I'm taking suggestions on which of these books I should read next. Any insight is appreciated.

• Beverly J Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization since 1870.
• Georgy Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life
• Laura Pulido, Black, Brown, Yellow and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles.
• Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora
• Michelle Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States 1914-1962
• Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power

or should i finish the Elbaum and the Ong books first?

Finally finished the paper today, sitting in a friend's apartment and babysitting the aforementioned kitten, who kept using the back of the chair I was sitting in as a scratching post and is totally adorable. I watched her stalk and pounce on a stuffed mouse toy for several minutes.

It won't get posted here, because it needs a lot of work, and if i'd given myself more time to write it, it would have ordered and structured it much differently and worked in stuff from The Practices of Diaspora and Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left, but the problem with the whole three term papers a semester structure of graduate coursework is that you can never read everything even if you really, really want to.

An anonymous commenter over at nerds thinks I'm unhireable.

Actually, there was an article in The chronicle of higher education about the danger of blogging for potential job applicants a couple months ago ("exposed in the blogosphere" http://chronicle.com/weekly/v52/i47/47b00702.htm). Being identified with a blog, especially if it contains personal information, can really hurt job applicants. Imagine reading weapon of class instruction (http://problemofleisure.blogspot.com/) and then seriously considering the author for a tenure-track professorship. there are universities where he might still be hired, but, generally, members of hiring committees might get turned off.

12/05/2006 7:45 PM

I'm not going on the job market any time soon, so the point's moot, but initially I thought this was intended in worse faith than it seems to have been. Most of the anonymous commenters over at that site these days generally preface their remarks by referring to one of the bloggers as a sphincter and perhaps I led my fear of anonymous commenters, which dates back to when it was me they were after, get the best of me. Or perhaps the derisionI thought I sensed when I first read the comment is indeed there but the point stands anyway. This far my response to concerns about blogging and the job market has been to defer such meshuggas until I'm much closer to actually being on the job market, if that is indeed where I end up. But that was part of the impetus behind the pseudoanonymity as well. That and getting the opportunity to rechristen myself with a smartass sobriquet.

Anyway, I'll have the customary year-end post up tomorrow.

I just technorati'd myself for the first time in a while. It yielded some unexpected results:

First, my defense of the anti-minutemen has led one right wing blogger to tag me as a "retard " without in any way engaging or critiquing my argument. Feels like college again! (Also, dude, I don't drink.)

Also, in October, someone in Toronto wanted someone else in Toronto to hook up with me.

Um, I hear Toronto's nice. I guess I should be kinda flattered, right? And any way, being someone's ironic soulmate is way better than being disingenuously blockquoted as evidence of "liberal" fascism when I have never identified myself as liberal (too far right) and was making a much more nuanced argument about universities and "free speech" than I'm being given credit for.

So that Goodyear agreement, after two months on strike, will mean a two-tiered wage structure, with new hires making much, much less than folks there now - reminiscent of what we saw in the SoCal supermarket strike in 2004. That's bad.

It'll eventually mean a plant closing and the loss of 1,100 union jobs - many through UAW/GM style retirement buyouts. The union did ensure that the plant will stay open at least until the end of 2007, but this is a three year contract and that gives workers little leverage to keep Goodyear from shutting down the plant during the last two years of the agreement, when the union's still operating under a no strike clause.

On the plus side, the contract means Goodyear invests $500 million in its U.S. plants, which will hopefully stem job hemorrhaging somewhat. It means a billion dollar health care fund for retirees, which is good. But as far as I can tell, the contract doesn't increase the power workers have relative to the company's HR offices or executives and doesn't do much to grow the movement or make up for the eventual loss of 1,100 members from USW ranks. Still, this is not a defeat. But it's also far from a resounding victory. Oy.

Meanwhile: will there be a New Year's wildcat at foxwoods?

And Alcoa and the UAW settle in Cleveland, ending an 8 week old strike

The contract calls for annual wage increases and introduces a company match to Alcoa's 401(k) plan. The new contract resolves issues over a wage and benefits package and health care, Alcoa said. The agreement also begins a new attendance policy and limits the overtime available to workers.

In February of 2006, workers at the restaurant wholesaler EZ-Supply in Northern Brooklyn and LIC, Queens, voted to join the Industrial Workers of the World.

Over nine months later, the company agreed to a contract with the union.

Two days ago, the company 'reneged' on the agreement and issued threats to workers based on their immigration status.

Today, the union served the company with a federal complaint over unpaid back wages and overtime.

This evening, the company responded by firing "all union workers." To find out more and get involved, go here.

three things. maybe four.

1. If you have not yet watched the Westerberg SNL clip of "Can't Hardly Wait," please do, because it's easily the best Westerberg/Replacements live performance I've ever seen, and the band is amazing, and the song is amazing. I'll shut up about that now.

2. I am almost done with the paper. I am cat sitting for a friend. The cat is awesome and today chased around the laser from a laser pen keychain and sat in a cheese hamper.

3. Yesterday in the mail I got The Wren's Secaucus and Nas's Hip Hop is Dead and I listened to them on the walk over to see the cat this morning. Secaucus lived up to expectations, which is pretty impressive given that i'd been trying to track down a copy, at times obsessively, for over three years before Wind-Up finally reissued it. It's very different from the Meadowlands and far less bleak, but the songwriting is just as staggering. The Nas album is equal parts paean and polemic and he namedrops Positive K, Tone Loc, and Kriss Kross. It's not bad.

Paul Westerberg-Can't Hardly Wait (live)

Ok, this is just amazing.

Paul Westerberg - I Will Dare

Needs more mandolin.

Paul Westerberg - Can't Hardly Wait

No horns, but still...

Paul Westerberg - Unsatisfied

sweet.

"the vital issue of teaching assistants' unions"

"Probably the most exploited and alienated group of people on any campus are the graduate student teaching assistants. The forces of the multiversity hit them from two directions - both as students and as teachers. As students, they have been around long enough to have lost their awe of academia. As faculty, they are given the worst jobs for the lowest pay. For the most part, they have no illusions about their work. Their working conditions, low pay, and the fact that their futures are subject to the whimsical machinations of their department chairmen [sic], make them a group ripe for radical organization. Furthermore, their strategic position within the university structure makes them potentially powerful as a group, if they should decide to organize and strike. If they go out, a large part of the multiversity comes grinding to a halt. The kinds of demands they are most likely to be organized around naturally connect them with a radical student power movement and with the potentially radical sector of the faculty. Moreover, these considerations make the organization of a radical trade union of TAs a crucial part of any strategy for change. We should see this kind of labor organizing as one of our first priorities in building the campus movement."

-From the SDS pamphlet, "The Multiversity: Crucible of the New Working Class," by Carl Davidson, early 1967. As reprinted in Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr, eds. The University in Crisis Reader, Vol2: Confrontation and Counterattack. New York; Vintage Books, 1971. 118-119

More on this later, perhaps. The "most exploited" claim is problematic, as are a few of the other arguments Davidson makes, but it's interesting to see articulated plainly a strategy I'd read about before but never seen spelled out by one of its proponents. It would be an interesting project to track this position into the campaigns at Wisconsin and Michigan and elsewhere, as well as the earliest battles at the private universities which began to occur not long after the Wisconsin campaign began - Yale in early 1972, NYU in 1977, and I don't know the rest of this history but it would be interesting to look at.

2nd Edit: Sorry, I wrote the previous paragraph at 3 in the morning, and it was a bit incomprehensible, so i have reworked it a little to make it slightly less so.

Labor, Metablog, and season's greetings for goyim

Building Bridges, the WBAI Labor-Community report, did a show this week on the UAW Parking Production Assistant's rally (which I couldn't go to because i was trying to wrote papers) and ROC-NY's fight against racial discrimination at upscale NYC restaurants like Restaurant Daniel. You can listen to it here.

Bruce Raynor responds to the anti-union lobby's anti-card check campaign with this op-ed at the American Prospect's website, demonstrating the complete failure of the NLRB process to compel companies to recognize the results of elections when unions win. It's one of the more powerful arguments I've read for card check, and it only barely touches on mass intimidation campaigns during election drives, such as that apparently perpetrated by Yale New Haven Hospital earlier this month. Read it when you get a chance. Here's an excerpt:

I don't know what the Board was doing over the next five years and two months.

I do know what our union was doing: organizing workers in other places, negotiating contracts for them, trying to improve both their economic circumstances and their voice and power in the workplace. But we were powerless to do much to help the Goya workers during those five-plus years we waited for the Board to rule.

I also know what the Goya workers were doing: they were suffering. They went on about their jobs, without a voice, without power, waiting for whatever raises the Goya bosses felt like giving them -- or not. They were suffering without the benefits of union representation they thought they had voted to secure in 1998. And the four illegally fired Goya workers were looking elsewhere for jobs during those five years because they had families to feed.

And I also know what the Goya bosses were doing over those five years: counting their money and patting themselves on the back. Counting the money they might have otherwise had to give their employees in the form of fair wages, better health insurance, and a decent pension. Patting themselves on the back for making the decision to cease bargaining with the union, knowing that at most -- at most -- all the Board would ever order them to do was to sit down again and bargain in "good faith" with the union.

Finally, the Board did rule -- on the last day of August, 2006. We won on every important issue. The company was found to have unlawfully withdrawn union recognition, and the Board ordered it to resume bargaining with us. But the Board hasn't ordered that Goya agree to a contract for the workers -- it can't under our legal system. The company was found to have engaged in unlawful threats, interrogation, and the like -- and for that, they have to post a notice in their plant saying they won't do it again and pay backpay to workers who lost work because of the company's misconduct. That's it. No fines, no penalties, no assessments, no order to pay the union's (or the government's) legal fees -- none of those remedies are available under our legal system.

So after seven years, winning doesn't look all that different from losing for these workers. They have lost seven years of wage increases, health care benefits, pension contributions, and other essentials that families need -- things they could have bargained for if they had a contract. Some lost their jobs, most lost respect for their employers, and immigrants lost faith in the system of their new home.

Our union, for one, simply can't accept wins that turn into losses. Workers are already too far behind -- no federal minimum wage increase in 10 years, pensions disappearing, and the ever growing divide between what working people earn and what their CEO's take home. Workers need to win whatever and whenever we can. So we decided a few years ago to stop using the Board as a means of organizing workers. The Goya case is everything that's wrong with the law and with the Board. We get weak decisions that come too late to matter much. Employers get exactly what they want: huge delays at virtually no cost and a non-union workplace even when their workers have voted, overwhelmingly, otherwise.

This is the 1400th post on this blog. (If you're reading this as an imported facebook note, you can ignore this part.) This year has seen far fewer posts than the previous two years of this blog's existence, because I've been busy, because there's been a great deal i've been unable to write, and because I've often found myself in situations like I am now in, in which i have papers to finish and no time to blog. But the discrepancy between the 439 posts between late April and Dec. 31, 2004, and the thus far 365 posts this entire year, a figure inflated by youtube clips and cameraphone picket line images, is interesting. In a few days, I'll post my usual end of the year entry, but until then I'll be relatively quiet as i try to finish work i should have finished already.

Happy holidays.

I think the Tom Tom Club said it best

when they said "James Brown... James Brown... James Brown... James Brown..."

Along with Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and a handful of others, Brown was one of the major musical influences of the past 50 years. At least one generation idolized him, and sometimes openly copied him. His rapid-footed dancing inspired Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson among others. Songs such as David Bowie's ''Fame,'' Prince's ''Kiss,'' George Clinton's ''Atomic Dog'' and Sly and the Family Stone's ''Sing a Simple Song'' were clearly based on Brown's rhythms and vocal style.

''He was an innovator, he was an emancipator, he was an originator. Rap music, all that stuff came from James Brown,'' entertainer Little Richard, a longtime friend of Brown's, told MSNBC. ''A great treasure is gone.''

If Brown's claim to the invention of soul can be challenged by fans of Ray Charles and Sam Cooke, then his rights to the genres of rap, disco and funk are beyond question. He was to rhythm and dance music what Dylan was to lyrics: the unchallenged popular innovator.

''James presented obviously the best grooves,'' rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy once told The Associated Press. ''To this day, there has been no one near as funky. No one's coming even close.''

His hit singles include such classics as ''Out of Sight,'' ''(Get Up I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,'' ''I Got You (I Feel Good)'' and ''Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud,'' a landmark 1968 statement of racial pride.

''I clearly remember we were calling ourselves colored, and after the song, we were calling ourselves black,'' Brown said in a 2003 Associated Press interview. ''The song showed even people to that day that lyrics and music and a song can change society.''

He won a Grammy award for lifetime achievement in 1992, as well as Grammys in 1965 for ''Papa's Got a Brand New Bag'' (best R&B recording) and for ''Living In America'' in 1987 (best R&B vocal performance, male.) He was one of the initial artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986, along with Presley, Chuck Berry and other founding fathers.

While Brown's influence in hip hop is obvious to anyone who's ever listened to any hip-hop record released between 1980 and 1991ish, I'm a little wary of the AP's claim that he somehow has a proprietary 'right' to the genre - that belongs as much to the Jamaican deejay and dub traditions Kool Herc brought with him to the Bronx, to the Last Poets, to theSugar Hill gang and every anonymous MC who ever rapped over a DJ at a NY block party from the late '70s onward. It also minimizes the amount of work and artistry involved in the sampling and manipulation of recorded music and the creation of beats. But then Brown himself influenced Reggae (as did much American soul music, from Smokey Robinson to Curtis Mayfield,) and anyway, I don't see why we have to claim Brown as the originator of everything contemporary in order to celebrate the fact that his music was fucking great.

EDIT: Jon Pareles's obit now up on the Times site is better than the AP piece which I linked to above.

"We're the FBI. We just do acronyms."

I was looking at W.E.B. DuBois's F.B.I. declassified FOIA file (the FBI seems entirely unaware of Du Bois's existence prior to 1942 and spends a great deal of time thereafter tracking him around the globe and analyzing his writing and speeches) and stumbled on this, which is fucked up on so many levels, the least of which being that the web person refers to Myles Horton, one of the more important figures in the history of movements for social justice in the U.S. South, as "Miles Norton." I think this qualifies as "adding insult to injury.

Also worth taking a look at: Ayn Rand and J. Edgar Hoover's bizarre correspondence
and was Obi-Wan Kenobi a communist?

I briefly forgot that there was a 24th of december, and thought that that holiday I don't celebrate was today instead of tomorrow. Usually I'm pretty good about figuring out stuff like dates and cardinal directions, but the fact that I've barely left my apartment now in over two weeks has apparently thoroughly befuddled my once keen sense of the useless. Or marginally useful.

For the first week of seclusion, I was extremely productive. I wrote 26 pages in three days. I read like four books. I took lots of notes. The last week's been more difficult, and i'm not sure if it's cabin fever or what. I need to finish regardless, and I don't really understand when finishing papers became this hard (maybe it's the added stress of trying to be "an academic" and having so much of your self worth wrapped up in what and how you write.) When I have left my apartment in the last couple weeks, which has been rarely, I've mostly just walked around my neighborhood, investigated a couple taquerias, found a halfway decent pizza place on 5th and 50th, and made innumerable trips to Key Foods for pasta supplies, candy canes, fat free saltines, and caffeinated soda. As much as I love walking to manhattan every day (which I have not done in weeks,) I also love not having to go to Manhattan. And as much as I hate the fact that I've been unproductive, I love not having to be on the NYU campus or in the panopticon more than words can express. Finally getting internet access in my apartment after a year and a half of living here was a smart move.

My paper-writing was slightly aided by the fact that the entirety of the 1968 San Francisco Newsreel film Black Panthers is on Youtube in its entirety (in six parts). It would be cool if someone would post Finally Got The News or Columbia Revolt or El pueblo se levanta or At The River I Stand, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Black Panthers documents a mass rally/birthday party for Huey P. Newton, who was then in jail on trumped up charges of shooting a police officer. The rally clips are spliced with Okland cops talking about the shotguns they carry, rallies outside the courthouse in which people sing "No more brothers in jail (off the pigs)/the pigs are gonna catch hell (off the pigs)" and extended interviews with Newton in prison and several other figures (all men.) Stokely Carmichael had a pronounced New York/West Indian accent, which makes sense, because he was born in Trinidad and went to Bronx Science before Howard and SNCC and the Panthers and Ghana and CLR James was proclaiming him as the revolutionary hope of diasporic/transnational West Indian radicalism. But I don't think I'd ever seen him on film or heard his voice before, and that was interesting. There's a short clip of Kathleen Cleaver speaking at a rally, but the filmmakers chose to run a Huey Newton voiceover over the footage, so you can't actually hear whatever she was saying. This makes for some problematic gender politics.

This seems way too short to actually be Newton's dissertation, right? Anyone know the story with this?

CIA Recruitment Commercial

Because what college student hasn't wanted to assassinate a democratically elected anticolonial nationalist prime minister and innocent civilians alike, economically assist military dictatorships which torture students and leftists and murder folk singers, or plunge the largest country in Central America into four decades of violence and repression?

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2223915657

It looks like the Goodyear strike may be ending.

feeling shirty

My old Adjusters t-shirt from when I was an intern at Moon Ska has suddenly developed gaping holes in the back where the moon logo used to be. I'm not really sure how these holes got there, but I've had the shirt for more than 8 years, and i guess it makes sense that now would be the time when it would finally disintegrate.

I realy need to get writing done today, but first i need to step outside for a few minutes (haven't been outside since at least thursday, maybe Wednesday - I can't remember.) So I'm going to do that and then get back to work lest my transcript disintegrate faster than my t-shirt.

There is a "Socialist Reading Circle" on facebook. I was skimming it a few minutes ago, trying to take my mind off my paper (always a bad idea) and came upon this comment posted on the group's wall.

by the way, don't bother with Benjamin; his work is long and tedious and he tries to conflate mysticism with Marxism and surrealism; forgetting the Marxism is always atheistic and scientific!

Welcome back to the 1920s, folks. How was "all that is solid melts into air" "atheistic and scientific" again? Yeah, let's just skip Walter Benjamin. He didn't contribute anything important to, say, the critique of historical knowledge, or, uh, every discipline that has anything to do with "culture" in the contemporary academy. Sometimes, when no one is looking, I secretly refer to him as "Walter 3000."

Nas feat. Pete Rock - The World Is Yours

Ok, that whole part at the beginning, which is one of the more shockingingly virtuosic verses I've ever heard, sounds much less intimdating when he delivers it while in a bubble bath.

"If we are not careful, there is the constant risk that the people will ask why continue the war, every time the enemy makes the slightest concession. We have become so used to the occupier's contempt and his determination to maintain his stranglehold, whatever the cost, that any semblance of generosity or any sign of goodwill is greeted with surprise and jubilation. The colonized then tend to break into song. The militant must be supplied with further, more searching explanations so that the enemy's concessions do not pull the wool over his eyes. These concessions, which are nothing but concessions, do not adress the essence of the problem, and from the colonized's perspective, it is clear that a concession does not adress the problem until it strikes the heart of the colonial regime."

- Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Philcox translation), 91

Yo La Tengo - Mr Tough

While I work on my paper, you can watch Yo La Tengo pretend to be Beck pretending to be Prince.

More detritus from the heartless hospital

NHI points to one VP, Steve Mertz, and details one specific violation of the conduct agreement, specifically the baldfaced lie that the 150 unionized dietary workers don't get merit pay benefits under the hospital's "Performance Incentive Plan."

"Dear Fellow Employee:

"On August 28 and 30, I had the opportunity to speak with you at two open forum meetings and in the course of those meetings I made statements about the Hospital's Performance Incentive Plan (PIP) which were incorrect. I stated that the dietary employees, who are represented by the Union, are not eligible for PIP benefits. I was mistaken. PIP benefits are part of the Union's collective bargaining agreement and dietary workers have received PIP benefits for several years.

"I apologize for my error.

"Very truly yours,

"Steve Merz
"Vice President, Administration"

As Paul Bass notes, Merz is a "high up" in the hospital's chain of command, and if Vice Preisdents of Administration are actively lying about loss of benefits to workers in "voluntary" meetings, how 'isolated' can these incidents really be? The hospital board's press release monday didn't begin to answer these questions.

After barely leaving my apartment in the last week and a half plus, I snuck out tonight to celebrate Channukah with Erin, JL, Ana, Josh P, and Erin's friend T. We went to Veselka and I had amazing cabbage borscht and way, way, too many Latkes and I read up on pan-africanism and specifically the pan-african congress of 1945 organized by Padmore and Nkrumah and the notes of which St. Clair Drake had in his manuscript collection I sifted through at the Schomburg for HVC two years ago in search of the "Brown Baby Problem." I am glad I ate lots of Latkes. Tomorrow I will get up early and write until my eyes bleed.

Hospital Update

The New Haven Board of Alders, after clergy from across New Haven denounced Yale-New Haven Hospital's betrayal of the agreement which allowed construction on the Cancer Center to go forward, weighed in on the failed election process. The board voted to “condemn YNHH’s actions as documented by the arbitrator in the strongest possible terms.”

Hill Alderwoman Dolores Colón saw the need to intervene in a power struggle. “We have to shed light on what the hospital has been doing, otherwise the rich will get away with whatever they’ve been doing, just get away with a slap on the hand.”

“The process is broken,” chimed in Westville Alderman Tom Lehtonen, referring to the historic labor peace treaty the city and aldermen helped broker after years of strife.

Downtown Alderwoman Bitsie Clark took issue with that stance. She saw the arbitrator’s ruling as proof that the process worked. “I do not believe that the aldermen should inject themselves at this point. I think the hospital did a terrible thing, and the arbitrator told them that.”

“I cannot make myself vote for this because I feel that the process is going [forward].”

Goldfield, too fired up to wait his turn to speak, said “the process could not be upheld” because of the hospital’s actions.

After the meeting, he drew a distinction: The process was designed to handle occasional incidents, such as when a union organizer was found guilty of getting into a fight with an employee, and was dismissed. But the hospital “took advantage of the process” by overloading the arbitrator with complaints to investigate.

On the aldermanic floor, Hill Alderman Jorge Perez agreed “the process didn’t work.” The agreement was designed to allow for “speed bumps,” not "a cement wall."

“It’s just something that happens, it comes with the unions,” countered Quinnipiac Heights Alderman Robert Lee. Lee suggested the election take place anway, violations or not.

The resolution passed, with Clark voting “no” and Lee and three others abstaining.

SEIU/1199 organizer Bill Meyerson, joined by rows of union supporters, embraced the resolution and the idea that the process didn’t work. “If the process had worked, we would have had a fair election.”

Carl Goldfield also wants to call Marna Borgstrom and other high-ups before the board to give testimony on the anti-union campaign. Borgstrom wrote a letter continuing to claim, incredibly, that the incidents cited by the arbitrator were isolated incidents, not part of a larger campaign, and perpetrated by hapless mangers "trying to do the right thing." She defended holding 'voluntary meetings' on work time and both she and Petrini continue to call for an election, rather than the card check agreement DeStefano demanded last week.

The board was skeptical of Borgstrom's "trustworthiness."

In an interview, Goldfield said these violations were not simple misgivings, but a purposefully lawbreaking anti-union campaign. “It was a tactic — you get up to the last moment and bam, you can overwhelm the arbitrator.” The bulk of the union’s 200 complaints occurred within the last two weeks....

East Rock Alderman Ed Mattison called Borgstrom’s letter “not satisfying.” “It was far too timid, and failed to recognize the breadth of the violations.”

And there's even a cool picture.

Financial Times: U.S. Army Might Break Goodyear Strike

Two and a half months ago, 17,000 USWA members struck 16 Goodyear Tire & Rubber plants. The Financial Times reported Friday that the Army is "considering measures to force striking workers" at at least one plant "back to their jobs" via Taft-Hartley injunction. Right now the plants are running way below capacity with managers and scabs for hire replacing the strikers.

So, does this derail or at least complicate the whole "labor aristocracy" theory in which the metropolitan proletariat benefits from imperial conquest? Granted, there's the whole question of oil, but it's not like people wouldn't by hummer tires if the U.S. weren't occupying Iraq, and while defense spending may mean pork in the form of jobs, it seems like there are some serious strings attatched...

Labor Roundup

The times reports that the UAW is thinking about a merger. Mergers raise a lot of questions, but for me and in this current climate I think the most important one has to always be will the merger facilitate an increase in new organizing and an ability to organize better. If it's a purely defensive maneuver, or a way to artifically inflate dwindling numbers of certain unions without confronting the fact that the percentage of private sector workers in this country who are union members is anemic, how does it further workers' interests in the long term, particularly those of us who are fighting state and corporate attacks on our right to organize?

Will the new democratic bicameral majority reverse the privatization of government work?

Tasini reports that the arbitrator in the MTA-TWU Local 100 contract fight has issued a binding decision which gives the union exactly what they voted down in the aftermath of last winter's strike.

Low wage Soho retail workers march down Broadway, in a campaign supported both by a community organization-run workers' center (The Good Old Lower East Side's Retail Action Project,) and the RWDSU/UFCW)

Parking production assistants organizing with the UAW held a rally at Rockefeller Center on thursday, and the overwhelming majority of seats on the House of Delegates, the new company union, have been won by GSOC organizers, including me.

The things you find on Youtube...

...when you search for Fanon. Alright, back to work.

happy chanukah

that is all.

Grinch of New Haven?

Jobs with Justice will soon crown either Smithfield or Goodyear as the Grinch of the Year, and rightly so, but for Paul Bass, the grinch of New Haven is none other than Marna Borgstrom, whose "name is mud in this town." Bass accuses Borgstrom of betraying the community's trust after promising to usher in a better era in the hospital's relationship with its workers and its city.

"That hospital's goodwill is shot in this community." I take back almost everything i said about bass after the whole Charlie Ellis/Linda Lorimer puff piece a few months ago. The coverage over the last few days has been solid, helping those of us who can't be in New Haven to storm those management conventions keep abreast of the situation.

Meanwhile, the NHI also revisits Martin Looney's captive audience legislation which Connecticut's state legislature failed to pass. The events of the past week showcase why such legislation might be useful and how destructive this kind of aggressive workplace tyranny is to workers and the communities they live in.

It's Bizarro Me...

This is incredibly frightening. Thanks to t.error at the happy academic for pointing this out...

dreams, dreams, union busting, and bancshares

Just woke up from tow very crazy dreams, one involving my roomate being a serial killer, the other involving an impromptu party in some random hotel room at some random airport and much interpersonal drama. I always have weird dreams when I'm stressed out though, going back to first semester of my first year of college when i had this intense dream about my high school girlfriend being a hermaphrodite (which she is not) and then one about being in my grade school cafeteria with a friend from grade school and a friend from college only it wasn't my grade school cafeteria (either one) and it was all offputting and uncomfortable. So i guess the two dreams from last night are basically par for the course. I just used a fucking golf metaphor. WTF.

New Haven Register story on yesterday's events at the hospital is vastly inferior to the NHI coverage, which, given the Register's close institutional links to the University and the Hospital, isn't particularly surprising. No mention of Card Check or DeStefano's call to disband the board, both of which seem pretty important, in the schme of things. And also in New Haven news, everybody's favorite get richer quicker scheme for city plutocrats keeps on acquiring.

I'm skipping my department holiday party and neglecting emails i should be writing and i missed The O.C. too, in order to research a paper on Postcolonial Marxisms, The United States, and the long 1960s, for which I am in the midst of reading Cynthia Young's Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, which I like immensely. Young's articulation of race, gender, class, New Left aesthetics and their vanguardist omissions, and labor in the formation of what she terms a "Third Worldist" structure of feeling, her historicization of the Internal Colony in lefts old and new, and her account of the prison and third worldist theorizations and activism concerning it are valuable interventions into the historiography of the 1960s, deindustrial urban spaces, and post-Cuba social movements. What i find particularly valuable reading this today, though, is the chapter on 1199 and its cultural programs as a central component of Third World subjectivity, looking at the lifeworlds of the working class black and puerto rican women and men who constituted the rank and file of the insurgent union's social movement organizing during the late 1950s and on, and giving us yet another vantage point from which to historicize and understand the struggle currently taking place at a hospital in New Haven where 1199 has left its imprint more than once. (Of course, Young knows this, given her own involvements in New Haven labor history, as, among other things, one of the three women made to appear before the university's kangaroo court tribunal in the aftermath of the grade strike which she helped lead.)

Alright, back to work.

Because if there's one thing NYU needs....

...it's "enhanced entrepreneurial activity"

New York University Joins Nationwide Kauffman Campuses Initiative to Expand Entrepreneurship Education across Campus

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--New York University has been awarded a $1 million grant by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation to make entrepreneurship education a common and accessible campus-wide opportunity for college students. The grant is part of a $200 million effort to transform the way entrepreneurship education is taught in the nation’s colleges and universities. Under this initiative, NYU will raise $5 million to match the Kauffman funds.

New York University was one of a select number of colleges and universities across the country that received grants as part of the Kauffman Foundation’s Kauffman Campuses Initiative, which was launched in 2003 to foster the creation of interdisciplinary entrepreneurship education programs in American higher education that are available to all students regardless of major.

With this grant, New York University will create The Kauffman Entrepreneurial Campus Program, led by The Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, housed in NYU’s Stern School of Business. The Berkley Center, with its multi-tiered research, pedagogical and co-curricular emphasis, has an established track record of success in uniting the schools of NYU in entrepreneurial endeavors.

William Baumol, Harold Price Professor of Entrepreneurship and Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at NYU Stern, will lead this pan-campus initiative, which will focus on the preparation and effective training of both innovative (vs. replicative) entrepreneurs, as well as social entrepreneurs, while working as a catalyst for enhanced entrepreneurial activity throughout the University.

NYU President John Sexton said, “Among the defining characteristics of the NYU community are its energy, its creativity and its affirmative lack of contentment with the status quo. Entrepreneurship was key to creating the NYU that exists today. This grant from the Kauffman Foundation is a perfect fit for NYU, and it will slake a great thirst among our talented for entrepreneurship learning and activities. We are grateful to the Foundation for selecting us.”

New York University was selected based on a series of criteria, including the ability to create a culture of entrepreneurship that permeates the campus, the potential to create new representative models, and the ability to partner with other foundations and funders.

“With the Kauffman Entrepreneurial Campus at NYU, we have an unprecedented opportunity to bridge the gap between replicative entrepreneurship—the creation of new enterprise that duplicates an abundance of preexistent establishments—and innovative and social entrepreneurship—which are critical for economic growth and the reduction of social ills, but for which no teaching program whose effectiveness is based on evidence currently exists,” said Professor Baumol. “Our goal is to create a model program at NYU through collaboration with our University partners, one that can serve as a model for educational institutions around the world.”

“At the core of entrepreneurship is a dissatisfaction with the status quo, an addiction to change, a drive toward bigger, better and faster and the exercise of the imagination without restraint,” said William R. Berkley, BS ’66, Chairman of the W.R. Berkley Corporation as well as NYU Stern’s Board of Overseers, member of NYU’s Board of Trustees, and main benefactor of Stern’s Berkley Center. “This is the culture we will continue to make synonymous with that of NYU.”

Er, uh, ahem.

Fighting Back

Destefano calls for card check. That makes sense to me, not that it matters. He also calls for disbanding the hospital's board of trustees, and that works for me too. And, he channels Kingman Brewster:

“I think it is impossible to have a free and fair election at Yale New-Haven today,” said DeStefano, joined by state legislators, Attorney General Dick Blumenthal and a dozen aldermen.

Despite the fact that all the managers in the YNHH anti-union campaign were employing the same talking points, and the arbitrator found evidence they were acting under orders from the top, Petrini is calling the meetings "isolated incidents." Anyone buy that? Yeah, i didn't think so.

And, Laura Smith leads 100 workers to confront a meeting of YNHH management, including "the borg," who turns her back on them. No wonder the mayor has no faith in the hospital anymore. I can't see why anyone should. These people should all join Joe Zaccagnino in unemployment. But I do have faith in the members of the Federation of Hospital and University Employees to keep fighting for justice for the hospital workers, for all of New Haven, and for all of us who work and live in service-sector dominated hospital-university cities.

Slick Rick issues statement distancing himself from anti-union tactics at hospital

Although Yale New Haven Hospital is not a part of Yale University, I serve on the hospital’s board of trustees, and I am dismayed by the recent actions of the hospital that violated the letter and spirit of its agreement with SEIU’s District 1199. Yale University assisted the two parties in negotiating this agreement to conduct a free and fair election, and I have consistently urged hospital management to abide by its terms. When the staff meetings reviewed by the arbitrator first came to my attention last week, I called for their immediate cessation.

I urge the hospital and the union to sit down and find a resolution that would restore a climate in which a fair, secret ballot election can be held. The University stands ready to assist the parties in finding a constructive solution.

Is there a climate in which a fair secret ballot election can be held? Has the hospital's conduct in fact demonstrated that in order to have a fair process, workers will need stricter controls on YNHH's conduct during any organizing drive? Would the amount of time necessary to cool the air following the captive audience meetings and terror tactics not constitute exactly what the hospital administration is hoping for? Is Levin just trying to keep his head above the fray or is he truly committed to ensuring that Hospital Workers have the right to organize? I doubt the answer to the final question is the latter, given Levin's own terrible record on the right to organize elsewhere within the university, (The RAI report, four years ago, quoted one anonymous worker as saying “The University accepts unionism as a thought proposition but quietly whispers,‘but not on my property.’”) but if he's really committed to pressuring Borgstrom et al to stop their harassment and intimidation of workers, then that's a good thing.

The problem is the wording of Levin's statement, which suggests that a card check agreement is out of the question, but in fact card check may be one of the best ways forward. Still, while I have reason to be extremely skeptical, i hope that this statement marks a real commitment on the part of President Levin to play an active role in ensuring that Yale-New Haven Hospital workers' right to a free and fair process to decide whether they want to form a union is not violated again. Regardless of Levin's real intentions, i will hold him accountable to the spirit these words should express, and i expect other alumni of the university to do the same.

NHI: "Union Election Off; Arbitrator Says Hospital Broke Law"

Yale-New Haven Hospital's "serious violations of federal labor law" have led the neutral arbitrator policing the conduct agreement to call off the elections scheduled for next week. Holy fuck.

one hospital supervisor, Judy Grant, who oversees 165 employees, summoned a group of them to a mandatory meeting, on work time, about matters unrelated to the union. After 15 minutes, she told workers they were "free to stay or leave." She then spent 45 minutes trashing the union, saying, among other things, that workers stood to lose a $1.75 per hour pay differential if the union wins, that their union dues would go up, and that unionized workers at a nursing home in town lost their jobs after they voted in a union.

Such meetings took place throughout the hospital the past few weeks. Organizers argued they were mandatory, not voluntary, because workers would be targeted as pro-union if they stood up to leave. Arbitrator Kern agreed. She also agreed that Grant's claims about the union, echoed by other managers in what appeared to be a coordinated hospital-wide campaign, were false and constituted threats. She called the practice a violation of not just the hospital's agreement with the union, but federal law as well.

"The employer thus put employees in the position of having either to accept or reject the employer's proffer of listening to an anti-union presentation, thereby pressuring them to make an observable choice regarding their sentiments about the union. The Board and courts have found this type of subtle pressure to constitute unlawful polling."

What happens now? It looks like John Destefano is justifiably furious.

"I am incredibly disappointed in the management of the hospital, and I'm saddened by the potential consequences this is going to have," DeStefano said. "They have poisoned the water as to whether there can ever be a free and fair election because of their intimidation and coercion."

The city can't stop the cancer center at this point. But, at least Wednesday night, it sounded like the hospital may face renewed political trouble.

"It's time for the elected officials of New Haven and the state of Connecticut to look at the governance structure of this hospital," DeStefano declared. "It enjoys substantial tax benefits that other hospitals in other states do not enjoy." He cited property tax and income-tax exemptions.

Yale-New Haven Hospital workers have the right to ORGANIZE FREE FROM HARASSMENT AND INTIMIDATION. The hospital's continuing attempts to deny workers that right no matter how much suffering it causes to their patients and their employees is not acceptable. It has never been acceptable. It will never be acceptable. Yale-New Haven Hospital workers need a fair process to decide whether they want a union.

UPDATE: The arbitrator, according to the New Haven Register, gave the union permission to seek a postponement of th election because the hospital had jeopardized the possibility of a "free and fair election." It's unclear from the register article whether the hospital is now compelled to do anything further. At the hearing, the hospital apparently "objected to the idea of a postponement," but the article claims that Petrini is saying that YNHH will reconsider "in light of the ruling."

She said it appears that the hospital gave permission to over 200 managers and supervisors to conduct mandatory meetings on work time to discuss the union with employees, which constitutes "unlawful polling," a violation of federal law.

Kern found workers were threatened with loss of pay and benefits, and possibly their jobs, if they unionized, and said information spread about union dues was false, and the employer knew it was false.

The Politics of the Memorial and The Neoliberal University: Yale, David Lee, Maya Lin

(Another paper for the same class at the Firefly piece. Started writing this last night because I dodn't knwo what else to write my last paper on, and got a bit caught up. This is still a work in progress, but it's eight pages too long and due in four hours, so I've sent it in anyway. I welcome criticism and comments from other folks who were involved in all of this first hand. There's stuff I don't think i do very well, and I probably should have engaged memorial theory more and gone into the specifics of the anti-Lee campaign a bit less. That said, here.)

In the fall of 2001, the Reverend W. David Lee, a former Syracuse University football player and the pastor of the Varick AME Zion Church on Dixwell Avenue, the oldest black church in New Haven, located in a working class African American neighborhood bordering Yale University’s sprawling, fortress-like gothic architecture, announced his candidacy for a seat on the Yale Corporation. The Yale Corporation is “the senior policy-making body for Yale University.” Unlike the massive boards of institutions like New York University, with its 70-some-odd trustees,[1] the Yale Corporation consists of only nineteen members, including the university’s president and Connecticut’s ex oficio governor and Lieutenant Governor. According to Yale’s website, the corporation plays “an unusually active role in university governance” compared to the governing bodies of peer institutions. The small number of board members suggests their institutional power. Ten of the trustees are successor trustees, selected by their predecessors for up to 12 year terms. Currently serving successor trustees include Roland Betts, the developer of Chelsea Piers and a close friend and schoolmate of George W. Bush, and Jeffrey Bewkes, the president and C.O.O of Time Warner. The other six trustees are alumni fellows, who only serve for six years, and are elected by a vote open to all alumni save those who have graduated from the undergraduate college within five years prior to the election.[2]

In order to appear on the alumni fellow election ballot, one must either be nominated by the Association of Yale Alumni, a not-particularly independent body responsible for channeling communication between the university administration and potential donors[3] which also administers the elections, or one must campaign for enough petition signatures to qualify independently. This process “involves the collection of a number of petitions equal to 3% of the prior year's number of qualified electors,” with “qualified electors” numbering over a hundred thousand.[4] While “campaigning” for an alumni fellow seat is unusual, it has been the means by which historically marginalized groups have attained a seat at the table. William Horowitz, who became the first Jewish member of the Yale Corporation in 1965, secured his place on the ballot through such a campaign.[5]

Lee’s roots in New Haven were the centerpiece of his campaign. Raised in the nearby working class black suburb Ansonia, and a graduate of the Yale Divinity School, Lee mobilized firsthand experience of the tangible inequalities between the global university with its $18 billion endowment and one of the poorest cities in Connecticut to call for increased commitment from Yale to an “equal partnership” and “new social contract” with the city. A board member of the union-affiliated non-profit community organization The Connecticut Center for a New Economy, (CCNE,) Lee spoke of pushing Yale to commit more to New Haven’s overwhelmingly poor and working class racialized neighborhoods as the center began a massive organizing program among New Haven clergy and community organizations calling for the desegregation of the university’s work structures, job opportunities for workers from the growing Latino neighborhoods on the fringes of downtown, access to health care, and a fair share contribution by the university to the city’s public school system to reduce class sizes.[6] As the university’s two recognized unions, Locals 34 and 35 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees, (HERE)[7] entered into what would prove a two-year long contract struggle involving two strikes and protracted wars of position and manoevre over the university’s investment practices, attempts to crush organizing by workers at its teaching hospital and graduate teachers and researchers, and broader vision for the city’s future, both Lee and the unions spoke of creating a new era of partnership[8] counterpoised to the bitter history of paternalism and turmoil between Yale and its workers and Yale and New Haven.[9] Between the fall of 2001 and the late Spring of 2002, the Federation of Hospital and University Employees (FHUE, the alliance of locals 34 and 35 with the graduate teachers and researchers and hospital employees’ organizing drives,) and Yale engaged in a process known as “Interest Based Bargaining,” facilitated by former Reagan-era Labor Department official John Stepp. Designed to channel the deep and lasting distrust and antagonism between both sides into productive discussion and cooperation, the moment was characterized by exaggerated strategic and performative demonstrations of goodwill, such as Local 35 President Bob Proto’s hugging of Yale president Richard Levin during a joint union-university memorial for the victims of the events of September 11, 2001 in early October of that same year, and Yale negotiator Brian Tunney’s distributing t-shirts to both negotiating teams which emphasized the positive tone of negotiations.[10] Both sides made their claims in relation to a discourse of partnership, with Lee and the unions frequently referencing, in speeches, on banners, and on placards, the idea of an “equal” partnership, or of bringing the existing partnership to a “new level.”[11] The administration’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs (ONHSA,) helmed by Baltimore waterfront developer and Yale alum Bruce Alexander, published numerous full page advertisements in local papers multiple times a week professing to celebrate the university’s already-existing partnership with the city, offering as examples student community service projects and Yale’s redevelopment of the strip of property along York Street and Broadway into a parade of high-end chain retail, such as Urban Outfitters, J. Crew, and Alexia Crawford. This struggle over the semiotics of cooperation eventually collapsed in the wake of Yale’s unilateral decision to fire Stepp in May of 2002, after the end of the spring semester, despite statements from both sides that progress had been made on several but by no means all of the contested aspects of the contract fight.[12]

The response to Lee’s candidacy was mixed. The bid garnered support from progressive students and alumni, as well as community groups and local and national politicians and political organizations and figures, including Senator Joseph Lieberman and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (both Yale Alumni.) Lee secured far more than the necessary signatures in advance of the deadline, and won a spot on the ballot, promising to become the only member of the corporation besides the university’s president to actually live in New Haven.[13] But the AYA and Yale Office of Public Affairs attempted to frame the campaign as an attempt by obstructionist unions to interfere in the university’s autonomy and decision-making, demonize the university’s expansion, and place a saboteur within the highest echelons of the university’s power structure for the upcoming round of what had become ritualized labor turmoil at the expiration of each contract. Even before announcing the ‘approved’ nominees to run in the election, AYA and Yale spokespeople pointed to the unions’ funding of the $30,000 mailing the Lee campaign had used to solicit petition signatures, as evidence that Lee was under the sway of nefarious outside parties.

In almost every election for alumni fellows of the Yale Corporation, the AYA nominating committee selects multiple candidates to place on the ballot, from which alumni select one new trustee. In late February, 2002, the Association of Yale Alumni announced that this year it would put forward only one nominee – the artist and architect Maya Lin, class of ’81.[14] Lin was a popular figure on the Yale campus. Her Women’s Table sculpture, with its smooth black surfaces visually and thematically evocative of the Vietnam War Memorial, which, Yale students are often reminded, she designed while among their ranks, numerically commemorates and memorializes the presences and absences of women at the university from its founding through coeducation in 1969, only stopping in the early 1990s, when women for the first time outnumbered male classmates. Lin’s liberalism, financial and artistic success, and celebrated creative genius are often represented to undergraduates as elements of a career worthy of emulation, and the university had recently awarded Lin with an honorary degree. Lin enjoys privileged status not only within Yale’s artificially-aged walls, but more pointedly in Asian-American studies generally – Jeannie Barroga’s play Walls, about Lin and the Memorial, is excerpted at length on the very first page of what has arguably been the discipline’s most important and influential intervention over the last decade.[15] Lin’s memorial has been important for Asian American and other cultural studies for its incommensurability, its refusal to be entirely subsumed and enclosed by a nationalist historiography of arma virumque cano, and its openness to appropriations and transformations, including the discourses which circulated widely concerning the ability of artist and memorial alike to embody, understand, and incorporate hermeneutics of experience and belonging from which both are presumed excluded by virtue of their alleged radical otherness.[16]

In New Haven, things got messy. The events surrounding Maya Lin’s landslide victory over David Lee in the mail-in election results, announced in late May, do more than just serve as a stark illustration of the fissures produced by tactical exploitation of the model minority myth.[17] This was, however the thrust of (then) New Haven Advocate editor Paul Bass’s argument when he outlined Yale’s tactics, including Lin’s candidacy and the anti-Lee campaigning of African American Yale Trustee and former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke, who, as an undergraduate in the early 1970s, had once led a hunger strike in solidarity with striking members of local 35.[18]

Quoth Bass:

#3: Rules for Attacking Your Opponent

· If possible, have stand-ins do it.

· If he's black, find black fronts to do it.

· If he's black and liberal, put up another liberal minority against him.

· Comb through his public statements, remove snippets, then broadcast them out of context to make him look like a raving, dangerous nut.[19]

I now think such a framework is far too simple for thinking about the Yale/AYA anti-Lee offensive. I do not wish to reify the forms of knowledge and research presumed by the masculinist and jingoist logics in Hart’s condemnation of Lin’s refusal to engage and understand a referent (the veterans) in her design for the memorial, but in the context of the Lee-Lin election, Lin’s physical and verbal absence from debates and conversations concerning the university’s relationship to New Haven, its demonizing of Lee, and continued global priorities, was and continues to be deeply troubling. At times allies of the Federation, including me, have critiqued Lin for her silence on matters of concern in ways which bear a problematic relationship to tropes of feminine (and Asian) passivity, difference, and childishness. In part this paper represents an attempt to formulate a more complex and less fraught critique, to think through how me might reach a different understanding of the political implications of the way Lin represented herself, and allowed herself to be represented, throughout the months leading up to the election, and the ways in which she has continued to represent herself in the years since. (Her six-year term on the corporation ends in 2008.)

Even a particularly anti-union, anti-Lee editorial board of the Yale Daily News opined that the AYA nominating committee had “made its nomination process look suspiciously subject to external influence and contradictory to the purpose of alumni fellow elections.”[20] Such skepticism was widespread, but did not prevent the YDN from later endorsing Lin anyway. Lin refused to campaign or speak to New Haven community organizations or media, while in her name the AYA, the Yale administration, and a group of alumni who were mostly current or former trustees and officers of the university (such as former University Secretary Henry “Sam” Chauncey and then-corporation member Frances Beinecke) calling themselves “Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship” waged a “slick, $145,000-plus campaign” to discredit and impugn Lee.[21] The supposedly neutral Association of Yale Alumni website lauded Lin while prominently displaying Lee quotes such as "There is a blind spot at Yale -- no one is responsible for the community interests ... [President] Levin is probably laughing now but he won't laugh after we get there." Paul Bass interviewed Lee and spoke with him at length about the quote:

I ask Lee about the quotes as we sit in his office, below a Yale wall hanging and his Divinity School diploma. Yale's leaving out a crucial part of that Levin quote, Lee claims. He said it in response to a call from a Yale Daily News reporter the night his campaign succeeded in getting a spot on the ballot by collecting 4,000 alumni signatures. The reporter said she'd just asked Levin about it and Levin laughed, according to Lee. (Levin, through his secretary, says he has "nothing to say" about Lee or the campaign. In other papers, he has joined in the criticism of Lee for "campaigning.")

"It hurt," a somber Lee recalls of hearing of Levin's laughter. "My gut reaction was, 'Wow. That stings. Fine. He won't laugh when I come in the room.' It was like calling me a joke. I had to deal with that all my life, growing up in the projects, not having money, people laughing at you.

"I went to Syracuse on a football scholarship. I went to Yale Divinity School. To still be laughed at by the president of the institution I love -- it was disheartening."

Regardless of Lee’s lack of press-handling skills to rival those of Yale spokesperson Helaine Klasky, who attempts to equate Lee’s union support with Enron, it is now and was then clear that the AYA would not neutrally conduct the election it was charged with facilitating. Bass’s response to Klasky’s claim that the media did not see her link between Enron and FHUE as poisonous outside agents with political and economic agendas separate from university leadership is worth quoting at length, for it underscores rather well what is at stake for New Haven in Yale’s anti-Lee campaign.

Klasky has a point. That's because Enron is a multibillion-dollar criminal enterprise that bribed the federal government and destroyed thousands of workers' livelihoods and pensions. The media doesn't see Yale's unions, or their influence, the same way.

The fact that Yale can see its unions that way helps to explain why more is clearly at stake here than the bid by a pro-labor minister from New Haven's oldest black church to sit in the board meetings of a $10.7 billion university. In fact, one trustee out of 17 clubby members probably won't change the outcomes of any votes.

But Yale's overreaction has endangered two of university President Rick Levin's major initiatives: promoting "partnerships" with New Haven and with Yale's unions. Levin convinced unions to enter a comprehensive form of marriage counseling as part of the latest wave of contract negotiations, to examine the roots of their contentious relationship. And under Levin Yale has helped workers buy homes in New Haven, rebuilt the Broadway shopping district, and spawned local biotechnology companies to help create jobs, part of a bigger campaign that has convinced many townies Yale can help tackle urban problems rather than make them worse.

But faced with the possibility of allowing a labor- or New Haven-backed alum to enter the sanctum of monthly corporation meetings (a "partnership" tool in some American corporate boardrooms), Yale revealed the limits of its definition of "partner."

Bass continues,

In this campaign, Lin has released a public [campaigning] letter in which she trumpeted her credentials and denounced the notion of campaigning. She failed, and continues to fail, to distance herself from the more expensive and nastier campaigning being done on her behalf.

By agreeing to be used by Yale to stop Lee's campaign, Lin has already proved her major qualification for the seat -- reliability. She won't press Yale to take more than baby steps to help rebuild New Haven or to abide by labor law in confronting union drives. (She declined to answer the Advocate's telephone and e-mail inquiries. Yale spokeswoman Klasky calls it a "jump" to suggest that Lin tacitly approves the massive campaigning on her behalf by not openly disavowing it.)[22]

The AYA, the Yale Graduates for Responsible Trusteeship, and the Yale administration together outspent the Lee campaign by nearly a hundred thousand dollars and dwarfed the union’s financial involvement in the race by a factor of five. The AYA letter strongly emphasized to over 115,000 voters that neither Yale nor the AYA supported Lee’s candidacy and openly attacking the Lee campaign

"The AYA's Board of Governors is concerned about the strong and unexplained disparity between Rev. Lee's past public statements about Yale and those now being made in campaign mailings to alumni," the letter said. "We are also concerned about Rev. Lee's expressions of deep commitment to the Yale-New Haven relationship despite his lack of past involvement at any level with Yale's many initiatives and engagements with the city."[23]

The anti-Lee campaign sought to portray the Reverend as a disingenuous and dissimulating intruder, a willing tool of the labor unions not truly dedicated to Yale or New Haven. The New Haven Register, into which Yale’s Office of New Haven and State Affairs sunk millions in advertising dollars, uncritically hopped on board the AYA bandwagon and blasted Lee for treating the board of trustees “like the board of aldermen.”[24] (Of course, they missed the irony that the members of New Haven’s board of aldermen are all democratically elected by all New Haven residents eligible to vote, which excludes large numbers of people incarcerated or formerly incarcerated for committing felonies, unlike most of Yale’s trustees, who often have as much if not greater power over the city’s future than the alderpeople.) Perhaps the Washington Post best summarized the tenor of the anti-Lee campaign, which seemed only tangentially, if at all, a campaign for Lin:

There are those at Yale University who firmly believe that the Rev. W. David Lee is a dangerous man, a stalking-horse and potentially a threat to America's proudly perennial No. 2 institution of higher learning. They use words like "corruption" to describe his efforts to join the 19-member corporation that runs the university, and privately, they belittle him as ambitious yet insignificant, a nobody and a spoiler, a puppet of dark forces bent on soiling their shining city on a hill.[25]

The attempt to rigidly separate town from gown in this language is extraordinarily simplistic and willfully ignores or obfuscates the constitutive role neoliberalized universities play in shaping ndreshaping deindustrialized urban spaces like New Haven, but often, the logic of the AYA, the YGRT, and the university’s “official” spokespeople was very much complicit in such sweeping generalizations and in the pernicious construction they would redeploy over and over again of Lee’s supposed lack of any capacity for independent thought, “anti-Yale” bravado (here relying on a quote from a 2001 union meeting in which Lee called FHUE Yale’s “waterloo,”) and duplicitous relationship to organizations with whom Yale was still proclaiming a desire to build lasting partnership and cooperation. Granted, the Lee campaign was, in part, an attempt by an activist affiliated with Yale’s workers’ unions and community organizations to push open the limits of what kind of partnership the university was really willing to enter into. Still, with Lee’s campaign recast as a deliberate move to challenge Yale’s power and agenda in the city, Lin’s role is no less problematic.

Yale’s campus is stuffed with memorials. Sterling Memorial Library. Hewitt Memorial Quadrangle and its tomb-like salute to the World War I dead. Woolsey Memorial Rotunda with its armed Athena marbles and names carved in the walls of Yale students and alumni who died in colonial warfare. These spaces are radically unlike Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial. They are unapologetically nationalist, realist, and imperialist, not necessarily in that order. Whereas Lin’s memorial is intensely public, these spaces and the histories (and memories) they institutionalize are private, elite, constantly policed to keep the homeless riffraff from sleeping on heated floors during the cold New Haven winters and available only to a select few, or open to the public only occasionally and as part of a grand but transparent gesture of accessibility and pedantic generosity, such as when Benjamin Carson, an African American neurosurgeon t Johns Hopkins and a Yale trustee, gave a free and open lecture to students from New Haven public on self improvement and individual excellence. A painting in the room where the Yale corporation customarily meets depicts Elihu Yale, the university’s first donor standing proudly with a slave wearing an iron collar kneeling at his feet. President Levin has replied to student demands that the painting be removed with assurances that Kurt Schmoke told him to leave it up, so that the university might be reminded of its problematic legacies. Yet, as in the summer of 2001, when a group of graduate students published a report detailing the foundational role the slave trade and racism played in Yale’s early years in the midst of tercentennial self-congratulations,[26] Yale has been often been dismissive of or lukewarm to critical discussion of this legacy, and has been loathe to engage in open dialogue with community organization it does not bankroll or control unless forced to do so by public and political pressure. This represents a key theme of Yale’s long shift from elite finishing school to global university, which obliterates the local in favor of universal discourses of historical and current excellence.[27] While Yale has openly embraced multiculturalism, not only are the possibilities for such a hermeneutic themselves limited, but so has been Yale’s commitment to said possibilities. Thus, these sites of exclusion represent not merely “the memory of the past but the experience of the present moment as explicitly controlled and shaped by the museum.”[28] If the “filth” of the anti-aestheticism and graffiti on Gerz’s disappearing Holocaust monument in Harburg reflects a deep and ugly truth – “the memorial projections and preoccupations”[29] of post-Cold War Germany, in this case, Yale’s memorial culture, antisceptic, neoclassical, and imperial points toward an altogether different project. Lin’s Women’s Table fountain is easily read as an attempt to subvert and disrupt this masculinist built environment glorifying death and war, yet recent events outlined above must lead us to question the limits of this intervention. (Indeed, there is no space on the Women’s Table to commemorate or memorialize the struggles of the uncounted numbers of working-class women employed by the university as maids, and as clerical, food service and custodial workers, the women who were historically the most vulnerable members of the university’s workforce, who built Local 34 and comprise a dedicated activist core within Local 35.) That Lin seemed so quick to embrace this politics of liberal exclusion in the face of a movement which literally promised to “tear down the walls” between Yale and New Haven[30] suggests that the space the memorial inhabits may no longer be simply precarious, but in fact perhaps already collapsed into the very forms of exclusion, violence, and loss which it attempted to disrupt – or ignore.

---

[1] http://2110uaw.org/gsoc/nyu_trustees.htm

[2] http://yale.edu/about/leadership.html

[3] Aya.yale.edu/about

[4] http://www.aya.yale.edu/corpelection/process.htm

[5] “Light and Verity,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November, 2001

[6] As CCNE’s organizing grew, Immigrant Rights and responsible development became increasingly foregrounded. See http://www.ctneweconomy.org/socialcontract.html

[7] HERE merged with the textile and garment workers union UNITE! In July 2004 to create UNITE-HERE

[8] “Unions Rally With Call For Partnership,” Yale Daily News, April 25, 2002 http://yaledailynews.com/Article.aspx?ArticleID=19186

[9] Yale workers have struck perhaps 14 times since the first union (what is now Local 35) won recognition in 1941. This history has been extensively documented. See Deborah Sue Elkin, Labor and The Left: The Limits of Acceptable Dissent at Yale University, 1920s to 1950s, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1995, Toni Gilpin, Gary Isaac, Dan Letwin, and Jack McKivigan, On Strike For Respect: The Clerical and Technical Workers’ Strike at Yale University, 1984-1985, updated edition, University of Illinois Press, 1995. Also Herbert Janick, “Yale Blue: Unionization at Yale University,” Labor History, 1987 28(3): 361-362, and Gordon Lafer, “Land and labor in the post-industrial university town: remaking social geography, Political Geography 22, 2003. Information on the fights surrounding medical debt at Yale New Haven Hospital, university investments, and the other issues discussed above may be found at union-created websites such as http://unfarallon.info and ctneweconomy.org, as well as in a series of articles by The Wall Street Journal (“Twenty Years and Still Paying,” WSJ 3/13/03)and continuous coverage over a multi-year period by local media such as the New Haven Advocate and the Yale Daily News. My own intervention into this scholarship, “The 1971 Yale Strike: Imperial Power, Workers’ Struggle, and Urban Renewal in the Globalization of the University,” is deeply indebted to this and other work which has been formed and informed by the city’s history of dynamic social movements.

[10] “T-shirts DominateLabor Talks,” Yale Daily News, 3/1/02

[11]Paul Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” New Haven Advocate, 5/6/2002

[12] “Yale Unions Poised to Call Strike,” New Haven Register, 9/4/2002

[13] The University at the time claimed that Charles Ellis of Greenwich Associates, Greenwich, Connecticut also lived in New Haven (he is married to Linda Lorimer, the secretary of the University,) but to my knowledge Ellis in fact lived in a mansion in Greenwich and not, in fact, in New Haven. If this is incorrect I will gladly edit this sentence.

[14] “Maya Lin Nominated for Corporation Seat,” YDN 3/1/02

[15] Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, Durham; Duke University Press, 1996

[16] Sturken, Tangled Memories, 51-58

[17] “Maya Lin vying with minister for seat on Yale board,” New Haven Register, 3/2/02

[18] “BSAY Position Paper,” Yale Daily News, 5/3/71 “Hunger Strike,” Yale Daily News, 5/4/1971. “Students Continue Support Activities,” Yale Daily News 5/7/1971

[19] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit

[20] “A conspicuously singular nomination”, Yale Daily News, 3/6/2002

[21] Bass, “The Bulldog Bites Back,” op cit

[22] Ibid.

[23] “AYA criticizes Lee in letter to alumni,” Yale Daily News, 4/16/2002

[24] “Elect Maya Lin to Yale Board,” New Haven Register, 4/7/2002

[25] “At Yale University, Ivy vs. Grass Roots,” The Washington Post, 5/10/02

[26] See http://www.yaleslavery.org/

[27] Bill Readings offers an interesting deconstruction of this sort of discursive formation in The University in Ruins. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1996.

[28] James Young, At Memory’s Edge:After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture. New Haven; Yale University Press, 2000. 123.

[29] Young, 139

[30] “Hispanics to Wield Clout at Union Rally,” New Haven Register, 3/3/03