kick your door down

Holy crap!

John Sexton is the 7th most loathsome New Yorker

New York Press

7 John Sexton
University president
What’s worse than a bunch of
over-educated, privileged crybaby Felicity wannabes? Their disciplinarian daddy,
of course. John Sexton helms NYU, that beacon of Downtown real estate and
strike-busting. Sexton gave the rising princes of capitalism at the Stern School
of Business a lesson in how to break the back of underpaid workers when he
refused to negotiate with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee. The private
university grad student union’s contract had expired, and Sexton’s stonewalling
led to a November strike.
Picket lines and petitions led to cancelled
classes. Some co-eds went keg wild—in support of the strikers. The strikers
believed that they had won the day. But Sexton, the Andrew Carnegie of Academia,
wouldn’t budge instead issuing an “or else.” The union and its members claimed
Sexton’s tactic was proof of their power. The strike is ongoing, yet unlike the
Transit Workers Union walkout, NYU’s newsworthiness fizzled quickly. With a
reduced workforce, the university, whose tentacles have spread from the East to
West Village, apparently hasn’t taken over enough of Downtown Manhattan, and
is—if you can believe it—looking to expand. While the school administration
claims the undergraduate enrollment is shrinking, and therefore revenue, NYU
dorms and classrooms are sprouting like poisoned mushrooms over the two
villages. One such project has the villagers brandishing torches and pitchforks:
A 26-story dorm at the corner of Fourth Avenue and East 12th Street. That’s the
site of the soon-to-be-former 159-year-old St. Ann’s Church (the Landmarks
Commission caved into NYU and denied landmark designation). The building would
be the tallest in the East Village. If you were wondering whatever happened to
the Saint and the Palladium, the city’s two best-ever nightclubs, it’s easy:
NYU. Lower Third Avenue now looks like Upper Third Avenue, thanks to all the
dorm highrises. A recent $200 million gift, earmarked for an institute dedicated
to the research of ancient civilizations, will further pad the pockets of a
school administration that has already eaten everything around Washington
Square.

The rest of the list is problematic. Mike Piazza isn't loathsome at all, except to the extent that he's a republican. And Roger Toussaint? Please. Roger Toussaint ranked higher than Bllomberg AND Pataki is a joke.

the clap pt 2

So when i was walking to the picket line this morning, up Bowery from the Manhattan Bridge, out of one ofthe restauraunt supply stores came a familiar song - the early synth-pop hit "popcorn." It's been in my head ever since. Read a brief history of it here.

I'd also like to announce that I just downloaded "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" as a ringtone. I'm sure, to paraphrase Malcolm Reynolds, that your days of not taking me seriously have finally reached a middle.

Thanks to all the respondents for their honest and diverse responses. I think part of the reason GSOC folks have such a strong aversion to the farmworker clap is that they think of it as an ahistoricized "power clap," to quote our unit chair, which sounds to me and probably others like corporate sensitivity jargon, Peter Drucker on Xanax. What the clap actually means, its history in the farmworker struggles and the Chicano movimiento, are evacuated in favor of what GSOCers percieve as empty groupthink.

So how do we change this, if that's what we decide we need to do? Does the farmworker clap constitute a useful means of connecting our strike and our union to other labor and social movement struggles? And is this a project we should even be embarking upon at this point?

Meeting Olympics

the clap

at a meeting tonight we were about to end with a farmworker clap when we got derailed by added administrative issues and then no one wanted to clap. There's a hostility to the UFW clap in GSOC which, coming from the Yale fight and from Unite HERE, where pretty much every meeting i was ever in ended with one, i find it frustrating. I don't know if the hostility comes from some sort of resistance to a percieved drinking of the proverbial koolaid supposedly exemplified by accelerated synchronous handclaps, or if there's a feeling that somehow we'd be missapropriating the legacy of Cesar Chavez, but I want to briefly argue here for said clap as a useful way to end meetings.

GSOC folks don't like cheerleading. They don't like being told that we're winning when it appears that things are more dire. Enthusiasm and energy sometimes get criticized for short-sightedness and/or evidence of stuff like white privilege, anti-intellectualism, and/or an inability to address some serious concerns in an effective way. I'm sympathetic to all of these critiques except for the anti-intellectualism one, which i in part find insulting and which the smarter, organizer part of me, assuming such a part indeed exists, thinks we need to take as a challenge to thing about and articulate what's at stake in our fight and what we are fighting for in better ways than we have thus far.

I don't see the handclap as a fascist gesture, an imposition of groupthink or an assertion of an artificial and false optimism. I see it as a way of committing ourselves to eachother once more as we end every meeting, of forcing ourselves to think about what happens in such meetings and what has to happen in terms of the struggle we're in, as a gesture of solidarity with other struggles and social movements, and because, from a very problematic formalist standpoint, they are a good way to bring meetings to a visible, audible, tactile end and move forward with on the ground organizing, a reminder that we don't actually win through meeting, but by all the work that happens in part in between the meetings, in the departments, on the streets, etc.

More on this later, maybe. Now it's back to Doreen Massey's For Space and then on to Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey.

But first, I want to open this question up to readers, particularly those involved in movement organizing or who've been in meetings where the farmworker handclap has been utilized. How do you feel about its efficacy? What does it do, or not do for you?

settlement at the Claremont

Over in Berkeley, California, comes word that an agreement has been reached to end the long boycott of the Claremont resort by Unite HERE Local 2850. Congratulations to the workers and their union who won this important victory!

The new contract has already taken effect and extends through July 31, 2009. Terms include wage and benefit increases for union members during the 31/2-year contract period. At the end of that time, the increases will "bring overall salaries to a level comparable to the union standard in the Bay Area," Huber said.

this is what democracy looks like.

When members of the Senate Judiciary Committee meet today to wrestle with
the fate of more than 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States,
they can expect to do so against a backdrop of thousands of demonstrators,
including clergy members wearing handcuffs and immigrant leaders in T-shirts
that declare, "We Are America."

But if events of recent days hold true, they will be facing much more than
that.

Rallies in support of immigrants around the country have attracted crowds
that have astonished even their organizers. More than a half-million
demonstrators marched in Los Angeles on Saturday, as many as 300,000 in Chicago
on March 10, and — in between — tens of thousands in Denver, Phoenix, Milwaukee
and elsewhere.
***
"It's unbelievable," said Partha Banerjee, director of the New Jersey
Immigration Policy Network, who was in Washington yesterday to help plan more
nationwide protests on April 10. "People are joining in so spontaneously, it's
almost like the immigrants have risen. I would call it a civil rights movement
reborn in this country."

yeah denver.

"Don't Stop Believin'"

The following represents the latest in a long series of attempts at rewriting popular music songs to be about academic labor struggles, a series which began way back in 2003 with "Knockin' on Levin's Door." I mean here not to ridicule or diminish the seriousness of what is at stake in our fight, to which i am deeply committed, but rather to add some levity and suggest one potential, if not particularly useful, form cultural production influenced by the strike might take. This particular attempt is inspired by an inexplicable recent fascination with Steve Perry and a desire to create something which, unlike, say, RUN-UOC, can be sung on picket lines. Also deserving of credit is The Revolutionary Army of California, whose inspired cover of the song on which the following is based turned my attentions away from "Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)" for long enough to write this.


"Don't Stop Believin'"
S. Perry/N. Schon/J. Cain/This Blogger

Banner we'll unfurl,
in this neoliberal world
your threats and intimidation, well we ain't scared.

Fill the city with noise,
our international's in Detroit
We picket decked out in union flair

long meetings in the conference room
more productive than we'd assume
we are united in this fight
It goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Their PR flacks are pretty shrill,
and so we struggle still
Follow mother jones' advice,
yeah -- we organize!

Gotta win, can't afford to lose
assure you this ain't no ruse
Yeah the struggle never ends
it goes on and on and on and on

Strikers chanting,
up and down the picket line
John Sexton cringes at the sight
Striking teachers
fighting for a resolution
fighting, striving for what's right

Don't stop Believing
Send john sexton reeling
Striking teachers


[shout outs to Alyssa and to Josh, whose version of "Time after time" was so good that i still think the line "Flashback '84" is in the original.]

Tricia at the podium

And on the buckets...

This Boston Globe article suggests that Wednesday's settlement is only the beginning for 1199's organizing in New England, and takes us inside the heads of anti-union hospital executives and behind the closed doors of union-busting law firms.

An SEIU local in Massachusetts with about 12,000 members voted to merge
with the New York organization last year, setting the stage for a major drive in
Boston, where the healthcare industry is the biggest employer.
A Boston law
firm, Mintz Levin Cohen Ferris Glovsky and Popeo, recently hosted a closed-door
meeting to warn several dozen hospital officials about the union's
tactics.
''This is not the traditional labor-management battle. It is a
totally different landscape," said Donald W. Schroeder, a member of the labor
and benefits group at Mintz Levin's Boston office.
Next month, the
Massachusetts Hospital Association is planning to discuss ways to counter the
union's efforts. And an April 4 conference in Cambridge planned by Dietz
Associates, a Kennebunk, Maine, human resources firm specializing in employee
communications, is expected to attract about 40 officials from New England
hospitals.

when heartless hopitals get their comeuppance

If you ever read Deborah Elkin's dissertation on Labor and the Left at Yale between the 1920s and 1950s, you'll read one anecdote from 1948 concerning a union campaign at Grace-New Haven Hospital. If you sift through old New Haven Registers and Modern Times from the late 1960s and 1970s, you'll find more than a few articles about the long push which won recognition for some 150 members of Yale-New Haven Hospital's dietary unit in 1974(?) but was precluded by changes in the labor law from the kind of department-by department organizing model 1199 had employed previously elsewhere. In 1998, organizing began anew at the hospital, a joint project of 1199SEIU/New England Health Care Employees Union and HERE, which had represented Yale University workers since the 1950s. The hospital met the campaign wih captive audience meetings and other intimidation tactics. Hospital administrators harassed workers. They arrested eight leafletters during the week of the Lcoal 34 and 35 strike votes (four of these as I looked on,) and meanwhile they put 10,000 people in debt by denying low income patients state-bankrolled "free bed funds" (which they instead shoveled into their own endowment,) by engaging in vicious and predatory "debt collection" tactics which involved garnishing the wages of Yale-New Haven employees whose meager pay didn't allow them to afford the company's ludicrously expensive health plan, by throwing debtors in prison for failure to appear in court, and by placing a thousand liens on New Haven area homes. They fired a rank and file leader of the organizing drive to intimidate other workers against the drive. They repeatedly rhetorically equated unions and their supporters with cancer and refused to negotiate with the city, the union, or CORD, the powerful and dynamic coalition formed to intiate a real dialogue between the "Heartless Hospital," as Paul Bass called it, and the residents of the working class African American and Latino neighborhood into which it was rapidly expanding with its tax exemptions, lax environmental regulations, "bad debt," and refusal to negotiate with workers in good faith or provide free care to those in need. They attempted to force the city to alter its zoning laws at their whim, attempted to reshape the geography, social, political, economic, of New Haven by fiat. Though hospital pr flacks proclaimed otherwise, the denial of free care and the predatory collection practices continued.

By all reports, as the hospital, the union, and CORD announce today the signing of a community benefit agreement guaranteeing jobs to Hill residents and close scrutiny to allocation of free bed funds, addressing parking, housing and environmental concerns as well as ensuring care for New Haven children, and, let's not forget, agreeing to a closely-monitored, agreed-conduct method by which 1800 workers can win union recognition, current CEO Marna Borgstrom seems to have abandoned the hardball strategy of her "distinguished alumnus of 2003" predecessor in the face of massive resistance from community organizations across the city and a powerful, united labor movement able to hold elected and corporate leadership accountable. The Yale-New Haven Register and Yale Daily News are calling this a victory for the hospital, and in a sense it is, although this is also to some extent evidence that so many years later, both papers continue to tow the administration's line uncritically. But looking at the faces of the folks in the photographs accompanying the NHI post and register story, people I've marched with many times, been arrested with, and some of whom I've walked beside on the streets of Greenwhich Village as well as New Haven, i suspect and examining the terms of the CBA as they have thus far been reported, YNHH workers and members of the New Haven community and the Communities Organized for Responsible Development seem to have won a victory far more than eight years in coming.

breaking

Both the Boston Globe and the New Haven Independent are reporting that a deal has been struck between Yale-New Haven Hospital, 1199NEHCEU, and CORD. More later, obviously.

Update:
News Channel 8
New Haven Independent

The deal includes landmark promises from the hospital to the community,
including a promise to hire 100 New Haveners a year, many from the surrounding
Hill, Dwight and West River neighborhoods; to establish a “citizen’s advisory
committee” to monitor Yale-New Haven’s free care policies; to invest at least
$100,000 a year for five years in a “career ladder program” for local people;
make a voluntary tax payment to the city the way other major not-for-profits
have agreed to do; make 12 traffic-signal improvements in the area around the
cancer center; and contribute $100,000 a year for five years to the Mayor’s
Youth Initiative.

In other words, the hospital agreed to a “community
benefits agreement” that activists from the labor-affiliated community group
CORD had been demanding.

“Yale-New Haven sat down with a community group they don’t control and they struck a deal,” crowed Rev. Henry Morris (pictured) of CORD. “That’s never happened before.” He predicted the community benefits deal would set a precedent for all major future development in the city

Update 2:
Josh

a quick link to the fascinating article in today's times on the colonial hustory of the "in the jungle" song.

I heart the music department.

Joel dresses the rat.

Hug This!

Monday morning picket line,

Picket line monday morning.

The building formerly known as the triangle shirtwaist factory is now owned by NYU, much like the rest of manhattan between 14th and chambers. The factory has been renamed "The Brown Building." The Triangle Shirtwaist Company's abrogation of workers' rights cost hundreds of lives. Today the owner of the Brown building is dishonoring the memories of the dead, hiding behind the Brown decision to

attack the rights of thousands of other workers. What's at stake is collective power over the conditions of production. I don't mean to ignore the very real fissures between 1911 garment sweatshop workers and 2006 graduate teachers and researchers, but it seems to me that NYU is here embodying all the contradictions and connections of New York's informatized economy and deindustrialized politics of space.

An article in the Times' SundayBusiness section today on gender and advancement in law firms takes a partner at Proskauer Rose LLP as one of its privileged informants, and Bettina Plevan has only accolades for her prestigious employer. But lest we be blindsided by NYU's former and Yale's current union-busting law firm du jour (NYU's moved on to Jackson Lewis, Yale went to Proskauer from the notorious Seyfarth Shaw)'s supposed commitment to gender equity, let's think for a moment about what kind of work this firm actually does, what it is fighting against when it helps corporations like Yale, Columbia, and NYU in their quests to stifle some of the strongest and most powerful voices for dismantling/transforming gendered work structures in some of the fastest growing corporate sectors in the United States. Union busting law firms can never be feminist enterprises, can never be supportive of equality in the workplace.

I sound all second wave.

Arrr! Lev is a jewish pirate viking!

I am related to this man.

financial aid redux

The Villager reports on TRAC's efforts at NYU.

Shtull-Trauring disagrees about the university’s transparency. Rather than
the comprehensive financial breakdown he had hoped to see at the meeting, he
says students were shown general pie charts that did not illustrate how their
tuition dollars were being spent. “It’s ironic considering that the president
started off speaking about how in contemporary conversation there is a tendency
toward simplification instead of high-level discourse….and then [he] uses
rhetoric instead of facts in his discourse with the students,” said
Shtull-Trauring.
In addition to the pie charts, Shtull-Trauring said Sexton
was disingenuous in the figures he cited verbally: “He was throwing out numbers
that at the time we had no way to verify but later when we looked at them, we
realized they were far from accurate. It was very patronizing.”
TRAC is
working on a response to Sexton’s statements while also “generally stepping up
our efforts,” as Shtull-Trauring put it. The organization already has the
backing of 32 student groups, making it one of the broadest coalitions ever
formed at N.Y.U.
At the town hall one administrator reportedly remarked that
such campaigns die out when students graduate. Shtull-Trauring said they told
her, “ ‘We’re in it for the long run, and we’re not going to give up.’”

police on my back

he New York times is reporting on the implications of a series of recently declassified reports on the NYPD's tactics at the 2/2/2002 protests against the World Economic Forum's decision to exploit the legacy of 9/11/2001 by holding its ministerial in NYC rather than Davos. Particularly interesting is the discussion of the events surrounding the entry of black bloc protesters into the Another World is Possible march staging ground in the "green zone" at 59th and 5th ave on Saturday morning.

The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, "It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters."

Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police lines.

"In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted hard-core, violent elements that were surveilled by the N.Y.P.D.," Mr. Browne said, citing the incident at the Plaza. "Yes, we used surveillance techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That's proactive."

About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors or dropped after six months without further incident.

I was standing in the crowd on Saturday morning next to a friend from high school and another friend from college when the riot cop charged hundreds of people with nightsticks out. We'd been doing nothing other than idly standing around. All of the sudden the crowd parted and we were pulled back towards the curb as the police came in, indiscriminately grabbing protestors who had done nothing wrong, based, i think, primarily on whether or not we looked anarchisty or not. When the chaos was over, i couldn't find my friend from high school (though she later turned out to be fine) and my other friend had been pepper sprayed in the mouth by a police officer and was in a great deal of pain. None of us, and few of the people in the crowd had "metal pipes," and the woman who was snatched away from right next to where my friend from college had been standing cetrainly was no more a potential rioter than the rest of us. The people who were directly targeted, as opposed to those of us who appear to have been simply acceptable collateral damage, were carrying, if I remember correctly, not metal pipes but rather plastic shields with images of revolt displayed on them. They were not charging the riot cops but rather marching in a loose formation through the throng of protestors towards the front of the march that the NYPD had refused to allow forward for more than an hour after our scheduled start time.

The claim made by the police in Dwyer's article that the NYPD's actions and its violent repression of nonviolent protestors were aimed at and necessary for protecting the civil rights of demonstrators is frankly obscene. The attempt to draw a preemptive line between violent "potential rioters" and a pliant, complacent, orderly mass is tautological, transparent, and fallacious. The NYPD brutalized all of us. It made us all "potential rioters." It made us all targets, all potential criminals simply by our very oppositional presence to an event held to celebrate the plutocratic power of capitalist governments and transnational corporations like the one presided over by an economist named Richard Charles Levin, who hobnobbed, I imagine, with the likes of Jeff Sachs and Ken Langone while the rest of us tried not to get the shit beaten out of us for daring to take action to demand a better world and a better New York.

Stanford has eliminated tuition payments for students from families whose income is below $45,000. Whether this will be accompanied by a concurrent commitment to admit students from poor and working class families remains to be seen, but the elimination of loan debt for those folks who are in this category is a huge deal, and this is a development that administrators at universities which have been loathe to make significant inroads into financial aid reform should heed. At NYU, John Sexton gets in shouting matches with undergrads for daring to question yearly tuition increases and anemic financial aid packages, and serious reforms are necessary and long overdue. At Yale, incremental change began last year only when undergraduates organized a mass movement and occupied the admissions office during decision crunch time, but reform were linked primarily to family contributions and failed to address the very tangible inequalities in forcing some students to financially contribute to their education while others recieved a free ride through the largesse of wealthy parents etc. Both of these universities, and so many others, need to view the Stanford announcement, as a sign that times are changing, and need to recognize that students at many campuses, folks like TRAC at NYU and the Undergraduate Organizing Committee at Yale, are going to fight hard, I hope, to make universities affordable and accessible for working-class students.

a little nepotism

When my brother Lev was about three years old, he saw Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom. It scared the bejeezus out of him. And he's jewish, so he doesn't have any bejeezus in him in the first place. When Lev was eight, he ditched piano for drums. When Lev was a little older, he discovered metal. When Lev started college, he majored in ancient history and studied archaeology. Now he's almost 22, and he's in a death metal band which, you guessed it, combines his Indiana Jonesophilia with his need to bang on things rhythmically. They are called Sallah. You can check them out here. Lev is the one calling himself "Barranca." I'm as clueless as you are.

shocked

shocked.

At the top, chief executive Peyton R. Patterson pulled down a direct grant
of restricted stock worth $10.8 million last year, the largest portion of her
$12.2 million compensation package, according to a shareholder proxy filed with
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.In addition, Patterson also was
granted options to buy 1.9 million shares of the bank's stock. The grant could
be worth between $17 million and $43 million if NewAllance shares rise between 5
percent and 10 percent."This was always part of the script," said John S.
Carusone, president of the Bank Analysis Center in Hartford. "Mergers and
conversions generate considerable wealth for the principals involved."Two years
ago, New Haven Savings Bank's plans to convert to a public company, buy two
Hartford-area banks and rename itself NewAlliance sparked an outcry. Opponents
of the conversion questioned the motives for the change because a select group
of high-ranking insiders stood to gain millions in stock-based compensation.The
bank tried to calm the protest by agreeing to put off for a year payments to
senior managers and directors in stock. But last spring, shareholders approved a
stock compensation plan at NewAlliance's annual meeting, clearing the way for
the stock awards in 2005.Much of the protest focused on the direct grants of
stock, which come in the form of restricted stock. Under the grants disclosed in
the proxy, the restricted stock is held by the bank and will be given out in
increments through 2012.The first 15 percent was given out on Jan. 1.According
to a report from the board's compensation committee contained in the proxy, the
restricted stock grants and other stock-based awards are designed to align the
interests of senior managers and directors with those of other
shareholders.

march ninth. four months and counting.

I really hope i never a) write about myself in the third person self aggrandizing manner that frank does, nor b) make such unproblematized claims about bodily metaphors for a unitary world economy.

education in the streets!

I meant to post this yesterday. I got sidetracked.

Three years ago today, thousands of workers at Yale University were on strike. It was a thursday, the fourth day of a weeklong walkout staged by unions of graduate teachers, clerical and technical workers, food service, maintenance, and custodial workers, and hospital dietary workers, and it was a day themed around the classroom. GESO held a teach-in (moderated, i believe, by BC) with Gordon Lafer and GSOC's Kitty Krupat, and rallied the superexploited folks from the professional schools, and, cutting my Spanish class yet again, I started out the day as the snow began to fall on the 1199 picket line as people did the electric slide on the line and chanted stuff like "We're freezin, we're freezin', we're freezin' for a reason!" But for me and lots of other folks the most powerful thing that happened that day was the action originally brainstormed by one Abbey Jane Hudson, in which shut down College Street between Elm and Grove and created six classrooms at which strikers, undergraduates, and members of the New Haven community would come together, demonstrate our support for the movement for justice at Yale and in New Haven, teach each other about what was at stake in the fight, and enact a vision of a radically democratic and constituent politics of a university situated in the movement we were building together through struggle and organizing. Capped off by the inches of snow accumulating on Cornel West's head as he told us that "we still hold up a blood-stained banner, and a tear soaked banner, of Light, of Truth, of Justice...,"[1] Education In The Streets, as we called it, was incredibly powerful for me because it was not simply a demand for something from the administration, not just a display of force in the eternal war of position that is Yale's labor-management conflicts, though it served both of these purposes well, not just another reactive gesture to Yale's continuing attempts to colonize New Haven, the globe, and workers' lives with the logics of neoliberalism. What made this action a watershed moment for me in thinking about the work that i do in every sense of that term was the ways in which it, in addition to being an incredibly powerful gesture of support for the movement and the strike and the workers and the unions and the social contract, also was an attempt to create the kind of community and university we all want very much to be a part of. I post this not solely to commemorate, much less to memorialize, but because I think we need to understand what's at stake in this strike in similar terms, to think about the possibilities the strike creates, create structures of organizing and protest in which such possibilities are immanent, and use this to fuel the fight for a/n other/better university.

[1]Thanks to Thomas Frampton for transcribing West's speech.

Taking a break from other work, yesterday I reread Cynthia Young's essay "On Strike at Yale," from The Minnesota Review vols 45-46, 1996, which is the definitive account, i guess, of the 1995-1996 grade strike at Yale. I'd read Young's essay once before, years ago, and had forgotten some interesting details - i'm not as familiar with this essay as I am with the account Michael Berube gave in the Social Text "Yale Strike Dossier" (which was reprinted in Will Teach For Food,) because back issues of the Minnesota review aren't available via jstor or anything like that and I own will teach for food and have for years. But Berube et al were drawing on Yong's account even before it had been published, and Young, as one of the leaders of the union, gives valuable insight into the strategic decisions made by organizers in the years before and then during the strike. Some things i'm struck by on this reading:

• When TA solidarity formed in 1987 in response to the Kagan-Pollit plan, TAs discussed and planned for a grade strike which apparently never materialized
• The retaliatory "penalties" threatened by the Yale administration against grade strike leaders Diana Paton, Nilanjana Dasgupta, and Young - who had been informed on by David Brion Davis, Thomas Carew, and Sara Suleri-Goodyear, respectively, are remarkably similar to those which the NYU administration is levying against GSOC members.

Young does something I've seen nowhere else, - she charts the prehistory and early history of GESO from TA solidarity to affiliation with the federation and the shift towards unionization, through the three strikes of 1991, 1992, and 1995, and into the grade strike and beyond. While i do disagree with her brief treatment of local 35's shift from moribund to militant (Young dates this to the 1968 strike, which others have tended to read a s a failure on the part of the union to command sufficient strength to pressure the university. I have argued, with somewhat tenuous evidence, that the crucial shift really seems to occur between 1968 and 1971, when Local 35 really emerges as the militant union which spends more than half a year on strike between 1971 and 1977,) i find this history of GESO itself, and of the specific organizing structure that union developed - (departmental OCs-CC-staff/steering committee-leads) invaluable in constructing a history of academic labor movements in the last two decades.

---

Speaking of GESO, last night the Revolutionary Army of California made its NYC debut at the Parkside lounge. A bunch of GSOCers turned out to support our colleagues from New Haven. They sound much better without David Sanders, which I say not as an insult to David (he's twelvety feet tall and six hundred years old and could totally kick my ass, and he scares me, but it was also kind of hilarious to watch him sing "I think we're alone now",) but more as a general observation that the band has actually gotten pretty awesome.

Inside Higher Ed reports on the U. of Miami janitors' strike Donna Shalala has helped force... (In the interest of neutrality, she claims.)

Janitors at the University of Miami, most living at or close to the poverty
level, have taken concerns about their working conditions to the next level — a
strike. Many have said they are willing to forgo days of pay they describe as
meager to raise awareness about low-income workers. And since Tuesday evening,
an increasing number have taken to the picket lines, demanding action by both
university administrators and the company they work for.

“Too many people are suffering and don’t have money or health insurance,”
said Darrell Francis, a member of the janitorial groundskeeping crew, who joined
the strike on Thursday. “I’m not only in this for me — so many people are living
from paycheck to paycheck and don’t have a decent salary to get by on.”

Speaking of strikes at universities, today happens to be the three-year anniversary of the first day of the March 2003 Yale strike, the coldest picket line I have ever been on and the first strike at Yale i was actually around for. The highlight was the community "Tear Down The Walls" march for job desegregation at Yale and the rest of the Social Contract, with the Nation Drill Squad (i'm pantomiming flying around the corners as I write this) marching right in front of us and Julie lending me her gloves, and thousands of people marching in the freezing cold for justice from the city's largest employer and private landowner, in solidarity with the thousands of workers on strike.

That's coffee. Get your mind out of the gutter

On strike! NYU brass never knew what hit them.

Inside Higher ed. asks

"If the Harvard University faculty can rise up, why not other
faculties?"

Before There Was GSOC, There Was Newsies. (posted by request of the great folks from GUS.)

Before there was GSOC, there was...NEWSIES!
"Wrongs will be righted, If we're united"

The 1992 Disney cult classic musical NEWSIES, starring a young, svelte Christian Bale, recounts the efforts of teenage newspaper peddlers to form a union in turn-of-the-century New York City.

Join Graduate Undergraduate Solidarity (GUS) for dinner and a screening of NEWSIES!
Friday March 3rd, 6pm to 8pm Vanderbilt Hall 216 at the NYU Law School
Free CHINESE FOOD and Open to ALL!