"The preservation of management rights is our goal, whether prior to a union
offensive, during a union-organizing campaign or in collective bargaining
negotiations."
What, we wonder, brought on this change? Have the folks at Proskauer lost their touch? Is NYU reconsidering its strike strategy?
Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Joan Scott, Talal Asad, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Donna Haraway have written a letter to John Sexton, one of the hundreds pouring in from across the academy and labor movement.
December 2, 2005
John Sexton
President, New York University
We, the undersigned
faculty from several universities in the United States and abroad, write to
express our objections to the New York University administration's efforts to
defeat the graduate student union and retaliate against those who have initiated
and sustained the current strike. The union in question was clearly instated on
the basis of a fair election which then obligated New York University to
negotiate with the appointed representatives in a fair and open manner. Although
the NLRB in 2005 released the university from its obligations to recognize the
union, it did not authorize retaliatory action on the part of the
university.The recent actions of your office, now widely publicized, defy
all protocols of civility and fairness and herald a bellicose approach to the
union and its demands for fair wages, decent health care, and provisional job
security.
As we all know, there may be differences of
opinion on how best to formulate policies that would address these various
issues, but undermining the union itself is nothing more than Reagan-esque
union-busting and so conveys and enacts hostility to student labor that can only
heighten conflict and circulate a ruinous image for New York University as an
unfair and indecent place of employment. The infiltration of student and faculty
email constitutes an unauthorized invasion of privacy. And the most recent
threat to rescind funding for students engaged in the strike constitutes an
abhorrent form of coercion.
We urge you to enter into negotiations with
the union and to find civil, legal, and productive ways of resolving whatever
issues of employment exist between these two parties.
Yesterday, during the fantatsic labor rally in which we shut down West 4th street for an entire block as workers from all corners of the labor movement came to support our struggle, one of the GESO folks handed me a another letter to Sexton written by the Yale American Studies folks and signed by a number of folks who've played formative roles in shaping my intellectual trajectories and organizing commitments. It read:
Dear President Sexton,
We, the undersigned graduate students and faculty in Yale University's
Program in American Studies, are deeply troubled by your response to GSOC's
ongoing strike. By making no-strike commitments prerequisites to holding
graduate teaching positions at NYU, you have compromised the principles of
workplace democracy and academic freedom that we hold vital to a healthy
university.
Sincerely
(signed by 37 members of the department.)
This Monday, we're staying out in the face of administrative attempts to break our strike and crush our union. Folks are scared, and my own cohort is deeply divided. Or, uh, Divided from me, at least, which is largely my fault, i think. But in the last few days I've noticed several things. First, we are starting to become a real union. People are forging strong commitments to each other across departments and disciplines. Computer Scientists, physicists, and queer theorists are forging deep solidarities and making commitments to each other to see eachother through this. The second and related development is this incredible stregnth which people are showing to each other. At a GSOC party in Greenpoint last night (the third of the night -- a union that drinks together strikes together, it seems) someone who's overcome a deeply hostile department and a uniquely and frighteningly contingent and transient employment status to become a powerful organizer committed to staying out until we win told me "We're still on strike. Despite all the bastards, we're still on strike."
Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson, Joan Scott, Talal Asad, Gayatri Spivak, Paul Gilroy, and Donna Haraway did NOT write that letter.
ReplyDeleteBecause if those people actually got together to write a letter, it would be SO less comprehensible. I've got lots of respect for them and all, but that's honestly the first thing I've ever read by any of them I fully undersatnd.
Cheers,
Thomas
Jameson I would believe. Good point about Butler and Spivak though.
ReplyDeletePaul Gilroy, at any rate, is somewhat more comprehensible in writing, when he actually provides footnotes to the esoterica he brilliantly references in person. I must admit I am less familiar with the work of Scott and Asad.
Patentgate ~ I wonder if this recent concern of Proskauer in electronic evidence is a result of their attempt to suppress evidence against their firm in the matter of stolen patents from Iviewit technologies. The theft of the intellectual properties has led to court room requests for Proskauer to procure documents they have stored electronically and their refusal to submit such documents, case Palm Beach County, Proskauer Rose LLP v. Iviewit Holdings, Iviewit Technologies and Iviewit.com, Inc. It has also been uncovered that these corporations in this case were actually illegal set up by Proskauer to mirror their client, Iviewit's companies, in efforts to steal intellectual properties through an intricate artifice to defraud inventors and investors of their technologies. Further, Proskauer has converted these technologies by setting up an anticompetitive monopolistic patent pooling scheme commonly known as MPEG or MPEGLA, whereby Kenneth Rubenstein acted as counsel to Iviewit and then stole the technologies he was supposed to patent for Iviewit, to proliferate in his patent pool that he controls with Proskauer and others.
ReplyDeleteThe inventions were invented by Eliot Bernstein, Jude Rosario, Zackirul Shirajee and others and where Proskauer representing these inventors went about a series of frauds to steal them and monetize them through MPEG. The crimes are currently under investigation at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the attorneys are under investigation with the United States Patent & Trademark Office Office of Enrollment and Discipline which requlates corruption by federally approved patent attorneys registered with the USPTO. Other law firms such as Foley and Lardner are involved in the missapropriations.
Read the entire story at http://www.iviewit.tv or the blog Patentgate at http://patentgate.blogspot.com .
Proskauer partners Steven C. Krane, former President of the New York State Bar Association and Stephen Krane who is married to Chief Judge of the New York courts Judge Judith Kaye have also been implicated in attempting to derail Iviewit's legal efforts through undisclosed conflicts of interest and violations of Supreme Court offices in New York's bar association.