- 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.
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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.
The question is the GESO that has developed one that is capable of actually developing a democractic university? My experience is no based on repeated statements to myself and others who have questioned the "leadership" of "you have to let leaders lead" and "trust us, we have thought about this more than you have" and "you are either with us or against us" and being told not to question in front of others who are new to the union/to organizing because it raises questions in their minds. As someone who watched leftists groups implode growing up, it is worrisome pattern to see again especially in a union that in theory is supposed to represent me. If the union doesn't embrace democracy (and questioning is a central tenet of democracy) than how can it change the university to do the same? In fact the mindset is the same I get from faculty, from the administration, and one I see in our current President. All of them when questioned respond with mistakes happen, trust us, we are trying to do good, it is not easy.
ReplyDeleteThe threats of the university have created such a climate of fear that permeates GESO & how it operates. The selection is to either kill the union or make it into one where the "leaders" of the union can understand the "burdens" the "leadership" of the university has. One were we can not tell the union "leaders" apart from the administrators. Which is what the business unions of Gompers are.
"When the working class unites, there will be a lot of jobless labor leaders."
--Eugene Debs, 1905
I wasn't sure at first whether i was going to allow your comment, because i don't really think this is the best space to deal with this question - it sounds like a matter internal to a union to which i do not belong and thus one i'm hesitant to engage in, but i will say that my own very considerable experience with GESO organizers and leaders as a Yale undergraduate organizer for four years, a boycott coordinator for their international union, and now as a graduate student/union member/organizer at NYU, has been very different from what you describe. GESO is one of the most democratic and open unions I've ever seen. I think their leadership structure, modified and always shaped by the organizing people are doing, is useful and powerful precisely because of how effective it has been over the last sixteen years or however many in building strong departmental organizing committees and training new organizers. The conversations i saw taking place in that union in the summer and fall of 2003 were a conversation with union members across every department in the university and led to sweeping changes in the organizing and organizing structure of the union.
ReplyDeleteSo i don't really see where you're coming from. While your line about the administrators and union leaders looking the same is all nice and Orwellian, in this case it's entirely groundless. After four years of standing on picket lines, being threatened with arrest for trying to organize, getting arrested in solidaroty with Yale workers, sitting in to protest the administratoin's inaction against a reported hate crime, marching through the streets of New Haven more times than i can count, I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of what the administrators look like and how they lead. I also know many GESO organizers, coordinators, and leads well. I have listened in on hundreds of organizing conversations, i worked side by side with GESO folks for years and am doing so again today, and find the invocation of the phrase "business unionism" here totally ridiculous. I find it ridiculous both because you have evacuated it of any productive meaning, because you employ it an an ahistorical phenomenon rather than a constructed, contingent formation, and because you use it to describe one of the most insurgent, democratic, multivocal, creative unions I've ever had the privilege to work beside.
Regarding the EVD quotation. Debs is writing in the year of the IWW's foundation to lambast unions which are trying to separate workers into glorified guilds based on craft, segregated ethnically and excluding women and people of african descent as a general rule. Debs' American Railway Union and the Industrial Workers of the World he helped to found before leaving in 1907 offered a flawed but incredibly important vision of an antiracist and expansive "one big union" which understood as productive work forms of labor upon which the AFL had generally spat. Debs, an organizer himself, is not saying that "the working class" does not need to be organized in order to unite. He is saying that the collaborationist and chauvenist arbiters of what constitutes work and who constitute workers are going to be dethroned by the forging of broad solidarities across the borders of industry and nation. Folks in GESO, it seems to this now outside observer, have for some time been trying to create a movement which does exactly this while also acknowledging the fissures and faultlines which make such solidarities so difficult to create. Attributing to GESO a culture of fear on the Yale campus seems to me historically shortsighted and ignorant of the ways in which the union has completely reshpaed how people understand themselves as academics and inteelectuals in ways which strike me as deeply empowering, for lack of a better word.
ReplyDeleteI am well aware of Eugene V. Debs and what he was speaking of. Based on my experience at Yale and watching my father fight to maintain a democratic union against an international inclined towards top/down strategy & experience watching activist/leftists/liberals my entire life, I would say GESO is not the organization you say it is. The summer & fall of 2003, things for a brief period were different because the "leadership" made a major blunder to push for an election which they lost. The attitude of my organizer at the time was there was no doubt that they would win and win big even though you could read the numbers in the biological sciences, you could also see that a number of members in the humanities/social sciences/natural sciences were going to vote no or not vote & you could see it was going to be close. Either the organizer didn't read the situation properly, which is a major problem, or was blowing smoke, another major problem.
ReplyDeleteIn my own department (MB&B) the period your mentioned (Summer/Fall 2003) that was a fantastic time. Members really took part in departmental meetings because they were actively engaged & it mattered to them. They were empowered. That went away though and we returned to the pre-election style of organizing/running the union by the end of the year. Many members felt let down. It wasn't their decision, they weren't asked about it.
Being asked to be an organizer, I decided I should canvass the opinions of GESO members in the department including former organizers. The lines I used in my first post come from those conversations. The Orwellian language came from those people. No push was required. I asked their opinions and listened. A pattern of behavior was apparent. When brought up to my organizer and OC members. I was told not to bring it up in the presence of new organizers as it makes them question things and that mistakes happen & to trust us. It is a very administration thing to do. It is controlling & paternalistic to tell a member "trust us we have thought about this more than you have" when they question. Many members in the department avoid interacting with GESO including some of those that had been its strongest supporters. Many of them also expressed how much they enjoyed that burst of engaging the membership and how let down they were when it was taken away. Language was also interesting. Members when referring to GESO did not say we but rather GESO. Organizers said we. The language of how they felt organizers treated them was equating the organizers with the administration.
I am not taking away what GESO has accomplished but its style has alienated people & weakened what it has tried to accomplish. I bring it up because I enjoy reading your blog & your hope for a better tomorrow but I do find your views of GESO to be colored (I freely admit mine are) and not fully matching with the reality. It is part of a international/umbrella labor organization that does subscribe to the Gomber's philosophy of unions with regards to partnerships with management and one where top-down leadership takes place under the mantra "you have to let leaders lead".
Andy Stern, SEIU/Change to Win, days after the Change to Win Coalition was announced:
"Well, our labor movement was built around an industrial economy back in the 1930s. It was sort of a class struggle kind of unionism, but workers in today's economy are not looking for unions to cause problems; they're looking for them to solve them, and this means just like Ireland where business and labor and government all began to work together, we need team America to really work together."
I think Stern's statements can't really be taken at face value. CTW's strategy as told to the media, particularly after the initial split, downplayed the very radical vision embodied in strategies such as the 2006 Hotel fight which is currently unfolding and which i have worked on. The way John Wilhelm talks about organizing and power and class is very different, and I suspect the same is true for Stern, Raynor, et al., when addressing folks within the union - organizers, researchers, rank and file members, than when talking to Steven Greenhouse or Lou Dobbs. A collaborationist rhetoric doesn't neccesarily mean a collaborationist strategy or politics. Just because someone isn't saying "fuck the bosses" to CNN doesn't mean that they aren't prepared to do so at the bargaining table or on the picket line. I completely disagree with Stern's comments, and i've heard Wilhelm say similar things - but Wilhelm and Stern aren't the same person, and when Wilhelm says stuff like this, I take it with a mountain of salt. Tell pretty much any Unite-HERE organizer i know that they are trying to ressurect this kind of Keynesian compromise, and they'll laugh in your face.
ReplyDeleteWell Wilhelm's strategy with HERE has been one of collaboration. HERE agrees not to push for higher wages/benefits in the current contract and in exchange the HERE gets neutrality agreements to help expand. The gambit being that they will have the strength to push for more in the future. This year is a test of that strategy. It is worrisome the a dissident local in the HERE was placed in trusteeship. As a member of GESO and therefore the HERE, why wasn't the split discussed amongst the membership? It is worrisome. The entire top/down strategy of the Change to Win is very troublesome. The mergers seen in the SEIU & to a greater extent in the Carpenters' Union to create super-locals is scary as it prevents members from getting involved directly in how their local is running. The problem with unions today is that there is not enough rank & file involvement/control in their union. Part of the problem is too much reliance on professional staffs instead of the membership.
ReplyDeleteThe CtW and its forerunner are about increasing union density and once that is achieved then you can have union democracy. This is the mindset I have encountered in my dealings with GESO.
We have to remember Wilhelm with Stern and McCarron gave money to Dennis Hassert and encouraged others to do the same. Hassert rewarded them by fighting hard to get the House to pass a bill slashing overtime benefits.
If they were serious about a class battle they need to form a new party, a true labor party in this country which we don't have, not trying to cozy up with Republicans.