The inevitable slew of "the strike is over" press has come, with Karen Arenson uncritically reproducing the NYU administration's talking points, from the "academic intervention" shibboleth to the ludicrous claim that there were only 12 people still striking labor at the end of last semester. Both the WSN and the NYT articles note that the struggle continues and that we are continuing to build and organize. Yet particularly galling, to me at least, and I do not now and have never here spoken for GSOC, is the claim made by the WSN's editorial that "Striking moved graduate students further from a union contract — not closer."
I would like to remind the Washington Square News that, prior to the strike, John Sexton was saying things like "the union can either die a quick death or a slow death." It was never the case that our tactics caused the administration to be less amenable to negotiating with us. The NYU administration saw an opportunity to get rid of our union when the NLRB issued the Brown decision and took it as soon as our contract expired. And while we might have adopted a different strategy, and have many options left before us as we move our struggle forward, making claims like this is simply indefensible, rooted solely in arrogant conjecture rather than any studied understanding of the events of the past year. Similarly the claim that the strike's "failure" (a term i'll return to in a moment) is somehow due to the fact that we didn't tell the WSN how many people were on strike in the spring to their satisfaction lacks any historical grounding or proof. It's self-important and just plain wrong. Given how fantastic the WSN's coverage of GSOC was in the fall, it's dissapointing to see opinion writing of such low quality.
Now on to the question of "failure."
We are back to work without a contract, and the demands of the six-month long strike remain unmet, hence the claim that the strike has failed. I think this is a problematic claim. Last year did not end in failure, but in GSOC emerging from the strike as a far stronger union, in many ways, than we had been going in. We had far better rank and file organizers. We had research. We had members who had been through a very difficult year and yet overwhelming committed their support to achieving a new contract. And while we have many challenges ahead - external and internal, as we strive to create a democratic, diverse union deeply committed to a just university, we need to understand the strike not as a singular tactic but within the context of the larger struggle to transform, to push through the neoliberal university
and achieve something better. Understood as such, I don't think we can term the strike a failure so prematurely. This, after all, is far from over.
The editorial doesn't talk about whether the numbers of the strike vote were released or not. The news article does. It doesn't cite that as a reason for the what the editorial views as a failed strike.
ReplyDeleteThe editorial is poorly written. The point they seem to be making is that the strike failed in the sense the union was not able to rally the campus to isolate Sexton to force him to change his position. In their opinion overall on-campus, the support for the GSOC is lower after the strike. That is a point of debate. Does the editorial cite any numbers to back this claim? No. It is the opinion of the writer(s) that she/he/they take for fact.
The strike as a tactic to force Sexton to the table did fail. The movement is not one strike. In the long term yes it may have strengthened GSOC as you cite but that is unknown.
I interpret the "refusing to divulge the extent of their on-campus support" clause in the editorial as precisely saying that the strike "failed" because Susan Valentine didn't hand the WSN a list of who was and who was not striking labor in mid-February (inarguably the lowest point of the strike.)
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of critiques to be made of the way the strike was planned, but the extent to which the recent crop of press is uncritically reproducing the adminsitrations lies (it's an incontrovertible fact that there were far, far more than two dozen people on strike in the spring) or jumping to ridiculous conclusions about what happened and why is pretty pathetic.
The decision not to be on strike right now was a tactical one - it makes a lot more sense to organize new folks from "inside" than to put ourselves in a position where we have to shout at them across picket lines. I think it's the right decision to make in order to build a stronger union and win a contract.
Zach -
ReplyDeleteI can't condone the editorial, but I will say that I never saw reports from either side gave what I consider to be a reliable assessment of the number of people striking or classes being struck.
I know there are reasons, both logistical and strategic, that unions might not release numbers in these situations, but it always bothers me. It implies that the union is afraid to reveal a low level of support, and it gives more credibility to management's lowballs. When I read NYU's lowballs, I of course assume that they aren't telling the whole story, but it's difficult to counter without something concrete. Same thing happened, to some degree, at Yale.
I don't intend this as a challenge to GSOC's strength, I'm just curious. I haven't heard in our personal discussions or read on your blog about the number of strikers. I've talked some with my dad about it too, but didn't have anything concrete besides that I didn't trust NYU's numbers. Can you direct me to some coverage of that? Or if GSOC hasn't released anything, can you explain how you determined NYU's numbers to be "incontrovertibly" wrong?
I know it's not your job to make this easier for me to discuss, I'm just interested.
The critique of numerical secrecy is valid and I generally agree with it, but i'm not going to post information here that the union hasn't made public for obvious reasons.
ReplyDeleteI don't think GSOC ever publicly stated numbers last semester outside of contexts that were closed to the media, and I won't do so now, but I have a solid sense of who was on strike based on organizing lists, personal headcounting, etc. The "two dozen" figure is actually the number of people who had pay cut off. That includes most of one department and several people from several others. I'm not sure I can get into this here, but if you do want to talk about it more, feel free to call me and I'll go into stuff I wouldn't put on the internet.