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.
Showing posts with label University of California. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of California. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Photos of the November 9th rally in support of public education in Irvine
In response to proposed tuition increases, protests took place across the UC system. For more information about the current situation, I would recommend UC Santa Cruz's website. The UCI protest didn't have the spectacular dimensions seen at UCLA or Berkeley. We stayed on campus, and didn't attempt anything ambitious as an encampment, but we managed to have a fairly successful protest. We estimate that we probably had about 600 people involved in the event over a span of three hours. I thought that it might be more interesting if I offered some photos of the event, rather than narrate it. These photos are roughly in chronological order, moving from the set up of the rally, through the speakers, and onto the march. I was busy with the bullhorn, so I don't have as many pictures of the march itself. I'm going to let the pictures speak for themselves, but feel free to ask questions in the comments section
Monday, September 26, 2011
Building Occupations?
I've been thinking about the tactic of building occupation recently. Given the recent events, this isn't terribly surprising. One might go as far as to say my focus on the subject is tedious and predictable. In any case, the police response to the recent Tolman occupation has produced the usual assortment of videos along with this particularly overwrought 'analysis.' (Someone needs to gently pry the well thumbed copy of the collected works of Guy Debord out of the assembled hands of the occupationist, demand nothing crowd.) My blase response to this kerfuffle is not meant to dismiss the experience of the folks who got manhandled by the police. While these acts of police violence are pretty mild compared to other forms of state violence, getting pepper-sprayed, hit by batons, and tackled/arrested isn't a whole lot of fun. Neither am I dismissing the political project contained in the action. On the contrary, I was glad to see our Berkeley comrades give the somewhat moribund defense of public education movement some well needed energy. Instead, the response comes out of the fact that the entire narrative of the event has become so predictable.
I understand that this response may come across badly. After all, we don't have social movements to provide jaded intellectuals new forms of entertainment, but let me make a political argument regarding this predictability. The initial occupations produced a real burst of energy for the 2009 movement. They put the California movement on the map internationally, and shifted the terrain of debate within the movement. As much as I hated the overripe prose of the movement, the initial organizers understood the need to create powerful images to drive the protests, and brought in a playfulness in their political theater that brought in a wide variety of subcultural groups into the Northern California events. But more than anything else, they brought a certain level of novelty into the movement. The police weren't really sure what to do with these kids who were occupying fairly random buildings, bringing out enormous crowds of undergrads, and generally not showing the forms of stultified cooperation that has seeped into so much of protest culture. I don't want to slip into nostalgia for those times. There were a lot of mistakes made, and frankly, the early organizers left quite a bit of a mess behind both literally and figuratively for more conventional activists to clean up. But they did something new for the movement, and shook some cobwebs off in ways that we all had to respond to.
Two years later, building occupation is no longer all that surprising. Indeed, the UCI police recently organized a training around the tactic. (See here) In effect, the act of occupation has shifted from novelty to an expectation of daily life. Rather than seeing that as a success, I think that we might want to see this fact as a signpost for the predictability of our tactics. The police have decoded the narrative, and are ready and waiting for us. At the same time, I'm not suggesting that we return to the predictable old forms of protest. I've spent too many hours walking in circles, carrying signs, and saying the same chants. Instead, I think we need to rethink our modes of militancy. Instead of direct confrontation and static conflicts over specific location, perhaps we should try to attempt to hold onto the benefits of mobility, flexibility, and retain our right to a myriad of lines of flight. With a few exceptions, the police are going to win those static fights. They have tactics and tools at hand to deal with them. (For further discussion, take a look at this intervention.) If we go back to the original occupations, the actions proved that one location is as good as another. One doesn't need to confront some imaginary sovereign in the administration building to produce an effect. Why don't we push this further through a multiplication of targets, temporary engagement, and a refusal to trap ourselves in one location. Clearly, the full meaning of such an approach can only be produced in the struggle itself, but our emotional investment in static and losing confrontations can be gotten rid of much sooner.
I want to make it clear that we need to discuss a lot more than tactics. We need to discuss our forms of organization, our relations with allies, our forms of popular education, but those are best left for another discussion.... at least for now.
I understand that this response may come across badly. After all, we don't have social movements to provide jaded intellectuals new forms of entertainment, but let me make a political argument regarding this predictability. The initial occupations produced a real burst of energy for the 2009 movement. They put the California movement on the map internationally, and shifted the terrain of debate within the movement. As much as I hated the overripe prose of the movement, the initial organizers understood the need to create powerful images to drive the protests, and brought in a playfulness in their political theater that brought in a wide variety of subcultural groups into the Northern California events. But more than anything else, they brought a certain level of novelty into the movement. The police weren't really sure what to do with these kids who were occupying fairly random buildings, bringing out enormous crowds of undergrads, and generally not showing the forms of stultified cooperation that has seeped into so much of protest culture. I don't want to slip into nostalgia for those times. There were a lot of mistakes made, and frankly, the early organizers left quite a bit of a mess behind both literally and figuratively for more conventional activists to clean up. But they did something new for the movement, and shook some cobwebs off in ways that we all had to respond to.
Two years later, building occupation is no longer all that surprising. Indeed, the UCI police recently organized a training around the tactic. (See here) In effect, the act of occupation has shifted from novelty to an expectation of daily life. Rather than seeing that as a success, I think that we might want to see this fact as a signpost for the predictability of our tactics. The police have decoded the narrative, and are ready and waiting for us. At the same time, I'm not suggesting that we return to the predictable old forms of protest. I've spent too many hours walking in circles, carrying signs, and saying the same chants. Instead, I think we need to rethink our modes of militancy. Instead of direct confrontation and static conflicts over specific location, perhaps we should try to attempt to hold onto the benefits of mobility, flexibility, and retain our right to a myriad of lines of flight. With a few exceptions, the police are going to win those static fights. They have tactics and tools at hand to deal with them. (For further discussion, take a look at this intervention.) If we go back to the original occupations, the actions proved that one location is as good as another. One doesn't need to confront some imaginary sovereign in the administration building to produce an effect. Why don't we push this further through a multiplication of targets, temporary engagement, and a refusal to trap ourselves in one location. Clearly, the full meaning of such an approach can only be produced in the struggle itself, but our emotional investment in static and losing confrontations can be gotten rid of much sooner.
I want to make it clear that we need to discuss a lot more than tactics. We need to discuss our forms of organization, our relations with allies, our forms of popular education, but those are best left for another discussion.... at least for now.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
University of California-Irvine lays off 1/3 of its janitors
I'm going to try to keep this posting relatively brief. Over the past few years, there has been a fairly significant labor struggle occurring at University of California-Irvine. UCI is the last of the UC system to use outsourced labor. At one point, both the landscape and the janitorial workers were outsourced, but after a long and fairly painful struggle on the part of an alliance of workers, AFSCME 3299, and the Worker-Student Alliance, the landscape workers were insourced as union employees. The struggle then turned to insource the janitorial workers, a struggle that continues to this day. A number of the significant actions of the budget cuts struggles at UCI focused on these struggles, and the political alliance at the heart of the insourcing campaign played a significant role in pushing those struggles forward. However, the campaign has been blockaded by the administration through its use of dissemblance and deception, at times, claiming that the workers were in the process of being insourced, while continuing the policies of outsourcing labor, at times through the use of rumor and innuendo to break up political alliances in solidarity with the workers. (In all fairness, the activist community has made significant contributions to these fractures on their own.) Additionally, the university has threatened to use the largely Latino work force's legal status as a way of stopping the calls for insourcing, posing legal and INS sanctions as the consequence of making these demands. (This calls for a longer conversation that I can't deal with at the moment.)
I wanted to open with that context to establish that the university's actions around the janitorial workers can't be simply understood in some sort of reductivist economic context. They are defined by the long struggle that started long before the existence of the current economic crisis. Recently it looked like there may be the possibility of a breakthrough in these negotiations. The university had sent a set of proposals to the union for insourcing the workers. To be sure, the proposal was terrible, and was part of a long series of university proposals that were never followed through on, but it was the first time that a plan was actually put into writing. Unfortunately, the university followed that proposal with a set of lay offs that went into effect last Tuesday, laying of 49 workers, about one third of the janitorial workforce. Within this context, it's difficult to see this action as one in a long series of betrayals on the part of the university to its lowest paid workers. If these lay-offs are allowed to stay in place, the already heavily burdened janitorial workforce will have to take on more work, creating health and safety concerns for both the workers and the entire university community. Even before the lay-offs, labs and classrooms were cleaned infrequently, and the loss of more workers is bound to make the situation even worse.
AFSCME has some good information on the health and safety issues that I can put up if folks are interested, but at a basic level, we should simply fight these lay offs out of a solidarity with our fellow workers, and as a fight against the racism of the university. Please write Chancellor Michael Drake at chancellor@uci.edu or call his office at (949) 824-5111 to protest the recent lay-offs and to call for the insourcing of all UCI janitorial workers without preconditions.
I wanted to open with that context to establish that the university's actions around the janitorial workers can't be simply understood in some sort of reductivist economic context. They are defined by the long struggle that started long before the existence of the current economic crisis. Recently it looked like there may be the possibility of a breakthrough in these negotiations. The university had sent a set of proposals to the union for insourcing the workers. To be sure, the proposal was terrible, and was part of a long series of university proposals that were never followed through on, but it was the first time that a plan was actually put into writing. Unfortunately, the university followed that proposal with a set of lay offs that went into effect last Tuesday, laying of 49 workers, about one third of the janitorial workforce. Within this context, it's difficult to see this action as one in a long series of betrayals on the part of the university to its lowest paid workers. If these lay-offs are allowed to stay in place, the already heavily burdened janitorial workforce will have to take on more work, creating health and safety concerns for both the workers and the entire university community. Even before the lay-offs, labs and classrooms were cleaned infrequently, and the loss of more workers is bound to make the situation even worse.
AFSCME has some good information on the health and safety issues that I can put up if folks are interested, but at a basic level, we should simply fight these lay offs out of a solidarity with our fellow workers, and as a fight against the racism of the university. Please write Chancellor Michael Drake at chancellor@uci.edu or call his office at (949) 824-5111 to protest the recent lay-offs and to call for the insourcing of all UCI janitorial workers without preconditions.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
A Joint Council Meeting That Wasn't Like Being Tortured By Monkeys
Remarkably enough, there was very little strife at the last Joint Council meeting. We managed to meet for over six hours, engage in a number of brainstorming exercises about the future of the union, and collaborate in decision making processes. We even managed to discuss possible bylaws changes, and pass a tentative budget. If we manage to make this meeting a precedent, the Joint Council might actually become a functioning decision making body. Most of the work that we accomplished yesterday constituted a set of beginning conversations, and will require a lot of continued effort to put into effect. We discussed the initial conversations from a set of committees created during the statewide meeting, and solidified their membership. These committees ranged from issues around internal organizing, the creation of alliances with other social movements and unions, communications, and the need to rebuild the public education movement. Additionally, we're going to work on producing a statement of vision for the next three years that should be discussed and revised by the various units of the union. We also committed money and energy for the upcoming orientation meetings, as well as for activist trainings. In effect, we have created a set of potentialities, which may lead to something remarkable, but those potentialities are dependent on both the focused energies of the JC and our ability to convince the rank and file of the union that they should move from their current disengagement to an active and participatory collective engagement. It's easy to be skeptical of the ability of grad students to make this great shift in collective political behavior, but the Berkeley unit has managed to construct a strong and cohesive presence on campus only after a few years of work, and moved from a campus with almost no union presence to a strong and thriving participatory union culture. We should learn from them and work to translate their success on to our own campuses.
Perhaps, some of my optimism comes from the behavior of the USEJ members of the council. As some might remember, my last comments about that particular formation were not exactly positive. However, aside from a few mean spirited off hand comments from one member, their activists contributed in a largely positive manner to the proceedings. In all fairness, the opposition was outnumbered in the proceedings by almost two to one throughout the meeting, which meant that they didn't have a great deal of power in voting terms, even within the context of Robert's Rules of Order, but a similar situation in the Statewide meeting didn't stop their attempt to disrupt the meeting. The difference in the group's approach at the meetings was startling, moving from wildly oppositional and monolithic approach to a more constructive, if detached approach. Perhaps more significantly, the group didn't vote as a block, and there were a number of moments when a number of USEJ folks supported our motions and contributed to their revision. Although their caucus began the meeting in the back of the room, a number of individuals began to move up to participate more fully in decisions, breaking away from the older leadership sitting in back. One could still see differences in approach in the meeting, as the opposition was happy with some of the open ended conversations that were held in the meeting and were unhappy with a couple financial decisions, but it would be wildly unfair to criticize any of that opposition. My hope is that as we go through the year the USEJ folks will get used to some of the messiness involved in deliberative democracy, and they will continue to provide the type of opposition at this meeting.
Before a Labor Notes discussion earlier in the year, I had commented to a colleague that the title of the panel, Fighting Unions, had applied to our ability to fight each other, but that we had not shown much ability to actually fight the boss. Perhaps, the last meeting gestures to the possibility that we will learn that skill as well. I hope so.
Perhaps, some of my optimism comes from the behavior of the USEJ members of the council. As some might remember, my last comments about that particular formation were not exactly positive. However, aside from a few mean spirited off hand comments from one member, their activists contributed in a largely positive manner to the proceedings. In all fairness, the opposition was outnumbered in the proceedings by almost two to one throughout the meeting, which meant that they didn't have a great deal of power in voting terms, even within the context of Robert's Rules of Order, but a similar situation in the Statewide meeting didn't stop their attempt to disrupt the meeting. The difference in the group's approach at the meetings was startling, moving from wildly oppositional and monolithic approach to a more constructive, if detached approach. Perhaps more significantly, the group didn't vote as a block, and there were a number of moments when a number of USEJ folks supported our motions and contributed to their revision. Although their caucus began the meeting in the back of the room, a number of individuals began to move up to participate more fully in decisions, breaking away from the older leadership sitting in back. One could still see differences in approach in the meeting, as the opposition was happy with some of the open ended conversations that were held in the meeting and were unhappy with a couple financial decisions, but it would be wildly unfair to criticize any of that opposition. My hope is that as we go through the year the USEJ folks will get used to some of the messiness involved in deliberative democracy, and they will continue to provide the type of opposition at this meeting.
Before a Labor Notes discussion earlier in the year, I had commented to a colleague that the title of the panel, Fighting Unions, had applied to our ability to fight each other, but that we had not shown much ability to actually fight the boss. Perhaps, the last meeting gestures to the possibility that we will learn that skill as well. I hope so.
Monday, April 25, 2011
An unpublished editorial written in support of the AWDU slate.
This was initially written as a collective editorial to go in our not so good local school paper. Since it was ignored, I will publish it here, which may get more attention from grad students anyways....
On April 26th-28th, the United Auto Workers 2865, the union for graders, tutors and teaching assistants, will be having its triennial election. This means that all positions within the union, from top to bottom, are up for election, and for the first time in the history of the union, nearly all of those offices are contested. Aside from a few exceptions, the election is between two slates, the incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice Slate and the challenging Academic Workers for a Democratic Union Slate. As the candidates of the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union slate, we’re excited that the rank and file membership has the opportunity to choose between two very different visions of the union in this upcoming election.
Most of us had gotten involved in the union during the debate over the recently ratified contract. We were concerned that the process of negotiating the contract was being undertaken in a manner that left out the concerns and participation of the rank and file membership. Additionally, the information that was provided by the leadership on the negotiation process was often lacking in clarity and detail. The leadership seemed to have forgotten that good contracts are not won by a small group of clever individuals at the bargaining table, but by the collective effort of the entire union. For us, a strong contract could only be negotiated with the collaboration and active participation of the rank and file of the union. We had spent the previous year fighting the university’s administration in the fight against the tuition increases and the budget cuts, and we were distressed to see some of the same forms of obfuscation and deception on the part of our leadership used by the administration.
Additionally, there was very little active union participation on the part of the Irvine branch in the past two years. As the Irvine campuses saw an unprecedented level of activity on its campus, and some of the largest protests in its recent history around the budget cuts, the union played little to no role in the organization of these events. It largely stayed out of the large coalition of students, workers, and professors that formed over that year. At the more immediate level of the economic life of graduate students, the majority of the bargaining team chose to ignore the issue of graduate housing, which is a major concern on this campus. Despite the fact that only 10% of graduate students have affordable housing, the issue was not considered worthwhile in the bargaining process. That issue, along with the lack of substantial economic gains caused us to oppose the contract, and the majority of our campus voted against the contract.
A group of us then decided to run for the elected positions of the union to finally have a meaningful union presence on campus, and have held elected office for the past two months. Within that time, we have worked to organize department meetings, helped organize a public social event for the union, and played a major role in coordinating the March rally against the budget cuts. We are working to make our local union play a larger role in the defense of public education in the state, coordinating with student groups and other unions on our campus. We are currently in the process of organizing campaigns to deal with the issue of the workload of our members on campus, and see this as a campaign to both defend our position as workers and students, and to defend the quality of education on the campus. We are also beginning a campaign to demand more affordable housing for students on this campus.
As we had mentioned before, the current election gives the graduate students the choice between two very different visions of the union. The current leadership has moved increasingly in the direction of running the union in a top down fashion. It’s notable that three out of four of their top candidates are no longer graduate students themselves. Ten out of twelve of the paid staff members are running on the United for Social and Economic Justice slate, including the candidate for the Irvine Unit Chair, Coral Wheeler. This vision of the union emphasizes a decision making process taken on by a small number of paid ‘experts’ with a largely passive membership. Our slate wants to reverse that trend within the union to move to a far more member run organization, allowing more decision-making power on the individual campuses and a process of decision making that is membership led. We feel that participatory democracy is not only a more ethical approach to running the union, but that this process will also produce a stronger union. It is only when the rank and file feels that they can participate in the decisions of the union that they will become active members. We encourage you to vote for the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, April 26th-28th. For more information, see awdu.org.
Monday, November 29, 2010
On The UAW (My thoughts, a day late and a dollar short)
There has been an unusual amount material about the proposed contract between grad students (represented by UAW 2865) and the university. Most notably, a number of the members of the bargaining team are calling for a no vote on the contract. Here's their response if you want to take a look. However the concerns about the contract can be broken down into two categories, more or less. The first set of concerns focus on the nature of bargaining. They argue that the membership was not properly informed about the bargaining process, and that the power of that membership was not utilized when the bargaining process got sticky. The second argument is that the gains from the contract were minimal and insufficient given grad students economic circumstances. The team got a 2% raise, but that was after no raise last year, and very little in the way of raises before that. In effect, the raise doesn't even meet the costs of inflation and increased inflation. In addition, the other gains were minimal. For instance, we still don't have a full fee remittance, and although childcare subsidies increased, they only cover 10% of the cost of childcare.
The argument on the yes side is fairly simple. They focus on the turbulent political situation, and argue that this is the best that we can do at this in the crisis. The problem with this argument is that it buys into the lie of the crisis. The bargaining team refuses to ask why is it that the upper administration is giving itself millions of dollars in bonuses at this moment of crisis, or why the university is taking up extensive building projects. To put it simply, they refuse to challenge the lie of that narrative, and if we accept the lie, we simply become another cog in the retrenchment of class power.
Those who defend the contract can ask two legitimate questions in response. First, if the bargaining committee had called upon the rank and file to act, would they have been willing to put in the time and energy that would be needed to succeed in such a campaign? Second, could we have challenged the narrative of 'crisis' given our isolation, both as public employees, and as participants in the university? Those questions are legitimate. To begin, any alternative narrative presented about bargaining operates at the logic of a counter-factual. We can never know what would have happened if we did something different. More significantly, I'm less convinced than some of the no vote folks that the current political terrain is somehow defined by a militant and engaged rank and file being stifled by a repressive union bureaucracy. My experiences with organizing on campus tend to gesture towards a rank and file that will sign a union card on the premise that the union will take of the business of the contract and grievances. However, we should remember that that process was produced by the forms of organizing, as well as our hours of work.
The problem is that the bargaining process never gave the rank and file the opportunity to act in their own interest. Rather than giving us as workers the chance to get involved in the bargaining process, through coherent reports on the bargaining process and through campus activities such as protests, grade-ins, etc. Those actions could have been used as a pedagogical process, moving towards an active participatory notion of membership, as well as a possible strike. In effect, the bargaining committee, through not engaging in those processes, forgot that our ability to get a good contract depends on the strength of our rank and file, not the clever skills of the fifteen members of the bargaining committee, the officials of the union, or lawyers. We can never know what would have come out of such a process, but we would have won or lost on the strength we bring to the table as a union, not as an economic interest group being represented by its lobbyists. Those on the sideline would be put into a position where they perhaps would have taken action, would have recognized the need to be active union members.
As a last note, there has been a bit of backlash to the no campaign on the part of folks who support the official position. Their website is here. There argument is not much more substantial than the one that I list above. But, they make a second argument in support of the campaign through the logic of grievance. They point to a set of incidents where no vote folks have attacked the bargaining committee, particularly around their intentions. I don't know about the veracity of these events, but I don't find them particularly surprising. After all, those who were openly opposed to the closed structure of bargaining have been cut out of the process, and there are no votes folks who have lost and are in danger of losing their position because they have challenged that process.
But despite that, I actually agree with them. I see no reason to challenge the intentions of the bargaining team. I suspect that they see their closed approach to bargaining as the strongest approach to the process, because of their belief in experts, because of their distrust of the rank and file, etc. These factor lead them to believe that they have gotten the best possible contract out of the process. In addition, the kind of bargaining we have seen is a dominant form of bargaining in the country. WHICH IS WHY IT IS WRONG. This kind of unionism, business unionism, a unionism dependent on the activities of a small group of experts representing a largely inactive rank and file, has devastated the level of union power in the United States. The level of union representation of the United States has gone from 35% to less than 10% in the past thirty years because of this logic.
More significantly, all major gains in union power have occurred because of the sacrifices and militancy of rank and file power. The current dominant logic of the unions has pissed away the blood and sacrifice of those women and men through this inaction. Whatever their intentions, the effect of the policies of business unionism has been the wholesale destruction of working class power. Perhaps after three decades of capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the basis of a long dead post war labor peace, we can recognize ineffectiveness of this approach to union organizing within the context of neo-liberalism. For those who are interested in looking into this with more detail, I recommend the work of Kim West, as well as the work of Bill Fletcher.
That is why I am recommending a NO vote on the current contract. The only legitimate basis of labor struggle is based upon the active participation of the rank and file. Democracy is the process of making decisions collectively, not the simple passive act of voting on a contract. We need to go to the table again to bargain on that basis. I think that we are capable of remarkable things when we act, and perhaps we should give ourselves the chance to do so.
The argument on the yes side is fairly simple. They focus on the turbulent political situation, and argue that this is the best that we can do at this in the crisis. The problem with this argument is that it buys into the lie of the crisis. The bargaining team refuses to ask why is it that the upper administration is giving itself millions of dollars in bonuses at this moment of crisis, or why the university is taking up extensive building projects. To put it simply, they refuse to challenge the lie of that narrative, and if we accept the lie, we simply become another cog in the retrenchment of class power.
Those who defend the contract can ask two legitimate questions in response. First, if the bargaining committee had called upon the rank and file to act, would they have been willing to put in the time and energy that would be needed to succeed in such a campaign? Second, could we have challenged the narrative of 'crisis' given our isolation, both as public employees, and as participants in the university? Those questions are legitimate. To begin, any alternative narrative presented about bargaining operates at the logic of a counter-factual. We can never know what would have happened if we did something different. More significantly, I'm less convinced than some of the no vote folks that the current political terrain is somehow defined by a militant and engaged rank and file being stifled by a repressive union bureaucracy. My experiences with organizing on campus tend to gesture towards a rank and file that will sign a union card on the premise that the union will take of the business of the contract and grievances. However, we should remember that that process was produced by the forms of organizing, as well as our hours of work.
The problem is that the bargaining process never gave the rank and file the opportunity to act in their own interest. Rather than giving us as workers the chance to get involved in the bargaining process, through coherent reports on the bargaining process and through campus activities such as protests, grade-ins, etc. Those actions could have been used as a pedagogical process, moving towards an active participatory notion of membership, as well as a possible strike. In effect, the bargaining committee, through not engaging in those processes, forgot that our ability to get a good contract depends on the strength of our rank and file, not the clever skills of the fifteen members of the bargaining committee, the officials of the union, or lawyers. We can never know what would have come out of such a process, but we would have won or lost on the strength we bring to the table as a union, not as an economic interest group being represented by its lobbyists. Those on the sideline would be put into a position where they perhaps would have taken action, would have recognized the need to be active union members.
As a last note, there has been a bit of backlash to the no campaign on the part of folks who support the official position. Their website is here. There argument is not much more substantial than the one that I list above. But, they make a second argument in support of the campaign through the logic of grievance. They point to a set of incidents where no vote folks have attacked the bargaining committee, particularly around their intentions. I don't know about the veracity of these events, but I don't find them particularly surprising. After all, those who were openly opposed to the closed structure of bargaining have been cut out of the process, and there are no votes folks who have lost and are in danger of losing their position because they have challenged that process.
But despite that, I actually agree with them. I see no reason to challenge the intentions of the bargaining team. I suspect that they see their closed approach to bargaining as the strongest approach to the process, because of their belief in experts, because of their distrust of the rank and file, etc. These factor lead them to believe that they have gotten the best possible contract out of the process. In addition, the kind of bargaining we have seen is a dominant form of bargaining in the country. WHICH IS WHY IT IS WRONG. This kind of unionism, business unionism, a unionism dependent on the activities of a small group of experts representing a largely inactive rank and file, has devastated the level of union power in the United States. The level of union representation of the United States has gone from 35% to less than 10% in the past thirty years because of this logic.
More significantly, all major gains in union power have occurred because of the sacrifices and militancy of rank and file power. The current dominant logic of the unions has pissed away the blood and sacrifice of those women and men through this inaction. Whatever their intentions, the effect of the policies of business unionism has been the wholesale destruction of working class power. Perhaps after three decades of capitulation to the bourgeoisie on the basis of a long dead post war labor peace, we can recognize ineffectiveness of this approach to union organizing within the context of neo-liberalism. For those who are interested in looking into this with more detail, I recommend the work of Kim West, as well as the work of Bill Fletcher.
That is why I am recommending a NO vote on the current contract. The only legitimate basis of labor struggle is based upon the active participation of the rank and file. Democracy is the process of making decisions collectively, not the simple passive act of voting on a contract. We need to go to the table again to bargain on that basis. I think that we are capable of remarkable things when we act, and perhaps we should give ourselves the chance to do so.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
October 7th
So, another state-wide day of action has been called for on October 7th in response to the continuing privatization of education. As far as I can tell, there has been very little discussion about planning something within the Irvine context, and I am a little concerned about that. We had some very impressive events last year, as well as some fairly substantial conflicts. At this point, the substantial alliance that produced the February sit-in and other events seems to have fallen apart, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in reviving or replacing it. (In all fairness, I think that it is very possible that substantial organizing can occur here without my notice. I'm not hopeful that this is the case, though.)
We should recognize that the same crisis in state funding is still in effect, and the University of California's upper administration is still largely committed to the logic of privatization. The student movement was really the only effective counter-measure to those forces, and most likely, we would have seen much more draconian actions if it hadn't occurred. I am genuinely concerned at what that administration would accomplish if we don't continue to put pressure on them.
At the same time, I don't want to paper over the real problems with the movement, particularly around issues of sexism and racism within its ranks. We have repeatedly gestured towards the need for an intersectional analysis, but that analysis has often been overwhelmed by the nostalgia for the often very problematic master plan, as well the post-war public research university. Our relationship to those institutions differ profoundly depending how we are racialized and gendered as subjects. At the heart of this, is a need to think through the way that the public research university, simultaneously allowed for the inclusion of working class students, as well as its contribution to reinforcement of the logic of white supremacy. (Without a doubt more needs to be written here, and that analysis needs to hold onto a number of intersecting categories to be useful.)
I want to keep this posting brief, so I will end with some questions for the probably not too large group of folks reading this. Do you think that a continued student movement (a very problematic term that stands in for a movement that has included actions by workers, professors, as well as students.)is necessary? If so, how can that process be revived in the UCI context? What are the conversations going on outside of our little cul de sac, in the other UC schools, outside the state? I'm not sure if I will hear from anyone, as that I've just started this blog, but I thought I would toss out the question.
In addition, I want to make it clear that aside from a vague sense that we need confrontational activism on the campus, I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. They are posed from a position of ignorance, and not that fake ignorance that Socrates takes on in the dialogues.
We should recognize that the same crisis in state funding is still in effect, and the University of California's upper administration is still largely committed to the logic of privatization. The student movement was really the only effective counter-measure to those forces, and most likely, we would have seen much more draconian actions if it hadn't occurred. I am genuinely concerned at what that administration would accomplish if we don't continue to put pressure on them.
At the same time, I don't want to paper over the real problems with the movement, particularly around issues of sexism and racism within its ranks. We have repeatedly gestured towards the need for an intersectional analysis, but that analysis has often been overwhelmed by the nostalgia for the often very problematic master plan, as well the post-war public research university. Our relationship to those institutions differ profoundly depending how we are racialized and gendered as subjects. At the heart of this, is a need to think through the way that the public research university, simultaneously allowed for the inclusion of working class students, as well as its contribution to reinforcement of the logic of white supremacy. (Without a doubt more needs to be written here, and that analysis needs to hold onto a number of intersecting categories to be useful.)
I want to keep this posting brief, so I will end with some questions for the probably not too large group of folks reading this. Do you think that a continued student movement (a very problematic term that stands in for a movement that has included actions by workers, professors, as well as students.)is necessary? If so, how can that process be revived in the UCI context? What are the conversations going on outside of our little cul de sac, in the other UC schools, outside the state? I'm not sure if I will hear from anyone, as that I've just started this blog, but I thought I would toss out the question.
In addition, I want to make it clear that aside from a vague sense that we need confrontational activism on the campus, I'm not sure what the answers are to these questions. They are posed from a position of ignorance, and not that fake ignorance that Socrates takes on in the dialogues.
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