Three months ago, John Sexton told a graduate student in the English Department, that GSOC was "a virus" that had to be eradicated/extirpated from the social body of the NYU campus. In considering the implications of these words today, after the student recounted this exchange to the hundreds of GSOCers at the GAC town hall meeting, as Katherine Stimpson squirmed and then tried to lecture us on respect (that's another blog entry coming soon to a weapon of class instruction near you) i find myself referring again and again to the graffiti on the high school bulletin board in pump up the volume and the multiple, shifting, rhizomatic forms of organizing it implies.
The meeting was a victory for our side. It began with Matt and Holly, the two locked out creative writing teachers who are facing at least a 3 semester blacklist and the denial of tuition remission and health care benefits, blasting the GAC proposal's useless grievance procedure and the repression visited upon the strikers by the administration. While administrators spoke of a "third way" (one GSOCer pointed out the conspicuous lack of thirdness implicit and explicit in the GAC's comissioning and subservience to the President of the University while a faculty member in the same department has reminded folks that historically, when we talk about a "third way" what we are talking about is generally fascism,) GSOC members pointedly told Provost McLaughlin et al. that they could not be the ones to unilaterally decide whether we should have a union - in fact, that decision is and has always been ours and ours alone (we have built the wide foundation laid it skyward stone by stone) and that we did not need their voice mechanism, we have our own and we have been speaking volunes through it for 93 days now. Susan pointed out that the community which the meeting sought to poll on the GAC proposal was a community which we constitute and a community that had spoken resolutely in support of our union and to demand that the university leadership team negotiate. Provost McLaughlin, responding to Melissa's question about the "human toll" of the strike all but admitted just ow destructive the administration's union busting has been for graduate teachers and researchers here. We all know now who Rodney Washington is. The next question, i suppose, is "who the hell is Frank Hoffensteadt, PhD.?" Sarah Wolf (who's been locked out of her job teaching Spanish, asked this. She also asked if the administration really believed the line that there are only seven of us on strike. Here, flustered and irritated, "Dave" (as the moderator referred to him) resorted to fascist bravado, telling us to give him our names and departments and how we were "failing our responsibilities." Mike Palm took issue with this, and so did I, and i was next on line to the microphone, so what I had originally plotted out as a GESO-style calm and collected explication of exactly why the administration was never going to win this instead turned into a half-shouted attempt to redirect and reappropriate the discourse of responsibility away from the shrill anti-union propaganda of Dean Stimpy and Provost Dave towards a much larger understanding of what GSOCers are responsible for (the future of academic labor and the movement for another university) and who we are responsible to (our colleagues, our students, New Yorkers, union and non-union workers, our companer@s in New Haven and North Hampton, Berkeley and Urbana, Philly and Morningside Heights and Madison and Ann Arbor and in every adjunct cubicle in every university in this country, the labor movement,) and that the only way to fight casualization and corporatization/neoliberalization is through unions, through organizing. We need a strong, independent union because we can't trust the agents of casualization and posterchildren of the neoliberal university to disrupt their own agendas out of kindness. We have a responsibility to eachother. We have a responsibility to the seven folks thus far who have been locked out of their jobs for striking. That responsibility means fighting. It means doing everything we can to win this fight and a new contract and to work towards a better future for universities and the folks who work in them.
Aqui estamos, y no nos vamos.
Oh, and here's some Ralph Chaplin for you.
Solidarity Forever (1915)
When the union's inspiration through the workers' blood shall run,
There can be no power greater anywhere beneath the sun;
Yet what force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one,
But the union makes us strong.
CHORUS:Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
Solidarity forever,
For the union makes us strong.
Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,
Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?
Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?
For the union makes us strong.
It is we who plowed the praries;
built the cities where they trade;
Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;
Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;
But the union makes us strong.
All the world that's owned by idle drones is ours and ours alone.
We have laid the wide foundations;
built it skyward stone by stone.
It is ours, not to slave in, but to master and to own.
While the union makes us strong.
They have taken untold millions that they never toiled to earn,
But without our brain and muscle not a single wheel can turn.
We can break their haughty power, gain our freedom when we learn
That the union makes us strong.
In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold,
Greater than the might of armies, magnified a thousand-fold.
We can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old
For the union makes us strong.
you, my dear, are a detached idiot. you embody the virus we are currently plagued with on this campus--priveleged, entitled, white crybabies.
ReplyDeletesincerely, a concerned nyu student
hey, thanks for stopping by. Maybe next time you could try to engage in an actual conversation instead of hurling ad hominem insults and hysterical hyperbole. I feel lik that might lead to more productive interactions with other people.
ReplyDeleteI'm white. I come from a relatively privileged background, and in this i'm something of an anomaly among many of the strikers, many of whom are from working class families. Niether of these is something I have any control over or can change. What i am not is a defender or supporter of white privilege or class exploitation. i see the strike as a means to contest and dethrone such power, to open graduate school up to folks who couldn't afford to come here without the secrutiy of a union and to help build a strong, deomcratic labor movement which fights antiracist struggles.
I'm not sure whether to dignify the crybaby thing with a response, given the pretty bankrupt level of discourse it suggests, but i will caution that if you can't see the crisis on this campus, you need to get your fucking eyes examined.
And as for entitlement, well, you're goddamn right i feel entitled. I feel entitled to the freedom to form and keep a union, to the right to collectively bargain with my employer, and to the right to strike. I feel entitled to an academic environment in which my colleagues are not intimidated, harassed, or locked out for trying to keep our elected collective bargaining agent and its relationship to the university administration. I feel entitled to know who someone slinging personal insults at me in a public forum is and why they feel they have the right to do so. I feel responsible for the department i'm in, the people in my union i've met over these three months of the strike, the undergrads who've been trying to win financial aid packages better than the bullshit NYU currently offers them, the union and organizing campaign which i left to come study here, and the friends across the US academy who are fighting for the same things I am. And that's why i'll be out there on the picket lines and doing whatever i have to do until we win.
i think "anonymous" just got the smack down.
ReplyDeleteI find GSOC's arrogance insulting. And a lame song composed two years before the Russian Revolution has about as much relevance to the present situation as the methods and strategies of industrial unionism have to the so-called global, enterprise university. It is undoubtedly true that due to political economic shifts, neo-liberalism, globalization--whatever you want to call it--the social, political, and economic functions of the university have been transformed, and the conditions of academic labor are changing. Yet, why should passionately intelligent and deeply politicized people respond to this new configuration of socioeconomic relations with the same tired old labor organization strategies of the Eisenhower era? GSOC, under the tutelage of the UAW, has no compelling interest in its membership, or in economic justice. Its interest--at best--is in exhuming the rotting corpse of national economic Keynsianism. Good luck to you. You've already lost.
ReplyDeleteYour response strikes me as deeply elitist and throughly ignorant of labor histories new and old.
ReplyDeleteUnions long predate the Eisenhower era, (as does the UAW,) and have changed profoundly in the last two and a half decades. This is not and was never about Keynesianism. (Nor was Keynesianism ever anything more than cautiously cool towards militant industrial unionism.) This fight is about building collective organizations across departmental and disciplinary boundaries with recourse to independent grievance procedures and connected to workers across the university and the social landscape of the flexible, imperial urban economy.
GSOC IS its membership. It IS the hundreds of people who are staying on strike to fight for the changes that need to happen. It IS the seven people thus far who've been locked out of their jobs for standing up for change at NYU. And GSOC is Holly Lewis and Matt Ozypowski, who have been not only locked out, but in effect fired for at least the next three semesters and will probably lose their tuition remission and health care benefits because they refused to cross the picket line and because they stood resolute in their commitment towards making NYU a place where you shouldn't have to be rich and/or white to get an MFA in creative writing.
Academic unions, like all unions, are what we make them. GSOC members voted for union representation and have spoken overwhelmingly in favor of a second contract because we care deeply about economic justice and we are willing to fight to achieve it.
The conditions of academic labor have changed. Past tense. Casualization and corporatization aren't looming in the distance, we're living with them now.
The first contract dramatically improved the lives of graduate teachers and fomented subsequent organizing against casualization and for justice in graduate teaching and research at universities across the U.S. We need, and we will win, a second contract to continue this work and this struggle. I hope you stand with us.
Why is it that when anyone opposed to the direction of this campaign poses any sort of reasoned critique, the immediate fall-back position of the GSOC faithful is "you don't know your labor history"? You say that I'm elitist, but I can't understand the full genius of the GSOC movement without a thorough sense of the past? How bourgeois! How decadent! Why is it that GSOC itself very conveniently forgets its labor history where it concerns almost two centuries of critique by people of color, or the fact that these same tactics that the UAW is imposing upon the struggle at NYU are the tactics that have been losing unions members and campaigns for the last twenty-five to thirty years? You want elitism: true struggle will be--if not the negation--the very transsubstantiation of history. The past is neither a template nor a guide, but a record of injury, written in letters of blood and fire. Marx knew it. Lenin knew it. But both of them had something GSOC has not: humility. Lenin was repeatedly humbled before the knowledge of the proletariat--unlettered and unschooled, workers, intuitively, knew more about politics and struggle than he could discern through days of agonizing intellection.
ReplyDeleteGSOC claims that its members are the union, and that its members are workers, but GSOC has no relationship to its members, its members sense of their work, the conditions of their workplaces, their understandings of the university, or their ideas about the informal networks that are the basis of community at NYU and the potential substance of an effective organizing campaign. I reiterate: GSOC does not trust its membership. If it did, it would stop harping on, George Bush like, about the mandate it has for a strike. If a strike vote were called today, the strike would be over, tomorrow. There are not hundreds of people striking. The strike is not winning. It will not win. I am not saying this because I hate unions, or militancy, or because I can't stomach struggle. I am saying it because I want to see something saved from this shipwreck.
And yes, I do know that unions predate Eisenhower. There is no question about that. As for Keynesianism, apparently my point was too subtle. I agree: Keynesianism was a ploy to defang the movement of working people. But this is my point: GSOC is doing the very same thing. It's campaign is not about empowerment, or justice, or the future of the university. If it were, it might be worth fighting. After nearly six years of running on empty, this is a campaign has been running on hubris. GSOC has seen brief explosions of true militancy and radicalism, but it has quashed them at every turn. GSOC exists to discipline the workers. Trust me: John Sexton loves you guys right now.
Anon, what makes *you* think *you* know all the things that GSOC doesn't about its membership? What makes you think that GSOC members are blindly and uncritically committed to GSOC? Talk about arrogant hubris...
ReplyDeleteMoreover, have you condsidered the fact that perhaps a strike vote wouldn't pass today (as opposed to back in Oct.) because strikers, other GSOC members, and GAs more generally have been unjustly threatened and intimidated by NYU? Let's not underestimate the brute strength of coercive power. And while we're at it, let's talk about the unparalleled arrogance and hubris of the NYU Administration; they're conspicuously missing from your "analysis"...
Perhaps you should be less concerned with attacking anon, and listen more to what anon has to say. GSOC, and you as a member, seem more concerned with policing dissent, an ironic and arrogant move considering GSCO's critique of John Sexton about policing dissent.
ReplyDeleteLaconic anon (i.e., the last poster): That's ridiculous. I'm not policing dissent, i'm responding to comments made on my blog. I'm not attacking anyone, i'm conducting an argument. It's difficult to attack someone who won't leave a name, though clearly not so difficult to call me a virus/idiot/crybaby.
ReplyDeleteAnon (we'll call you Verbose Anon, as opposed to ad hominem anon and laconic anon,) I call you elitist because you are so disgusted by the possibility that "passionately intelligent, politically committed people might feel that they have a place in unions, and, vice versa, that union members who aren't graduate teachers might be passionately intelligent and politically committed. I'm pretty young, but i've spent a lot of my adult life working in and with various social moevemnts, including labor and including industrial unions like Unite-HERE, and the folks in those unions are every bit as intelligent and as politically committed as you.
It's disingenuous to claim we aren't attentive to the critiques people of color have made of unions. We are. We take such critiques very seriously and we are working to foreground such converns in the organizing that we do. I personally am also very aware of the ways in which people of color have built struggles for social justice around the labor movement, from the sleeping car porters to 1199 to the memphis sanitation workers to the UFW to the more autonomist formations like the league of revolutionary black workers.
There is a strike going on. There are hundreds of people who are still on strike. These are facts. This is a strike that isn't protected by the national labor relations board, and it's a strike which has cointinued into its fourth month despite a level of repression from the administration which is unprecedented on this campus. You can't get much more militant than that.
There are seven people who are currently being locked out of their jobs for two semesters. Two of these folks are also losing their health care benefits and their tuition remission.
Ending the strike now means abandoning a fight which we are winning. It means leaving these folks out to dry. It means letting the ULT walk all over faculty governance and the rights of academic workers. That's not something I, for one, and there are hundreds who agree with me, am willing to let happen.
You call the strike a shipwreck, and I disagree. But if you aren't doing everything you can to win this fight, I think you're helping the administration to wreck the ship. If all you are doing is sitting on your ass and writing anonymous anti-union comments on some "idiot's" blog, you're helping the administration keep those seven people locked out. If you've returned to work and yet harp about how GSOC is "disciplining" the workers from undertaking more militant acttion, you're a hypocrite. So i ask you where you stand, and if you want to see change on this campus, I urge you to do everything in your power to support this strike.
Is GSOC a perfectly run organization? No. To my anonymous mind, many of its organizational tactics have been quite poor and have alienated many people who aren't soaked, coated, and poached in the white sauce of wealth, race, and male privilege. That said, GSOC is nonetheless ABSOLUTELY in the right versus the NYU administration, and while the strike may or may not have been properly implemented and orchestrated, there's a point where heaping abuse on an organization under such concentrated attack from a university administration in THIS forum is just fucking ridiculous. This is a personal blog, not a union meeting. While there's value in the critiques of the anonymous chorus, the arguments are hardly being presented in a manner or a place where they'll actually make a difference. So why the vitriol? And Anon #3, why the quasi-mystic valorization of the uneducated worker? Is it because (s)he's closer to nature? Presumed browner? Why the incredibly problematic divorce of intellection from the worker -- do you think you just *know* about politics simply from working a series of crappy jobs? (Maybe I'm a dumb bitch, but when I was an *uneducated worker,* I didn't intuitively *know* anything -- I had to think about it). More to the point, what can GSOC do to please you? Are you doing anything to combat NYU or improve the union other than bitching at Zach? If you're not, these critiques -- many of them legitimate on their own -- are nothing but cop-outs when they come from your mouth.
ReplyDeleteBut Zach, seriously, some of these international "we the people unite" moments do elide substantive differences in the respective struggles when you simply call upon them to lend gravity to your struggle. That kind of violence isn't particularly good.
Dear anonymous,
ReplyDeleteI wanted to respond to a couple of things you said… “GSOC, under the tutelage of the UAW, has no compelling interest in its membership, or in economic justice.”
I’m not sure if you know who GSOC is. GSOC is a bunch of graduate employees. I’m not sure how they could have anything but the interest of the members at heart, since they are members. Folks who are active in GSOC aren’t perfect and you may not agree with everything they do, but they are only grad students. And I would encourage anyone who is a grad employee at NYU to get involved with your union. If it’s not living up to your expectations, get involved and make it better—otherwise, you’re just a crybaby. I’ve been active in my union since I became a grad employee. And I don’t love everyone in my union or agree with every decision, but I don’t sit around and complain either. I’ve gotten involved. I’m committed to working with my union to fight our boss and work within my union to make it the type of organization I’m proud to be a part of.
And if you don’t have union, you might as well be a crybaby ‘cause you won’t have any power. I don’t believe that any individual student has power at NYU or any other university. And it’s only when you band together and fight that you can sway the powers at be. If you guys accept something less than a union, you can ask for what you want. When you have a legally sanctioned union you can demand to bargain. However, GSOC is not asking to be recognized under the law. Instead, they’re organizing and resisting in order to FORCE the university to bargain. I’d say this is much more powerful than running a union election or not having a union at all.
You continued, “Its interest--at best--is in exhuming the rotting corpse of national economic Keynsianism.”
So I kind of agree, unions uphold capitalism. They do not create radical change in the political/social economy, but I don’t see anyone at NYU offering an alternative that does. It seems to me that the alternative is to have no union and no voice as employees on campus. If you can explain to me how this is a better alternative, I’m listening….
However, as a grad student at UMass, I am far better off with a grad union. For the WORK I do, I get paid decently, get healthcare, dental care (both with same sex domestic partner benefits), subsidized childcare, and a legally binding grievance procedure in which a third party, not my employer, has the final say.
Our union is constantly on the forefront of student organizing on campus—currently around freezing student fees and increasing recruitment and retrenchment of students of color. Two years ago, we had a huge campaign where we mobilized members, petitioned local government and went to arbitration to oppose the SEVIS fee, a fee on International Students that in part paid for their own surveillance.
Furthermore, having a grad union makes graduate programs affordable and accessible. I don’t know a single grad student who has their mommy or daddy paying for their graduate education (I’m sure there are some, I just don’t know them). The grad students I know are either going into debt to pay for their education or they are working as a graduate assistant and are able to get by with their wages, tuition waivers, and benefits. We care about making higher education affordable and accessible for all students, and our union contract is the best victory and weapon we have in that fight.
Whoa, whoa, whoa!!! Engaging in dialogue does not equal "policing dissent." You can't tell us we're silencing you and tell us to shut up in the same breath -- that's hypocrisy, par excellence. You're free to critique GSOC, and we're free to critique you. Stick to the substance of the issues...and lay off Zach.
ReplyDeleteI want to respond to the comments offered by the most recent anonym. I do think GSOC has made mistakes in this campaign, particularly early on, and done things in ways which limited our effectiveness and ability to organize. I've found some of the discussions that have been happening in various places within the union reassuring. I hope that these conversations continue and that what's being discussed and who's discussing it expands and changes the way we organize.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not trying to, and would be interested in discussing whether and how I, create a colonizing universality through the way i am talking about academic labor and about GSOC here and elsewhere. I say this not to dismiss your comments, but to continue the discussion. If there are places I have done that here, that's a problem and I take your point.
While I do not want to elide the differences within the ways in which race and class and gender and "alienness" are constituted, and don't see the union as an automatic panacea by any means (and i'm regretting a bit my initial points in response to the first anonym which seem a bit overly simplistic,) I am involved with GSOC because I feel that it can be a powerful platform from which to look at the ways in which we can forge some cautious and careful links which don't dissolve violently into universality but instead might constitute (a?) multiple, hybrid form(s?) from which it might be possible to assault the neoliberal university on several fronts and build on new possibilities for thinking about how we might wish to (re/dis)order the production of knowledge and help to rebuild and reshape a global labor movement.
Thanks for your comments.
ad hominem anon here, back in the mix. how happy am i to see that my base insults have generated such a complex discussion. I have to say though, mr zs-w, the other anons are being very generous by continuing to engage you to such a degree. which is why i happily resort to ad hominem insults. i forgot to mention last time: your reviews on amazon suck.
ReplyDeleteby the way, you LIAR ( or idiot for believing it, whichever it is) there are NOT HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE ON STRIKE. there are maybe 50
the gsoc propaganda is unbelievable.
if you enjoy misrepresenting the truth, at least use language other than what gsoc provides. we've been hearing it for months and it is so boring. get creative!
YOU SHUT YOUR MOUTH WHEN YOU'RE TALKING TO ME.
ReplyDeleteone of the few redeeming lines in wedding crashers.
Hey, thanks for reading crap i wrote in high school. I guess i should be honored by the attention.
ReplyDeleteThere were far more than a hundred graduate students at the GSC meeting on Wednesday night. Of those, only a handful were non-strikers (on fellowship or having returned to work.) I don't know the exact figure, but I trust what I've heard from the union leadership (if that means i'm an idiot, then so be it,) which is a great deal more than 50.
The union leadership's lies will soon be exposed. the way they calculate and disseminate the numbers is so flawed. First, as was admitted, by one of the organizers, they count people on fellowship as strikers. If you don't believe it ask them yourslef. Basically, they accept anyone who says they're on strike as "being on strike". how accurate.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, I give you that there may be more than 50 people on strike, but not much more. And yes, though I didn't do a head count myslef, there may have been more that 100 grad students there. BUT not all were gsoc members, that's for sure. But you guys were loud, so it did SOUND like there were a hundred of you there.
Third: I don't know about you but I was way samrter and in tune with the world in high school. You don't like who you were in high school? That explains everything!
People on fellowship are absolutely not counted as strikers for the purpose of calculating the numbers of people who are striking labor. The numbers announced at the last membership meeting were, to the best of my knowledge, accurate. The union leadership has nothing to gain from lying to members and everything to lose. You can keep looking under the furniture in the hopes of finding some union conspiracy, or you can actually try to take action and change something. Your choice.
ReplyDeleteoh god, clearly living in la la land. from your comments about the "responsibility" of the private university because it is in part publicly funded ( aren't our tax dollars going to iraq too?)to your uncritical gsoc-worship i see there is no point. i don't even have the energy to insult you anymore. good luck. you "won". just like gsoc will
ReplyDeleteI don't worship gsoc and my involvement in the union is hardly uncritical. But i won't publicly attack folks who are at risk and striking for things i support when i can be much more productive actually organizing than sniping anonymously from the shadows of the internets.
ReplyDeleteI don't see your point about Iraq. What are you arguing?
Anon Verbose here: Did I say that I was disgusted by the possibility that intelligent, critical, passionate people could be part of unions? No. In fact, my point was almost exactly the opposite--that GSOC is elitist for refusing to acknowledge the knowledge and talents and capacities of its membership, and to use those same passions as the basis of its organizing and political campaign.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, do you really think that all the collective anons are doing is sniping from the sidelines of this conflict? For all of you who are trying to shut down our arguments by implying that we are somehow "inactive" participants in this struggle, I submit that we are extraordinarily active, even if we do not toe the precious GSOC party line.
ReplyDeletethank you, anon verbose. i like your smarts. i think we are being treated unfairly by the manager of this website. maybe we should start our own union called called "asoc". anonymous snipers organizing commitee. anyway, my point about iraq is simply that "public" funds are rarely, if ever, put to "public" use. they are always diverted to the private interests of whatever old white man is in charge(or his lackies, often non white, non-male, non-old).
ReplyDeleteBy the way, who is this "we" you speak of?
or, to use "our" language: OF WHICH YOU SPEAK
ReplyDeleteI nominate Anon Verbose for the gsoc presidency. SIKE.
ReplyDeletethe saddest part of this is that people care so little that a coup is laughable. now that gsoc's membership has been completely alienated ( i totally agree with you AV), only the rotten core remains. its gonna be real fun watching you guys go dowwwwnnnn. MWAAAAAAHAHAHHAHHAAAA!!!!!
you selfish bastards.
AD HOMEINEM IS BACK!