of strikes, settlements, and longues dureés

The TWU and the MTA have settled their contract.

Today marks the beginning of the eighth week of GSOC's strike at NYU.

I'm under the impression that this is now, entering its eighth week, likely the longest job action at a private university in the history of the graduate student labor movement, unless one of those campaigns in the '70s involved a protracted stoppage that I've never heard of.

The 1995-1996 Yale grade strike, in which the administration and professors all to happy to do Levin's dirty work threatened their students with the same shit Sexton threatened us with - the loss of teaching positions for the spring semester, a.k.a. a lockout, began on December 8th and ended on January 15th '96 after the administration put three women - leaders of the union (two of whom were international students and two of whom were women of color) through kangaroo court show trials threatening possible deportation for the international students and a similar end to graduate study for the third woman and, indeed, any teacher who continued to withhold fall semester grades.

The grade strike was a watershed moment in Yale's labor history, but also in the history of the academic labor movement. It's generally recorded as a loss, in which the union was taken by surprise by the brutal response of liberal faculty and progressive historians and theorists all too willing to become union busting Yeshiva-style managerial agents when they believed that their own power and prestige might be threatened by the specter of collective bargaining. But it was also a moment which, by some accounts, profoundly changed the way that GESO organized and helped to rekindle the gradate student labor movement across the country. By one account, what became GSOC began after a couple NYU grad students went up to New Haven for the 1996 "People's Graduation" on the green, with Jesse Jackson and puppets, talked to GESO folks, and realized that they needed a union too.

So now we're heading into a semester in which many may find themselves locked out of teaching positions and forced to work multiple jobs, or take out large loans in order to stay in grad school and/or remain in the country. I feel a little weird, because as a first year student, I'm not at risk - assuming I finishing my papers from last semester, which is what I've been spending all of break thus far attempting unsuccesfully to do. But I will do everything i possibly can, rat or no rat, to continue this fight and build this movement. And now i need to get back to work.