Wipe That Smile Off Your Face or Lose Your Job

Specter of Marx reports that NYU security guards, members of SEIU 32B-J, have been "warned not to acknowledge striking GSOC members on campus grounds. That means, no hellos, no waving, no smiles, and for goodness sakes, no thumbs up!" Until this order presumably came down, many security guards were openly and generously supportive and some had discussed joining our lines during their lunch break or shifts when they were not working. Unless I am reading this wrong, the administration seems to be policing people's actions, opinions, and emotions not only while on duty, but while anywhere near campus regardless of whether or not one is actually working. Outrageous as this seems, it may seem permissable to the ULT because of this recent Bush NLRB decision.

So how did the NLRB decide to weaken fundamental workplace protections?
Security firm Guardsmark instituted a rule directing employees not to
"fraternize on duty or off duty, date, or become overly friendly with the
client's employees or with co-employees." In September 2003, the Service
Employees International Union filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB
against Guardsmark, claiming that the company's work rules inhibited its
employees' Section 7 rights.

Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act grants workers the right to "self-organization, to form, join, or assist labor organizations…and to engage in other concerted activities for the purpose of collective bargaining or other mutual aid or
protection..." While the law allows employers to ban association among
co-workers during work hours, Guardsmark's rule was broader in that it applied
to the off-duty association of co-workers.

On June 7, 2005, the Board ruled 2 to 1 that Guardsmark's fraternization rule was lawful.1 The Board majority argued that workers would likely interpret the fraternization rule as merely a ban on dating, and not a prohibition of the association among co-workers protected by Section 7. But the dissenting member of the Board
pointed out that since the rule already mentions dating, workers would
understand fraternization to mean something else. She noted, "the primary
meaning of the term 'fraternize…[is] to associate in a brotherly manner'…and
that kind of association is the essence of workplace solidarity."

Hardt and Negri write in Empire about the shift to "affective labor," a category of work which marks the subsumption of interpersonal interactions into the realm of capital accumulation, in which caring and interaction become forms of work. NYU's assumption that it can declare what kinds of interactions security workers may have on or off the job seems to constitute a flip side to Hardt and Negri's formulation, in which the boss not only gets to decide with whom and how you interact, but with whom you deny certain kinds of interactions (conviviality) in favor o others (arrests?)

Anyway, I share Specter of Marx's outrage. This is disgusting.