Thursday, February 16, 2006
be advised that all comments on this blog are now being moderated. I welcome moves toward productive conversation and discussion, but feel no obligation to showcase here hysterical hyperbole, self-serving, pretentious anti-union screed, or ad-hominem namecalling. Such comments may be subject to deletion.
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good for you. it's too bad you still have to read personal attacks before you can delete them. you need some sort of screener monkey. provided that said monkey earns a fair wage, of course...
ReplyDelete--anonymous (but not to you)
ok. but just so you know this is typical of gsoc/oc behavior. shut em down. you will not hear from me again.
ReplyDeleteagain with the hyperbole.
ReplyDeleteI'm not shutting anyone down. I'm imposing some basic rules that folks are going to have to follow if they want to continue to use my blog as a space to talk about the union. That includes a basic modicum of respect and a commitment to responsible and informed dialogue.
But Zach, where else will I be able to anonymously make glib remarks about the strike that posture as critical analysis, invoke opportunistic, self-aggrandizing claims of OC martyrdom, AND trot out anti-union cliches to boot, all the while insulting you personally? It's not fair. Quit shutting me down.
ReplyDeleteGee, Melocoton. That's a good point. Maybe I'm just too dumb to be in graduate school and don't deserve my generous package with which largesse the University Leadership has seen fit to bequeath me in their infinite generosity. Clearly I have been duped by those devilish fascist autocratic Trotskyists on the GSOC organizing committee into cutting my hair and hooking up with barn animals!
ReplyDeleteReally though, the only people I have any interest in shutting down are the administrators who've spent the last three and a half months trying to shut us up.
Perhaps the first step in beginning a productive conversation is to refrain from calling your co-discussants pretentious and self-serving...or elitist and hyperbolic, for that matter. But what do I know? None of the strikes I've participated in have involved the academic labor force at Yale.
ReplyDeleteI'm no expert, but maybe the first step in building a productive conversation would be to refrain from calling your co-discussants hysterical, hyperbolic, or self-serving. Of course, what do I know? None of the strikes I've been involved in have had anything to do with the academic labor force at Yale.
ReplyDeletePerhaps you should try imposing similar standards on Maida.
I'm not really responsible for Maida. Perhaos you should try bringing your issues with Maida up with someone who is. Like Maida.
ReplyDeleteMy co-discussants initiated this exchange by calling me a detatched idiot.
I tried very hard to conduct a respectful dialogue despite this, but am no longer certain that either party is particularly committed to doing so, given the tenor of the past few posts.
I'd love to return your invocation of my favorite four-letter word (Y____) with something similarly salient about your own personal and institutional affiliations, but you're posting anonymously and refusing to extend me the same courtesies of which you are so willing to take advantage of against me, so instead i will state that while i do not privilege the Yale strikes above others, I feel very blessed to have been given the opportunity to play the limited role i did in them and to have learned from them what i was able to learn.
Is anyone responsible for Maida? Did anyone elect her? Is there any way to replace her? Is there any way for the membership of the union to call an election without the approval of the organizing committee?
ReplyDeleteI'm tired of beating my head against this wall. And tired of having to prove to you and every other party-liner that I am either smart enough, down enough, politically-minded enough, considerate enough, or working-class enough to hold an opinion that merits some hearing. I wish we could have a conversation, but I'm not sure that you can hear what I'm saying, or that you have any interest in it. Good luck to you, regardless.
Maida isn't elected by our bargaining unit alone, but by the whole of local 2110. I'm sure there are rules governing how a recall election would work, but i'm not aware of them, and frankly I think there are more pressing things to worry about.
ReplyDeleteYou accuse me of requiring you to prove to me that you're "working-class" enough and yet have no problem Yale-baiting me, which i find curious.
I'd love to have a conversation with you, but anonymous blog comments don't constitute any sort of real space to do that. If you want to have a conversation, seek me out and let's do that. But please stop lecturing me n how I couldn't handle or don't want to listen to what you have to say.
why would you have a space for anonymous comments if you are not willing to take what comes with it? and if you are so hurt by being called a "detached idiot" well by jove...
ReplyDeleteplus, from what i can tell you do avoid many tough questions by deferring to "later".
For example you said you had thoughts on what "winning" might look like (aside from the stock gsoc/uaw answer) but you have yet to engage that point ( and that thread has mysteriously disappeared...)
And most recently you write:
"I'm sure there are rules governing how a recall election would work, but i'm not aware of them, and frankly I think there are more pressing things to worry about"
What???
your disingenuousness, evasive tendencies and utter disregard for a democratically functioning body makes me sick. but you are not alone, and I can't blame you for being swept away. just let me know when maida decides to whip out the kool aid. oops, i guess that might be censored, or be considered a " death spell" or something, but I'm just trying to make a point.
I posted about winning here. I am not deferring to later on anything. if the3re's shit to be dealt with, let's deal with it.
ReplyDeleteAs for maida, impeaching or recalling her and replacing her with whoever won't win the strike. It won't be a magic bullet to solve everything you seem to find wrong about GSOC. I am interested in and involved in building a strong, democratic, progressive, and agressive union of graduate teachers and winning an extremely difficult and important strike. Maida can be gruff, and there are things she's said with which i've disagreed, but whether or not GSOC grows and changes in ways i think we both want it to isn't really something that she is standing in the way of.
You claim that i have a disregard for democratically functioning body. That's total horseshit and you know it. I support participatory models for democratic action and governance, rather than the ossified, "representative," roberts rules of order inert morass which you seem to be under the mistaken impression that a union is.
Thank you for that link, but I am talking about when you were accused by some anon poster of being inflexible and seeing only one way to "win", which was why gsoc was ultimately going to "lose". You responded that winning could look like something other than what gsoc is demanding ( "negotiate in good faith ...uaw..contract..."mantra) but you never got back to it. and the 26-posts related to it are gone ( perhaps they take up too much space). Could also be that you were busy policing and reprimanding "snipers", insulters, debaters and forgot to get back to the issue.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I only know about you what I can tell from this blog, and so far it seems like a lot of fancful, abstracted "specter of marx"-ish hot air. You don't much care about any "rules governing an election", how can you care about participatory democracy?
And I have to ask: what do you know about this labor struggle if, as you claim,you haven't yet engaged in the labor ( i.e. TA ing of GAing AT NYU) that has produced it? I guess that's what "detached" was referring to.
Anyhow, my point here is not to hurt you, or make you feel bad, but just shake you up a bit. That seems like what the other posters want to do too. By the way, as much as I wish I could express myslef as well as some of my "co-discussants", or even knew them at all the fact that more than a few people are challenging you ( and gsoc) should at leat give you food for thought.
Good luck with your life in the American Labor Movement.
Maida is about nine-tenths of the reason that the union went into stagnation after winning the first contract. Before those negotiations she consistently shut down attempts within the membership to organize the largest possible public forums and teach-ins that were meant to open up lines of respectful communication between the liberal-left union faithful, and the less ideologically aligned (and generally better compensated) sectors of the membership (i.e., in the sciences). At that time, there was a constant refrain of, "We'll worry about that after we win." Of course, by the time we had won, Maida had so alienated the most progressive, aggressive, and radical parts of the membership that there was no impetus to change or develop anything. Instead, content to rest upon the laurels of winning a contract for graduate workers at a private university, the union went about the business of being a bureaucracy, and did nothing to build any sense of connection with its membership. Even after the Brown decision came down, and it seemed imperative to start organizing in a genuinely respectful and responsive way, the good folks took their time and didn't start reaching out to the membership until about this time last year. Then, as before, and as now, the organizing committee had to rely upon the good faith of the members who, in general, support unions, and have labor backgrounds, and who are committed to progressive change. The nearly three years between the first contract fight and the second were spent building nothing. Where was GSOC when the Brown decision came down? Why is NYU the line in the sand with the NLRB? How is it that other private university graduate students had the same legal rights as we for the same period of time, and still didn't organize unions? Yale has been at it for well over a decade, and still they struggle.
ReplyDeleteThere may be members of GSOC who are committed to building a progressive front for democratic social change, but there are just as many who are invested in nothing more than the union for the union's sake, and I refuse to fight for and with somebody who has been so consistently disrespectful to myself, and my colleagues.
The NLRB was never an open door to unionization. NLRB protections did very little in the way of protecting the rights of workers to form unions even when we had them, even under the Clinton administration, and over the last five-plus years, they've done even less. The NYU decision in 2000 did lead to several new organizing drives at private universities, in the same way that the NYU drive was in part inspired by the Yale fight (in particular a trip four NYU grad students took to an action in new Haven in ther spring of 1996, the way i've heard Kitty Krupat tell it. In fact the fight for the rights of graduaste teachers is much older than a decade - GESO alone has been organizing for about sixteen years now and was immediately preceeded by another similar organization for three years prior to its existence.) After the 2000 NLRB decision, drives at Columbia, Penn, Cornell, Brown, and Tufts began. At all these universities, elections were held. At Columbia and Penn, where a victory in the election was highly probable, university lawyers held up the counting of ballots for years on appeals. Since the Brown decision renders the results of these elections irrelevant, this suiggests the importance of winning neutrality agreements in securing collective bargaining agreements.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't here for the history anon #2 references. I can't speak to it's accuracy or innacuracy. And i've freely admitted that i haven't yet taught here. But I will, so this fight is extremely important to and salient for me.
Anon #2, we're fighting now, not for a contract for a contract's sake, (Anon 1, blogger archives posts more than a week old, but they're still here and you can find them easily enough. I'm not censoring anyone.) but for the future of those organizing drives at other universities, because independent grievance procedures give us a power we would otherwise be very hard-pressed to claim, because we think that winning a new contract is the only way currently available to build an independent, democratic organization which links its struggles to those of folks outside this campus. I strongly disagree with the assertion that there's anyone organizing in GSOC who is doing this out of some love of bureaucracy rather than out of a real desire to bring about social change. I'm sorry if you feel disrespected and would be more than willing to discuss this in a forum which is more appropriate and responsive than anonymous blog comments. I believe that this struggle is important enough that such converstaions are worth having. Dismissing the possibility of even having them, as others have done here, seems to me something of a shameful cop-out.