in defense of social justice is going to take a lot of membership support.  We want a strong paycheck to make up for the years of sub-inflation raises we have received over the years, but we also want to use our contract to fight for underrepresented groups, to put caps in the amount of students are in our classrooms so that undergraduates receive a better education, and for cheaper housing and other issues.  We're hoping to see your participation in the variety of fights that are going to occur over fall quarter.

         We've been involved in this fight for a long time now.  Through our work in the public education movement, we've seen the University of California system move from double digit fee and tuition increases to a cap on tuition for the last couple of years.  This fight is never acknowledged by the former leadership of the union, because they played no role in it, refusing to ally themselves with the students and unions involved in it.  Instead, it was folks from AWDU who did that work, and contributed to those victories. With this new contract, we have the opportunity to move away from staunching the wounds of privatization and beginning to make gains for ourselves and for the public university.  AWDU has moved the union from the provincial backwaters that it used to occupy, and has placed it in the center of the struggles around the university, and the fight for a more just and democratic society represented by campaigns such as "Make Banks Pay".  Those fights have earned the union respect, and have led to alliances that can make that happen.  We're looking forwards to the fight.  The rank and file of our various campuses have the opportunity to get a strong contract through that process.

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. 

Union Elections, May 6th and 7th: Our First Contested Election in Over a Year.

      It's been a while since I've written anything about the union. There are a number of reasons for that. Most notably, I've been caught up in the process of writing my dissertation, but the current issues facing the union haven't been very easily placed into the confines of the five to six paragraph form that makes up the vast majority of my blog entries, notably some of the conflicts and controversies that have occurred within the confines of the AWDU caucus. I'm not sure that I will deal with these issues in the near term, given the amount of work that is currently on my plate, but I hope to produce some sort of self-reflexive essay at some point in the future that will explore the current impasse of the organization. However, we are at a much more familiar conjuncture, at this point with the vacancy elections of May 6th and 7th, a conjuncture that requires a more direct intervention. For the first time in the past couple of years, we are going to be having contested elections. Despite some of the mild consternation and concern that is being felt by AWDU folks, I think we should see this as a good thing, a moment where the members of the union get an opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the direction of the local just before the beginning of the bargaining process. Within this context, the membership has the choice to continue the process of reform that was begun by AWDU or to partially return to the leadership that ran the contract negotiations of 2010.

      For those who weren't around or had forgotten the nature of bargaining three years ago, the process for bargaining was much different. The bargaining team made an effort to minimize the amount of information that was made available to the rank and file. The majority faction of the team made every effort to suppress the positions of the radical minority of the bargaining team, going as far as to exclude members from bargaining team meetings and to throw them off the team. Despite that fact, the minority was able to demand that the team push for additional benefits, and pay, although not to the extent that we pushed the university to offer us a pay raise that went above the inflation rate. In the end the majority was able to push through the contract despite the protest of the remaining minority bargaining team members, and got the contract passed under fairly controversial circumstances. (Those who want more information on this time period should take a look at the AWDU blogs of the time, along with these articles.)

     Effectively, the AWDU victories that occurred during the triennial election were a repudiation of the contract process, and the stultified, non-representative, and undemocratic nature of the union leadership that negotiated that contract. Since them, we have seen a number of substantial changes in the union, ranging from increased involvement in the fight for a public university,  to more focused advocacy at the legislative level, and the a greater ability of rank and file folks to get involved in the decision making processes in the union. Unfortunately, we also have not gotten the level of representation we would like to see, a result of our need to rebuild the union from the ground floor up, given the absence of representative structures left by the old leadership, who preferred to organize with small professional staffs, rather than through democratic structures of representation. To be honest, that project is still an ongoing one, one that is going to need to develop at a faster rate if we want to win the next contract fight.

        Both  Rob Ackermann and  John Gust were part of the former leadership of the union, Gust playing a significant role in the majority position of the former bargaining team, and Ackermann as a supporter for the USEJ slate in the triennial election.  They both plan to hold positions on both the bargaining team as well as the executive board, replicating the problematic structures of the past.  Both positions are significant ones that allow for considerable latitude on the part of the activists involved, a latitude that the former leadership used to concentrate power in a very few hands.  In effect, voting in Ackermann and Gust will be a partial return to the old structures of power, albeit one partially mediated by the affects of the past elections.  As we go into the contract bargaining process, we need to have our executive board committed to the processes of democratic reform, rather than the sorts of business unionism that have strongly affected our past practices.  I want to make it clear that I trust both Ackermann and Gust to act in what they believe to be the best interests of the union, and that their experience makes them worth engaging with, but I have yet to see them committed to the forms of democratic transparency that I feel is necessary for such leadership posts.  The AWDU candidates, on the other hand, are connected to the commitments of the reform process through the caucus.

       Within this context, I think that it is important to vote for the two AWDU candidates, Troy Araiza Kokinis from San Diego for southern vice-president, and Mauricio Velasquez for financial secretary. Both have had been involved in the social justice struggles within the university and outside of that context. They represent the continuing incomplete project of AWDU, a project dedicated to creating horizontal, democratic, and rank and file structures within the union. Kokinis has been involved in anti-oppression work on the San Diego campus, while Velasquez has a long history of union work in Colombia, and has been involved in the contract struggle on his campus in Los Angeles. Within this context, it is certainly noteworthy that both Rob Ackermann and John Gust have been active and serious union activists, but neither has shown the commitment to the kind of union reform that has defined AWDU's intervention into the day to day politics of the union. Both were committed to defending the highly problematic contract process and both were complicit in the triennial election debacle. (for more information, look here. and here.)  The only way that we win a strong contract is through the active participation of the rank and file members of the local, a process that will be facilitated through the continuing of the democratic reform of the union, rather than the top down organizing that both Ackermann and Gust implicitly support.

     At the same, time it's worth mentioning some limitations to the entire election process. Unfortunately, over the past two years, we have moved from an e-board that was predominantly women to one that is predominantly made up of men. The bargaining committee is also disproportionately men, as is the Joint Council to a lesser extent. No matter how the vote turns out, that representational structure remains. We need to see this issue as symptomatic of larger problems within the structure of the union, rather than as something that can be solved through simple numbers, but as long as those inequities in representation exist, we can feel fairly safe that the problems still exist. We have been trying to confront some of those issues through the construction of the anti-oppression committee, but we need to take this process up within all levels of the union. My hope is that we will begin to deal with these issues within the context of the contract campaign to fight for a genuinely democratic and representative union.

scattered thoughts

        Since I am between large formal writing projects, I thought I should make a greater effort to write for the blog.  I'm currently taking a few days to access the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which resides in the special collections of the University of California-Riverside library, in order to read through the lengthy debates between Samuel Delany, Ursula Leguin, Joanna Russ, James Tiptree, Jr. and others that occurred in the third and fourth issues of the Khatru fanzine.  I've only just started this process today, and have only read a later issue that catalogs a series of fan responses to the debate, responses that have ranged from the thoughtful to the esoteric.  It's a nice reminder that one can find genuinely interesting intellectual debate outside the academy, in a language that a lot of the inhabitants of that institution would probably not deal with very well.  Don't worry, I'll put up some of my initial thoughts as I start to read the actual conversations between the authors, which sound like they're fairly contentious, if the rather large secondary literature on the debates is true. 

       Asides from that, I'm trying to use my week of spring break to get myself prepared for the rather large amount of work that I am going to have to take on for the spring quarter.  I have to finally complete my chapter on the implicit debate between Ursula Leguin and Samuel Delany that can be found in their respective novels, The Dispossessed and Trouble on Triton.  Additionally, I need to edit my chapter on Judith Merril, along with my chapters on Joanna Russ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.  This is going to be a lot of work, but I know that those earlier chapters are not in as bad shape as the initial draft of the Gilman chapter that I took care of this quarter.  Finally, I need to put together a definitive prospectus/introduction to the project, based of the many earlier versions of that conversation.  I feel that I'm in a much better position to do this sort of writing, but I've never been good at that kind of abstract summary.  I suppose I need to figure out how to do this, if I want to apply for any jobs, or apply for grants of any sort.  Not my favorite activity in the world, but as Bertolt Brecht notes, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral."

     In addition to that, we are going to have a lot of work ahead of us, politically, because of the contract negotiations that will be beginning in the summer, at latest.  I feel that we actually have a lot of positives on our side, from the passage of Prop. 30 to the long history of protests that have created a deep crisis amongst the upper administration of the UC system, but it's going to take a lot of work to move away from the older forms of bargaining that have defined the last couple contract negotiations.  We have introduced a series of demands that I feel are quite strong, but without concerted action on the part of the rank and file, it's going to be an uphill battle, at best.  Within this context, I think our reform slate has done a very good job of creating democratic structures amongst the representatives and has gotten rank and file activists deeply involved in the process of organizing, but we haven't as of yet created the democratic representative structures that we need to bring 12,000 members into the conversation, rather than a small portion of that.  In many ways, the folks at Berkeley seem to be about as close to that ideal as anyone, with their Contract Action Team structure, but we need to come up with a structure that makes sense to activists and members on the Irvine campus, a campus that sees a substantial amount of police repression, even of simple actions such as canvassing and handing out fliers.  One thing I am hoping we will do is create a lot more media about what we do, another thing we can learn from other activist groups around the state.

      In any case, I might find myself continuing the low output on the blog that you have seen over the past couple months, but just be assured that this doesn't indicate a lack of commitment to the blog, or my implicit plans to close it down.  It just indicates that I have a lot of work to do.   Incidentally, I will be giving a paper at the Eaton Conference in Riverside this year on The Stepford Wives.  More details on that in the very near future.

Fall Joint Council: Some Notes

       Although the recent joint council meeting lacked the drama and conflict that has defined a lot of our recent union meetings, I thought I should still write up a brief description of the process, in order to continue to report back on what we have been up to recently.  In many ways, this shift from the drama of the past to the relative boredom of today is a positive transformation, gesturing towards an acceptance of the shifts that were introduced into the local over a year ago.  We still have a long way to go in terms of creating a participatory democratic culture in the local, but our local has at least largely accepted that as a goal.  I suspect that we're going to see some fights in the upcoming contract negotiations, but those fights should primarily be with management, will hopefully avoid becoming internal issues.

      The day of the meeting was extremely busy, consisting of two union meetings, along with an internal AWDU meeting to deal with some internal political issues.  The first meeting focused on the upcoming contract campaign, and was the first time that the larger bargaining committee met together.  It was primarily a conversation about the future plans of bargaining, focusing on the various structural deadlines of the process, along with the directions that we want to take. We decided to set up bargaining training for later in the year, and some other issues that we will be discussing with the membership later in the year.  The committee has largely accepted the need to both expand the contract fight to deal with social justice issues, and the need to produce a more participatory contract negotiation process. The Berkeley campus presented some of the new approaches that they are taking to bargaining, notably the creation of Contract Action Teams.  These teams will be made up of rank and file members who are willing to spend a few hours every months passing on information about bargaining and getting folks to events in support of the contract struggle, while meeting up every other week to talk about the progress.  It's a really exciting idea, and we're planning on stealing it shamelessly on the Irvine campus.

     The larger meeting remained positive, spending a substantial amount of time covering the issues of the upcoming contract negotiations and the process of getting folks into the union over orientations.  We saw an upsurge in membership over the past couple months, which shows that we're beginning to get used to being formal union representatives, and coming up with new ways of getting folks involved.  We also agreed to support the larger framework of bargaining that we came up with.  The threatened longer debate about endorsing the president didn't occur.  I suspect that the Santa Barbara folks realized that it wasn't going to go anywhere, and when Obama is up by double digits in California, there was no real reason to have that conversation.  I would have liked to revisit our conversation about Prop 30, but we wound up avoiding that conversation as well.  Instead, a vaguely defined political committee has been created, which I'm not sure of what its role is going to be.  From there, we moved into discussing bylaws, which allowed us to pass the reforms that we had introduced in the spring, formalizing our earlier decision of allow campuses to have access to the email lists without state interference, insisting that northern and southern vice presidents should come from the regions that they represented, and a couple issues.  Additionally, new bylaws on elections are were introduced as well.  Unfortunately, our attempt to change the presidential succession was blocked due to the international constitution, which means that we will still only have presidential elections every three years, rather than during vacancy elections.  We still have more work to do in limiting the power of the president and the eboard, but I think we're going to get to that with the next JC meetings.

      All in all it was a fairly successful set of meetings.  We have a lot of work to do to get ready for contract negotiations in the spring and summer, but we're beginning to function as a collective body in a much more healthier manner.  We still have some pretty fundamental differences in approach in the body, but at least our every action isn't defined by the hostility of the election.  In many ways, I think the upcoming contract negotiations are going to be the real test of the union reforms.  I think we're going in the right direction. 

     As a last note, I haven't dealt with the AWDU aspect of the day, which dealt with internal issues.  We wound up having a very productive conversation about feminist practices, but it would be far too drawn out and painful to explain the origins of the conversation.  I'm hoping that those conversations will continue, and we will develop more productive ways of working with each other.  The immediate danger of USEJ is largely over, but the kinds of business union practice that they represent still often define the day to day life of our union, and perhaps as significantly, the expectations that our rank and file have for us as a union.  I still believe our caucus is deeply important to transforming the structures of the union to democratic and participatory principles from the top down model of old.  I'm hoping we will finally have the conversations about organizing that we need to have.

On the summer joint council meeting

Since the former leadership caucus, who used to be known as USEJ, but now call themselves SWITCh in a desperate attempt to avoid their own history, have quoted this particular blog.  I would like to remind everyone who reads this blog that AWDU helped lead the fight for refunding public education through the Make Banks Pay coalition campaign, a campaign which got no support from the former leadership.  Dozens of AWDU activists were arrested in this campaign, which made Governor Jerry Brown compromise on the Prop. 30 language, which was substantially less progressive in its taxation structure.  (I slightly edited this to acknowledge that the Make Banks Pay campaign was a coalition event, involving a lot of unions, but we substantially pushed it towards the questions of public education that it took up.)


     It struck me that I forgot to produce a substantial account of the previous Joint Council meeting, a meeting which produced a few small reforms in the bylaws, as well as a couple substantial arguments. all in a hot and miserable union office, frankly unfit for the number of folks that were there.  I thought I would try to make up for that error with a short report on the interesting aspects of the meeting, along with a similar report concerning the latest Joint Council meeting.  After all, these informal modes of communication often translate into more rank and file engagement than the official channels of communication, and I've tried to pass on my perspective on things since our election.

      The first and most notable aspect of the Berkeley meeting is that it was fairly pleasant for the most part, if you ignore the oppressive heat in the room.  For the most part, conversations remained productive with a number of minor reforms to the bylaws being passed, guaranteeing local access to the union listserves, elections committee reform, changes in staff membership requirements, and requirement that Northern and Southern Vice Presidents are members in a campus that they're representing.  Each of those points passed with minor debate, and cordial conversation.  The two exceptions were notable.  The first came around a request for a small amount of money to help with a bail fund for UCLA protestors, which was opposed by the Santa Barbara contingent, who continue to insinuate that these events were not sanctioned by the union despite the fact that the protests in defense of public education have been discussed extensively at Joint Council meetings.  The Santa Barbara contingent was asked why they had taken this position, which translated into a fairly spirited back and forth between AWDU folks and the Santa Barbara crew.  Despite claims on the the part of the Santa Barbara folks otherwise, the response on the part of the UCLA folks was pretty minor, given the absolute lack of solidarity shown by Santa Barbara.

      The second debate was probably the more significant of the two, that being over the compromise millionaire's tax, Prop. 30.  The proposition was initially advocated for by Santa Barbara's Steve Attewell, who did a good job of defending the initiative's positive qualities, emphasizing its level of progressive taxation, and the funding that it would bring in.  However, the proposal was quickly amended for opposition by Jason Ball of UCLA, who brought significant counter-arguments, notably the regressive aspects of the bill around taxation, and our exclusion from the compromise process itself, both by the governor and our fellow allies in other social movement organizations and unions.  Eventually, a middle position was taken by the union as a whole, taking no position on the bill, leaving it to individual members to decide how they should vote, a position which might be revisited in a later online vote.  The thing that really struck me in the debate was that Attewell simply couldn't conceive of a reason why a reasonable person might disagree with the logic he presented to the JC.  This sort of myopia is all too represented of the reasoning of the former leadership, who all too frequently refuse to recognize that there might be an alternative to their version of trade union politics, and a view that's going to leave them a small and irrelevant force until they rethink that position.

       Moving from there, the summer meeting was much smaller than the earlier spring meeting, being made up of 16 members of the AWDU caucus, and about 8 members aligned with the former leadership, and the Riverside leadership did a good job finding us a space to meet in that was both air conditioned and spacious, two qualities that I appreciated after the Berkeley experience.  The initial section of the meeting went quite well.  We passed a number of minor proposals, money for organizing kits, more money to send folks to a conference, we took positions on a number of initiatives (more on that in a later post) and postponed a re-visitation of Prop 30 for a later online conversation (this conversation is necessary after the recent budget passed, a budget that will freeze tuition costs, but only if the proposition passes.  I'm also going to write a more substantial post on this later.)  Additionally, my first official proposition (in conjunction with Charlie Eaton) in support of a change in our letterhead to emphasize our position as "UC Student-Workers Union" passed, which I see as a minor part of our attempt to link our upcoming contract fight with the larger worker and student struggles in the university.  We will have to wait to see if we can live up to the claims made in the title.  I certainly hope we do.

     From there, we took a short break.  However, when we returned, a member of the caucus of the former leadership, Guanyang Zhang, called for quorum, effectively ending the official section of the meeting.  At that point, a fairly lengthy and unproductive conversation broke out over the interpretation of the contract and Robert's Rules broke out, and effectively ended any meaningful conversation.  Without getting into the details of that conversation, we came to the conclusion that the meeting could not continue officially.  In effect, this decision translated into our inability to pass any of the bylaws reforms that we had wanted to pass, nor could any of the more substantial bylaws reforms that we were going introduce get their first hearing.  The decision froze out any meaningful decisions about the contract campaign from happening, and kept us from a number of other necessary decisions.  There is a possibility of holding an emergency meeting early in the fall, but that action is going to create a lot of problems.

     Not surprisingly, a number of folks in AWDU were unhappy about the turn of events, and expressed this over the Joint Council website, which translated into a fairly predictable debate with the former leadership circling the wagons.  My thoughts are a little different than both sides of the debate.  Not surprisingly, I don't agree with the position of the former leadership.  Zhang's position was clearly political, designed to shut out the ability to introduce a number of proposals that I suspect that he opposes.  Zhang avoids the polemics expressed by the other members of his caucus, but he fairly faithfully represents the sort of conservative politics exemplified by that caucus.  To put it simply, he's not as neutral as he thinks he is.  At the same time, it's difficult to argue that his action was in any sense illegitimate.  His action is allowed by both the bylaws and the arcane rules of Robert's Rules of Order.  I don't agree with the action, but that is a matter of political disagreement, rather than some sort of ethical infringement on the part of him.  That distinction is significant.  We might want to make efforts to reform the way we enforce quorum, or perhaps more significantly, make sure that we make that requirement, but it doesn't make sense to condemn someone who uses a legitimate rule for his own political position.

Hopefully, we'll be able to make up for this problematic ending with an emergency meeting in September.

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....   

Vacancy elections, February 14-15

      We're approaching another union election in a few days.  Unlike the election that occurred last year, only a few positions are up for grabs, positions that were resigned by their previous occupants.  There are a couple contested head steward elections, but the only contested statewide contest is the election for Southern Vice President. That election is between the AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) candidate, Erin Conley, a rank and file member from UCLA, and the USEJ (United for Social and Economic Justice) candidate, Robert Ackermann, a head steward from Santa Barbara.  I don't think anyone is going to be surprised that I am endorsing Erin Conley, but that endorsement seems to be useful space to further explore some of my critiques of USEJ that I put together here, along with some reason why I think that Erin Conley is a strong candidate.  My basic argument is that the election is fundamentally between two types of organizing style, one that is engaged in the contemporary struggles for public education with Erin, and one that represents a very old and dated notion of union representation with Ackermann.


       Before I make that argument, I want to make something very clear, my critique of Ackermann isn't a personal one.  I've had a number of formal and informal interactions with Ackermann, going back to the vote count last year, and for the most part, those interactions have been pleasant.  Unlike most of the Santa Barbara contingent, he doesn't make every interaction with him as emotionally and intellectually painful as possible.  In a lot of ways, he represents what probably is the best side of a fairly unimpressive group of people.  However, this fact allows us to bring the significant political differences between the two candidates to the forefront.  The problem with USEJ (United for Social and Equal Justice) is not, ultimately, a personality issue, one of pleasantness or unpleasantness, but of two very different models for thinking about the union.


      When we look at Rob Ackermann's candidate statement, we find a number of claims about the work that he has done for the union.  The first set of claims focus on involvement in the bread and butter campaigns of the union, contract enforcement, and the campaign to organize Graduate Student Researchers (for those who don't know, for some strange reason, the California legislature decided to allow for teaching assistants to form a union as workers, while researchers were classified as apprentices, and therefore, are not workers, and cannot organize a union.  The union has been trying to change that law, allowing for GSR organizing.)  The issues referenced here are significant, but we find a number of problems in the approach of the Santa Barbara campus in approaching these issues.  That campus is still operating within the old service union perspective of the UAW, a top down model built on the centralization of decision-making and communication.  Barry Eidlin offers a fairly good description of the goals of this earlier organizing model in his analysis of the UAW international,


     "The goal is to reproduce the existing leadership as much as possible while minimizing the possibility for independent initiatives that might lead the union astray (since they don’t emanate from the leadership, which alone has the true interests of the union at heart).  In terms of information, this is why we see the reluctance to make basic information about the union available in writing, whether that be executive board minutes, financial reports, etc.  It also is why the union leadership is very reluctant to pursue any kind of communications strategy beyond what they call “one--‐to--‐one organizing,” where a trusted key leader, usually a paid staffer, interacts one--‐on--‐one with a specific member.  To the extent that they disseminate information, they want it to be in one direction: from them to the membership, preferably in a carefully scripted form.  Thus the almost exclusive preference for phone banking and department walks over leafleting, e--‐mail campaigns, or even department--‐level meetings not organized by the top leadership."


      The continued investment of the Santa Barbara leadership has been clear through both the language that they use to describe organizing, and in their practices as well.  While in the Joint Council meeting, Ackermann described union work as a 'job', in which we 'provide services.'  The Santa Barbara leadership, including Ackermann, continued to speak in this manner throughout the meeting, most notably in their description of their approaches to grievances, which entirely left out any thoughts on how to create horizontal structures of solidarity through this work. Instead, the entire model was built on transforming the elected leadership into a mediator between worker and management.  These issues have also been fairly apparent in the behavior of the local leadership, as well, making every effort to isolate the campus from any inter-campus influence, informally keeping rank and file members out of membership meetings, and focusing on the isolating organizational forms discussed above, particularly one on one organizing.  We also a dismally small amount of rank and file participation at the last meeting, despite the fact it was supposed to be a statewide membership meeting.  Rather than seeing an 'organizing campaign' at Santa Barbara, we've seen a lot of cards signed.  I'm not dismissing that, but a card is only a small step in creating a strong member based union.  In effect, we can see that Ackermann within the Santa Barbara context represents returning to the organizing models that were rejected by the union rank and file last year, a model that we should not return to.  


     The second part of Ackermann's claims become increasingly problematic.  He makes reference to the protests around the UC system, in defense of public education and in response to the increased inequality of the state and the nation.  In particular, he references the protest that occurred in UC Riverside, claiming that it 'inspired' him.  The problem is that neither Ackermann nor the Santa Barbara leadership has been seriously involved in the has not been seriously involved in the organizing work of the protests in Riverside and other schools.  That work has been done by AWDU activists, with the AWDU candidate, Erin Conley, playing a central role in the organizing of the ReFund protests in Southern California.  Rather than standing in the background with the Santa Barbara leadership, Conley was in the front ranks of the fight at the regents meeting.  She helped create the conditions for the success of the Riverside action through her organizing and she put herself on the line when folks were challenging the regents expulsion of students and workers from the meeting.  The work she has done has built bridges across the campuses, and has contributed to making a stronger public education movement in the region.


     At the same time, Erin Conley has been committed to the day to day organizing work of the union, organizing training sessions for rank and file and officer alike.  Rather than accepting the top down model of the UAW International, a model that has increasingly failed both at the local and international levels, we can see possibilities of another approach to creating workplace solidarity and power.  Ackermann is absolutely correct in bringing up the issues of defending the contract and organizing members, but the model he working from isn't working.  We need to use contract defense and membership organizing to produce membership empowerment, and forms of collectivity that use those documents to genuinely defend public education for all.  The old ways, based on the wisdom of a centralized leadership and the quiescence of the rank and file, cannot produce those results.  Erin Conley, on the other hand, has shown through her leadership at the local level in her work in the union and Occupy UCLA, as well as through her work at the state level, that she can play an effective role in creating the kinds of collective power that can reinvent this union.  My hope is that folks will get out and vote for her.  You can find links for polling information here, along with links for the two candidate statements. 


      I will also state that if folks want to have conversations on these issues, they need to put their name to their comments.  Otherwise, I'm erasing them.

Thinking about union organization in light of the last Joint Council meeting (mostly a critique)

      One of the earliest critiques of conventional trade union organizations was presented by socialist organizer and polemicist, Daniel DeLeon.  DeLeon has a generally justified reputation as a rather sectarian fellow in the history of the workers' movement, but his inability to get along with others doesn't negate his fairly sharp analytical skills in understanding the limitations of reformist structures.  DeLeon notes, "It has become an axiom that, to accomplish results, organization is requisite. Nevertheless, there is “organization” and “organization." That this is so appears clearly from the fact that the “pure-and-simplers” have been going about saying to the workers: “Organize! Organize!” and after they have been saying that, and have been “organizing” and “organizing” for the past thirty or forty years, we find that they are virtually where they started, if not worse off; that their “organization” partakes of the nature of the lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up."  For DeLeon, conventional or 'pure and simple' trade unionism continually fails in its effort a producing an effective organization because it accepts the basic structure of what it is ostensibly trying to fight. More significantly, he argues that the 'organization' of the conventional trade union takes on the formal characteristics of that system.  He phrases it in an interesting manner, offering a peculiar metaphor, 'a lizard, whose tail destroys what his foreparts build up.'  I'm not sure what it means for a lizard to build with 'his foreparts,' but the metaphor clearly indicates a organizational structure that is in conflict with itself, an organization that unknowingly undoes its own accomplishments.  DeLeon describes an organization in conflict with itself, an organization that still accepts the premises of its own exploitation without recognizing that contradiction.  Pushing this to a set of epistomological concerns, we find ourselves with an organization that doesn't recognize the implications of its own theoretical framework.  Or drawing on a different context, literary theory, Terry Eagleton notes, "Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people's theories an oblivion of one's own." (Eagleton viii)  It opposes the anti-capitalist perspective but through that action, it can't recognize the full implications of that decision, which place the organization in collusion with the institutional structures that it is ostensibly opposing.  At a more basic level, we are facing a set of people who have naturalized a set of social structures, putting them in a position where they not only refuse any alternative to it, but are unable to meaningfully recognize an alternative.

     I found myself returning to these questions out of fairly immediate and prosaic concerns.  The joint council meeting of the grad student union, UAW 2865, was held a week ago on my birthday, January 21st.  One of the central concerns of that meeting was to discuss the question of membership recruitment, in response to the loss of members over the past few years.  Within that discussion, it became obvious that our differences with the remnants of the USEJ (United for Social and Economic Justice) caucus had a number of substantial organizational differences at the heart of it, and that the USEJ members of the JC were incapable of recognizing this.  Before I move into this conversation, I want to make it clear that the question of membership is a serious one, and that our ability to meaningfully function as a union is dependent on the active consent and participation of the vast majority of the potential membership.  Our ability to negotiate contracts as well defend our rights cannot operate without this, as is our ability to use the social and institutional power of the union to create a genuinely democratic public education system.  Signing a card becomes the first step in getting involved in the (hopefully) vast assemblage of the union, contributing to it, and reshaping it.  The difficulty is that the previous dominant model of the union frequently operated on the premise that our first and last interaction with workers was the attempt to get that card.  (For a longer critique of the UAW membership model, read this.)  In effect, the meaning of membership has been hollowed out, transformed into a passive acceptance of representation, rather than creating a constitutive model.

      So when the USEJ members of the Joint Council from Santa Barbara made a proposal for increasing membership, it contained these sorts of assumptions within its structure.  The proposal was designed to fund organizers at all the campuses that fell below a certain level of membership, funding these positions at a 50% funding level, which is the same level of funding and work as a teaching assistant position.  This part of the proposal was fairly uncontroversial.  There was a bit of volunteerist over-enthusiasm within the AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) camp early, but most folks seem to recognize that have someone spending twenty hours a week just thinking about organizing might be necessary to keep the organization strong and coherent.  However, the Santa Barbara proposal had a number of other stipulations that proved to be much more troubling.  In addition to funding local positions, they wanted the executive committee to control both the hiring and the direction of work of the organizers, effectively cutting out the local branches from having a say in how organizing occurs on their own campuses.  Fortunately, this got revised in the discussion to allow for a substantial amount of local control over these funds, but I think that the original proposal is revealing of an organizational common-sense, one that operates on the basis of top-down control and one on one organization that cuts out forms of horizontal communication and solidarity.

      A number of other moments in the meeting revealed a similar set of assumptions.  Within the conversation about the vision of the union, the Santa Barbara contingent was concerned about the absence of any discussion about defending the contract in the vision statement.  I happen to agree with this sentiment.  The contract provides an important site for creating social power and solidarity in the workplace.  But rather than thinking of the contract in these terms, the remaining USEJ forces continually posed this work in terms of 'servicing' the contract, and 'doing our job.'  In effect, we were offered the servicing model of the business model, a model that isn't that different from the anti-communist unionism of Samuel Gompers.  Their discussion of grievances operated under similar model, working to have a greater say by union officialdom in the secondary documentation (this is the document that states what we are expected to do as workers), but no thought on how this sort of agency could be taken on by workers themselves through collective action.  Furthermore, these officials were unable to or were unwilling to recognize that this is only one of many ways of organizing a union, insisting that the only thing lacking within the current framework of the union was enthusiasm, refusing to recognize the role of their own organizational structure in the lack of union membership.  Even though there are folks involved in these fights that I don't particularly care for, I want to emphasize that I don't think that the issue with the former USEJ is a matter of a lack of sincerity or enthusiasm.  We're talking about some genuinely committed folks, but that commitment is based on a set of class-collaborations that have been dead for years, and on the basis of an alienated worker that has never adequately described the labor practices of folks involved in public education.

      At the same time, we at AWDU have had our own limitations, as well.  We've done a lot to contribute to the renewed struggle in defense of public education, but we haven't given enough thought into how we can make the union more relevant to the day to day life of the union.  We ran on the premise that our union should be in a position in which we could meaningfully go on strike, but we are very far from this position.  Comrades such as Josh Brahinsky, Anne Kelly, Alfredo Carlos, Adam Hefty, Katy Fox-Hodess, and others have been offering some useful ideas on the sort of work that we need to take on in order to accomplish this, but we haven't put the kind of collective intellectual labor that is necessary to imagine the new sorts of organizational structure and practice that are needed to produce a successful union within our current crisis.  We need to build stronger horizontal structures such as steward's councils, as well as creating reproductive mechanisms in those departments to allow for a continuity of the union at the departmental level.  We need to produce a set of organizational models that allow for a lot of folks to play the part of activists, while completing their education, rather than a few specialists that move on to work for the international of the union.   These questions will not be resolved by the simple application of enthusiasm to a model that destroys with its tail what its front parts are trying to create (returning to the lizard model.)

tentative notes on the state of the union

       I haven't written as much as I would have liked to do in the past couple of months.  I've been distracted by my work for the union, and the effort to produce a movement to defend public education at both the local level, as well as the state level.  Within that context, I thought it might be worth briefly discussing what's been going on within the Irvine branch of the local.  Most of my postings about the local have been polemical in nature, focusing on the conflicts with the former leadership or conflicts with the former leadership, but this posting is going to be a little more open ended.  To put it simply, our reform group, AWDU has been in charge of the local for the past quarter.  At this point, it might be worth asking what we have accomplished at this point.  I'm not going to get into the larger debates about the state, although some of the concerns around the Irvine campus may tie into larger concerns around the campus.

          To start off with some of the positive aspects of the past few months, the Irvine branch has managed to produce a fairly large activist base.  We currently have a listserve with about thirty activists on it, and, for the first time in years, we actually have all of our Joint Council positions filled.  Additionally, we have a number of steward positions filled by activists.  This has translated into monthly membership meetings with large numbers, the attempt to organize a number of committees to focus on campus issues, and a number of cultural events.  The former leadership at our campus always insisted that the Irvine campus was intrinsically conservative, and the rank and file preferred to let a small group of people make the decisions for the union, but I think the recent shifts point to the fact that this may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy.  We still have a lot of work on this front, particularly within the natural sciences, but the shift in the local has been considerable.

      The local branch of the union has also been involved in the attempt to recreate the coalition to defend public education that more or less fell apart after the large demonstrations in March.  In this regard, there has been some meaningful success.  Despite the fact that the Irvine campus hasn't seen the drama and militancy that has been seen on the Davis, Irvine, and Santa Cruz campuses, the campus has managed to produce a significant coalition space, and has also managed to organize protests, and contribute to the protest against the California State University trustees in Long Beach, as well the UCLA regents meeting.  The direction of this coalition and its sustainability is still very much in the air.  A number of the issues that destroyed the 2009-2010 coalition, particularly around the issue of race and perhaps more specifically, the colonial legacy of the term 'occupation' and the attempt by one participant to argue for a focus on economics, rather than race, revealed themselves in the last general meeting. (a lot more needs to be said here, particularly around the need for us to meaningfully commit to anti-racist politics, but I feel neither the ability to take this on now.)  Within that context, the concept of 'occupation' is still viewed with a deep suspicion on the part of many of the undergraduate organizers, particularly the activists of color.  Furthermore, the movement has not linked itself to the broad student body despite a successful demonstration of about 300-500 people.  We managed to accomplish quite a bit in the past months, but we're going to need to launch a massive educational event, and perhaps more significantly, create forms of militancy that don't mirror the protests of the northern campuses.  (We also need to learn how to run better meetings, and call people on their nonsense, as well.)

       As a brief side note, the guilty verdict for the Irvine 11 has played a considerable chilling effect on much of the campus.  That verdict led to the choice on the part of the Irvine 19 to take plea deals, as well as making prosecution a much more real threat for on campus activism.

     Moving away from the question of coalition activism to day to day rank and file activism, we can see another substantial problem.  As I previously noted, the local unit has done a very good job of recruiting a powerful activist base, one that exists primarily in the social sciences and the humanities, but having representation throughout the disciplines.  The next step, making the union a presence in the workplace of the rank and file, has not yet occurred.  The AWDU group was able to successfully out organize the lone USEJ representative through a combination of resentments around the last contract, and more significantly, the variety of informal social networks.  That set of networks continued to produce an activist base for the campus, but efforts to move beyond this situation have been less successful, particularly in bringing in new membership, and more significantly, translating the right to collective bargaining into on the ground worker's power.  I don't want to say that this problem hasn't been implicitly recognized by the group, but the effort to create subcommittees hasn't translated into practical action, and the proposed organizing committee and departmental meetings have yet to occur.  We were right to reject the representational structure that the former leadership operated under, a structure that operated on an instrumental logic, but we haven't as of yet come up with alternative structures.  This seems to be the central question, along with the need to produce a new student movement in Irvine.