I still read the Yale Daily News. Frequently.
Ok, I don't read all the articles, and I really do it just to keep tabs on what the UOC, the Undergraduate Organizing Committe a bunch of folks (of which Alek and I are the only two who regularly blog, at least, to the best of my knowledge. Josh and Julie and Thomas blog too, of course but they came into the picture about a month later) started just over three and a half years ago out of the ashes of three successive preceding incarnations of Yale Undergrad student labor organizing, is doing, and because i want to know what's up with the Hospital fight and the Best Practices stuff (I did say i would have to come back and get arrested if there was another strike, and there already was one since the article was written, but it didn't involve any mass arrests...) and because I want to keep up with GESO and having three to four organizers and a researcher down here at any one point just isn't doing it for me and I need that incisive, unbiased, informed - oh wait, i mean lazy, distorted, vicious, parochial, and ignorant perspective which only the paper that gave the woman who wrote this a journalism career can provide.
At any rate, I was reading this morning, feeling rather pathetic, as usual, immediately prior to sitting down to figure out a presentation, when I read this article about a finacial aid action organizined by the aforementioned UOC. As someone who has picketed on many a New haven sidewalk and likely will at some point again, barring the Best Practices stuff magically resolving GESO and the Hospital and the investments stuff and so forth, I want to ask the Yale and New Haven police departments (Yale has its own cops who can arrest anyone, regardless of whether or not they are anywhere near the campus. Recently they have been aggressively policing the working class and poor African American neighborhoods north and west of the university) when, exactly, picketing on a sidewalk became grounds for arrest. Am I missing something? (Chorus of anonyms, that was a rhetorical question.)
2. We need a contract
David Montgomery weighs in on the strike.
“President Sexton seized upon this ruling to put an end to NYU’s collective
bargaining agreement with the union chosen by its assistants,” Montgomery said.
“[His] justification negates the original purpose of the Wagner Act and rests on
the absurd assumption that a person cannot be both a student and an employee.”
And Adam Green, who, it seems, really does speak in paragraphs:
“The category of graduate workers at universities didn’t exist in
significant numbers at universities back in the 1930s,” Green said. “They
certainly do exist as a category today, and they’ll become more and more
important in terms of doing the labor of teaching if the current evolution in
how instruction is parceled out at universities continues along the lines that
it has.”
“I think in this instance it’s clear that the Wagner Act was meant to be
redefined expansively in correspondence to the expansion of the economy
generally,” Green said. “The NYU administration clearly feels differently, and I
think what needs to be thought about is where that aligns this university and
this institution in terms of the larger sense of what’s ethical in relation to
the treatment of workers specifically on this campus and, more generally, within
American society as a whole.”
And finally, Matt Osypowski, who began Wednesday night's town hall meeting by asking Provost McLaughlin how the GAC grievance procedure could possibly protect blacklisted strikers like him outlines why he's on strike:
So if it’s not the Prada habit, then what’s my problem? Why am I, as
Alessandro Miglio put it, whining to daddy? (“Grad students deserve punishment,”
Feb. 6) Part of the answer is that I don’t consider any administrator on this
campus to be my “daddy.” Their jobs are to facilitate the greater work of the
institution — the process of learning, teaching, working and researching to
which we are all committed in one way or another. This is my third year teaching
college classes. Last semester, I taught 30 students in two stand-alone courses,
each paying a lot of money to learn from me and from my colleagues. I am a
fiction writer hired to teach essay-writing to freshmen — this is not practice
for a future career, this is the real deal. I perform the work for which this
university is paid.
Still, the language of morality and professional pride is not enough to
keep me marching around an inflatable rat. NYU has said previously that we are
students earning degrees of “incalculable value.” That’s true. It’s impossible
to calculate the value of a degree, either financial or otherwise, and the truth
is that the value varies greatly from one field to the next, from one individual
to the next. What I can tell you is that most of us on strike come from
departments that don’t promise six-figure careers. Most of us will spend our
lives in academia, doing the work we’re doing now for many years to come. There
are fewer and fewer cushy tenure-track positions available for an ever-growing
number of qualified candidates. Every year, universities like this one farm out
more of their courses to adjuncts, TAs and other part-time instructors — at NYU,
the numbers are now over 75 percent.
I’m deeply invested in the working conditions of those who teach at
universities, now and for decades to come. I believe we deserve a living wage,
that collective bargaining is what gave us that living wage and is the only
thing that can protect it, and that our rights as workers are worth fighting
hard for when they’re denied. If I was willing to sell out my moral convictions
and my sense of social responsibility for a paycheck, I’d be making a hell of a
lot more than $19,000 a year.
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