NYT Roundup

Carson Daly's a scab, rich Princetonites value the lives of their dogs than those of their service workers, and labor turmoil on Broadway may be just beginning.

And, (for my mom, who secretly reads this blog,) this is an interesting article on anthropologists and the military, in which one academic suggests that a slippery slope was created by the AAA's decision to allow secret research by folks working for proprietary companies - the outsourcing of the university - and the academicization fo the corporation feeding into the forms of information monopoly and clandestinity which have been a hallmark of the "global war on terror." Interesting, isn't it?

Oh, and that WGA Strike? Far from over.

The continued stand-off pushed Hollywood toward a decision point in the next week or so, as writers will have to decide whether to dig in for a long strike, or return to work without a contract, perhaps to resume their walk-out next June when members of the Screen Actors Guild might join them.

At the same time, companies will rapidly see the rest of the current television season crumble, unless they make another move to meet the writers’ demands.

A joint strike by the WGA and SAG would be a very interesting tactic.

Back to the reading.

Edit: Wow.

Carrie Brownstein (yeah, that Carrie Brownstein) interviews one of the striking Colbert Report writers today on her blog Monitor Mix.

I went to the WGAE rally at Washington Square park Tuesday after teaching. It was MCed by Aasif Mandvi from the Daily Show and the bald guy from Sex and the City and featured speeches by Danny Glover, Tim Robbins, Gilbert Godfried, Colin Quinn (ugh), and, uh, John Edwards, who was pretty good, although Anthony Edwards was on stage later and the whole thing felt kind of surreal. I've never felt like a starfucker for going to a union rally before, but at one point i was standing about ten feet away from Tina Fey, and Edie Falco and Joe Pantoliano were on stage, and Gilbert Godfried was making jokes like "there are more Jews here than in Schindler's List." By far the best speaker, i think, was Ed Ott, the head of the NYC CLC, who called attention to the other strikes taking place now - the stagehands but also the Aramark food service workers of Local 100 in the financial district. Mike Fishman from 32BJ was also pretty good. As was Danny Glover, wearing his Unite-HERE T-shirt, presumably from when he got arrested in Toronto.

I'm uneasy with the way that some folks involved with the strike are joking about outsourcing - i.e., they'll give all our jobs to the chinese ha ha ha. It smacks of racism and ignores very real issues involved in capital flight and global rearrangements of the international division of labor. Maandvi's joke, the gist of which was that he'd benefit either way (victory/contract or loss/all the work goes to india) was absurd enough to be mildly amsuing, and in some ways parodies what less careful observers have been saying about the indispensability of the creative labor force, Richard Florida style, but i think in general this is the kind of discourse - much like the lawyers claim in court that all our charges should be dropped because we were "outstanding citizens (i.e., privileged white folks, mostly) that makes forging broader solidarities even harder.

UAW wins Foxwoods vote.

And decisively, at that

But the Courant suggests that management may refuse to bargain.

Although winning on Saturday, dealers remain far from a collective bargaining agreement. Leaders of the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which owns and operates Foxwoods, could refuse to bargain with the UAW and push the issue into federal court.

The tribe throughout the process leading up to Saturday's vote has fought the vote administered by the National Labor Relations Board, saying the federal agency does not have jurisdiction over the casino on its reservation. Instead, tribal leaders have said workers should organize under recently passed tribal laws concerning unions.

Foxwoods officials declined to comment early Sunday morning on their next step. But a statement released by the casino indicates management is likely to continue its fight against the UAW on jurisdictional grounds.

"We are disappointed with the preliminary tally, however, these results will not be official until all legal issues, including jurisdiction, are resolved," said John O'Brien, Foxwoods' president in a statement.

The NLRB conducted the vote on Saturday from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. in a ballroom at the casino. Federal officials then counted the ballots as casino management, union officials and dealers looked on.

And in another article...

Foxwoods management has fostered a feeling of unease about the union through radio and newspaper advertisements, handouts to employees, and posters at employee bus stops. A poster behind the hotel worker warned "With the UAW, the threat of a strike will always be with us," and cited instances in which past UAW strikes in Connecticut had allegedly led to violence such as rock throwing.

Card dealers know that even an overwhelming vote in favor of unionization will not immediately bring new bargaining power. The casino, which unsuccessfully sought to avoid an election on the grounds that the labor law of the United States does not apply on Indian land, could challenge the outcome.

"I think they're going to fight it," a card dealer named Judith said shortly after voting.

TBD

The Hartford Courant thinks that the UAW may win the Foxwoods dealers' vote...

If they do, and let's hope the Courant is right, it would be a huge victory for the labor movement. But how big a victory? Has the UAW developed a way to systematically organize tribal casinos, or were Foxwoods workers so pissed off already - after ten years of organizing drives and a wildcat or two - as to warrant hot shop status? Can this work elsewhere?

How many times in the history of the New York Times have Edna Bonacich and Alicia Keys been mentioned in the same article?

For that matter, how many times in the history of the NYT has Edna Bonacich been mentioned at all?

Mr. Young, who is executive director of the West Coast guild, is well acquainted with corporate strength, something he confronted during the mid-1990s as a leader in the unions that sought unsuccessfully to organize garment workers employed by Guess Inc.

Writing of that campaign in the fall/winter 2005 issue of The American Sociologist, Edna Bonacich, a sociologist who worked closely with Mr. Young both then and later at the writers guild, noted that “he studied Sun Tzu’s ‘The Art of War’ with deep attention, trying to find its applicability to union struggles.” (The fascination has been shared by modern students of conflict as diverse as Douglas MacArthur, Lee Atwater and Michael S. Ovitz.)Should Mr. Young and his colleagues make only small gains next week, they could make a midcourse correction in their strike strategy and sidestep the dangers of a protracted fight against a strong opponent. They could return to work without a contract, with an eye toward joining the much larger Screen Actors Guild in a renewed strike next June.

-Hollywood and Strikers Watch Clock (NYT, 11/21)

A: at least four times since 1997. (One of which is Steven Greenhouse's report on the UC Santa Barbara Wal-Mart Conference.)

The autonomists would have a field day with this.

His colleague Paula Pell, a 13-year veteran and another head writer, added: “It was uplifting. So much of what the strike is about is valuing the creative brain.” Like the other writers Ms. Pell had been on the picket line; she and Ms. Dratch improvised some strike-oriented material for Debbie Downer, Ms. Dratch’s sad-sack character. Strike talks are to resume on Nov. 26.

One sticking point is residual payments for online content, particularly relevant for this show, which has spawned several Internet triumphs. After flashing a card that read, “An SNL Digital Short,” Andy Samberg and Mr. Armisen performed one, a gay-oriented rap by Mr. Samberg starring Mr. Armisen as the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (Ms. Jones and the hairy rear cameoed.)

Lorne Michaels, the show’s producer, watched and occasionally laughed from the audience, but Ms. Poehler noted that he was not involved, and he left immediately after. (It was his birthday.) Tickets for the show were going for as much as $300 each on Craigslist (officially the price was $20), but many in the standing-room crowd were comedy cognoscenti: writers from other late-night shows and actors like John Krasinski of “The Office.”

“This is the show I would’ve been crushed if I’d heard about it the day after,” said Samm Levine, an actor (“Freaks and Geeks”) from Los Angeles who performs at the Upright Citizens Brigade theater when he’s in New York.

(I'm referring, of course, to the reappropriation/expropriation of the workplace and the technologies of work, "valuing the creative brain" as what a young Toni Negri might have called 'self-valorization,' rather than the presence of the inimitable Samm Levine, which deserves commentary in its own right, but you won't find any here.)

but wait, there's more

I'm also finding it difficult to deal with what seems like a conflation of big-L Labor (as in the house of, as in the AFL-CIO, as in cold war liberalism) with small-l labor, as in the creation of value, as in the work that people do that transforms nature and without which there is no capitalism. The former does not have a monopoly over the latter and did not in the 1960s, and one would hope a treatment of the new left's labor politics might have more to say on the subject than just detailing its often cordial and often fraught relationships with the AFL-trade union bureaucracy as well as the more left-wing leadership of 1199 and District 65 (an ancestor of the UAW's Technical, Office, and Professional department and Local 2110 more specifically.) talking about "blacks" (small b) and "labor" (small l) as two discreet entities, even during the jim crow era, is similarly problematic - because African American workers formed their own unions and their own organizations within white unions (like the Dining Car Waiters of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees, - see Eric Arnesen's Brotherhoods of Color) and fought against both the employers and the racism of white unions, because the noble effort to extricate black bodies from their inscription as 'mere labor' notwithstanding, the african american populations of both the deep south and the urban north were racialized as labor, as people genetically primed (biologically or 'culturally') for certain kinds of work, and ineligible for certain kinds of social citizenship and privilege. Looking at black political movements as somehow outside of questions of labor, as Levy seems to in the first few chapters of his book, flirts with the mystification, and therefore reification (what you don't see can hurt you) of the specific ways in which black labor is racialized and rendered either invisible or pathological by racist state and capitalist optics.

I ran into my aunt and her semi-separated(?) husband on the street today. First time i'd seen her since my grandmother's funeral last september. Very strange, and kind of sad.

I'm making slow progress down my exam list. Today i finally finished (after five years of trying) Nick Dyer-Witheford's Cyber-Marx, and read the intro and first chapter (thus far) of Levy's The New Left and Labor in the 1960s. The former seems at once extraordinarily prescient and strangely dated (perhaps because of its prescience,) while the latter seems overly simplistic thus far in its analysis of race and its reading of leftist political commitments, so i'm hoping it gets better later on. It's not so much that it's undertheorized - though after NDW's autonomist marxism-meets-media-theory most labor history reads that way - as that there's not enough of a critical inquiry into the stakes and assumptions implicit in the notion of a labor-new left alliance -- and the claim that the New Left was principally, or even entirely, a Student movement proscribes the scope and limits of such a discussion. Work by Arif Dirlik and Immanuel Wallerstein, and Georgy Katsiaficas, among others, might complicate this kind of limited or overly localized account. (And here i demonstrate my debt to Michael Denning's Socialism and Marxism in the 20th Century syllabus.) Lest i sound too critical, let me say that the archival work Levy does is fascinating, as are some of the connections he's able to make - Stokely Carmichael hanging out with the children of CPUSA bigwigs at Bronx Science and organizing with AFSME in DC as a Howard University student being, for me, the most intriguing.

I'm stepping out for a hot chocolate. Then it's back to the east balcony of the tenth floor of the panopticon, which seems to be the one place in Bobst that's dimly lit and sparsely populated enough for me to get work done.

The Columbia University Hunger Strike, which lasted more than a week, and won three of the striker's four major demands, is over, though organizing continues. I've never been a huge fan of hunger strikes as a student organizing tactic because they can be incredibly disempowering, they don't necessarily create a sustained palpable disruption, and they can block further organizing if they fail. The folks at Columbia seem to have done everything right - using the hunger strike as a means to attract attention to and create an urgency for their demands, while engaging in broad based coalitional politics and organizing work, to create a mass movement on campus and bring the administration to the table. The one plank they didn't win - shifting the course of the university's expansion into West Harlem, was arguably the most ambitious, the most direct challenge to the university's power and plans for neoliberal 'growth.' To say this, however, is not to discount the substantial core curricular reforms and support for Ethnic Studies that the strikers did secure - victories which i know i and many others find inspiring and full of implications for our work on our own campuses. This is not so much a congratulations - because the strikers would likely tell us that the struggle is not yet won - as a statement of solidarity with and admiration for their work.

As the Equal Rights and Access Committee of GESO put it,

As the Equal Rights and Access Standing Committee of the graduate teachers union at Yale University, we support your struggle to hold Columbia accountable to the principles of equality and respect for all people inside and outside the institution. We, like you, wonder whether universities (must) perpetuate the systems of oppression that they claim to challenge. You challenge Columbia to confront their role in, as you put it, "a world in which racist, gendered, and sexualized hierarchies dominate the way power flows." Your demands for curricular and thus intellectual change articulate the way in which the knowledge produced in and by universities enables these harmful actions. We draw inspiration from your willingness to take direct
action to institute greater democracy on your campus.

Your struggle also speaks to other universities. Like you, we face a university that plays an increasingly dominant political and economic role in its host community and seeks to reshape it in its own image. This manifests in the forms of escalating gentrification and policing. Our administration, like yours has disregarded the voice of students, workers, community members, and faculty, and has failed to address the systemic discrimination that exists on our campus....

Instead of seeing Selma James speak last night, i went to Lemongrass with R and S and sang some Karaoke - Benatar's "Heartbreaker" - original lyrics, not the strike version - S and i sang "Run For Your Life," which is a deeply, deeply problematic song. Then we did Metallica's "One" again, which the nerdy dudes in the back got really into, and I finished with "November Rain" to mark the two year anniversary of the GSOC strike and as an earnest gesture of support for all the unions that are on strike right now. Unfortunately i picked the crappy truncated version with no "Slash Walks out of the Church" solo and no "Slash gets up on top of the piano" cool ending part. basically it ends when they jump through the cake. So lame.

Now i have to make up for all of this by reading, so I'm at the panopticon and i'm not leaving for a while.

Food service workers employed by the subcontractor Aramark at 55 Water Street and New York Life, in the Financial District, are on strike. Here's the email bulletin from Unite HERE

NYC's Other Strike: Cafeteria Workers for City's Biggest Companies Strike at Two New York Landmarks

Workers in the executive dining rooms and corporate cafeterias for some of New York City's most prestigious companies went on strike on November 12th at two city landmarks.

Striking workers, members of UNITE HERE Local 100, vowed to walk picket lines at New York Life and 55 Water Street until their employer, the Philadelphia-based contractor ARAMARK, settles contracts with them.

ARAMARK food service workers at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Citigroup have already voted to authorize a strike at their locations, and collective bargaining agreements continue to expire at ARAMARK cafeterias across the city. If the company does not commit to raising standards, workers at cafeterias at Bank of New York, CBS, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and the United Nations could join the strike as their contracts expire.

(I)N(S)YU, or, Someone's been reading their Saskia Sassen

Global expansion is the core of what Sexton calls his "ICE" concept: his idea that, by 2050, the world will adopt an economy of "intellectual, cultural and educational activity" that will result in the emergence of worldwide "idea capitals" dedicated to encouraging and attracting creative, entrepreneurial and economic talent.

Participation in this "ICE" sector, Sexton says, is not only an opportunity for NYU to gain prominence in the global dialogue but a key element of its survival and fundamental mission.

"It starts off with our embrace of otherness in who we are and our comfort in being a genuinely integrated part of the city," Sexton said. "This is our personality, so we don't gate ourselves off, we don't retreat, we don't mind having our campus interrupted with other buildings instead of an NYU building."

Potential "ICE" cities that the university is considering for future global regional campuses include Paris and Shanghai, Sexton said.

"ICE?" Seriously?

addendum

this is pretty great, and reminds me of some of the lighter (read, colder) moments from the NYU strike.

3:30 p.m. One writer suggests that we walk counter-clockwise. A minor fracas occurs between those who think this is a great idea and those who believe it might undo all our work for the past two and a half hours.

Why You SHOULD Support The Writers' Strike

Yes, there's something alluring, if anachronistic (hearkening back to Hollywood's red days and the pre-HUAC thirties) and perhaps ridiculous about the photographs of America Ferrera and, in Grey's Anatomy scrubs, Sandra Oh and Ellen Pompeo walking the WGA picket lines in solidarity with the strikers, and press has tended to focus on the disruptions the strike causes (no more Daily Show, so much for Steven Colbert's presidential aspirations, etc, how will we ever get to see Jack Bauer valorize torture?) rather than what's at stake in the demands and dispute which have brought us to this moment.

I want to argue that you should support the strike, not ironically, and not only because it's the right thing to do to support strikes that aren't hate strikes and aren't out to disenfranchise one group of workers at another's expense, but instead because what's at stake here winds up being rather important.

Sure, the Jane Espensons of the world aren't exactly an immiserated proletariat. They make lots of money. They don't work in mines. They're mostly white, mostly male. Why should you give a fuck?

Because what's at stake here winds up being the relationship between the labor that generates "intellectual property" and the ownership and distribution rights of said "property, a key question" for those of interested in questions of what Andrew Ross has called "the Mental Labor problem," or what the Italian autonomist marxists - notably Lazzarato, call immaterial labor - the labor that generates the informational and cultural content of the commodity. What control intellectual workers should have over what they produce winds up being relevant to a far broader swathe of workers than well-paid TV writers. Think of international graduate student researchers in biology labs at universities all over the country, helping to produce pharmaceutical and other medical patents in which they will have no ownership rights. The two cases are not quite the same - the writers are simply asking for a stake in one particular arena, that of digital reproduction of the tv show - but still they seem to be to be calling the question of who owns and profits from intellectual work.

We may, ultimately, want to throw out the entire concept of intellectual property as extremely deleterious for much of the world, or as now stifling the very innovation it was supposed to encourage and protect. That's fine. I don't think such a goal and supporting the strikers demands are mutually exclusive though. As long as profit is the extraction of the unpaid (excess) labor that goes into the production of a commodity, attempts to recognize that labor, to bring it to the fore, are important and worth fighting for.

That said, we can't ignore the role that other forms of labor play in the creation of the tv show as a commodity and as a unit of intellectual property. We can't fetishize the writers and their celebrated creative work as the only labor that makes possible the creation, or even the writing of a television show. I'm thinking not only of camerapeople, editors, set designers, but also parking productions assistants, janitors, food service workers, the workers who actually work in the factories that produce the dvds and tivos and home theater systems that have precipitated the so-called revolution in viewing which has led the writers to make the demands that the studios are refusing to meet, as well as, perhaps, the people who clean the writers' apartments, take care of their children, cook the food they eat. So while we should support the writer's strike, we should also insist that it be augmented, broadened to address the often invisible forms of labor that we don't often think about in conversations about creative labor and intellectual property.

Now back to my exam.

ipod shuffle

Donny Hathaway - "You've Got A Friend"

The Just Brothers - "Sliced Tomatoes." (Pretty cool, understated surf-soul guitar-driven instrumental.)

Little Milton - "More & More"

The Cure - "Torture." Rana's favorite song, clearly.

Marnie Stern - "Logical Volume"

Bob Marley and the Wailers - "Memphis" - from the early reggae period featuring the Upsetters and lots of soul covers aqnd some fantastic acoustic instrumentation.

The dB's "Ask For Jill." "There is a girl on the fourth or fifth floor/buzz at reception slightly disheveled." Not my favorite song off "Repercussions, but pretty good in that dB's shhepish masculinity kind of way.

Ghostface Killah - "Child's Play" The "Bridge is Over" interpellations make this song that much weirder.

The Clientele - "Monday's Rain"

Beatles - "Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey." Possibly the best song title in the history of popular music

Secular white ethnic anti-black police state fascism and evangelical fundamentalist homophobic masculinist militarism, together at last

Pat Robertson endorses Rudolph Giuliani


pictures stolen from some weird blog and The Onion, respectively.

We could make him change a flat tire, or we could all at once retire

I left the apartment at the crack of dawn and walked into bobst, graded two papers, one good and one extremely poor, which was disconcerting. I'm in the process of finishing "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses," which is interesting and more engaging than i thought it would be based on previous engagement with Althusser. I've been using my dad's ancient copy of Lenin and Philosophy and it split in two last night, though the relevant essay remains intact, which i suppose is convenient.

I interrupted the Althusser twice Well, more than that, but there were two big interruptions. The first time was for lunch. On the way to corporate sweatshop burrito chain i ran into some former Yale grad students I knew from New Haven on the street and they were extraordinarily nice to me. I then stopped again to read this on one of the computers in LL1. It's still resonating in my brain. The whole weekend makes graduate school seem more exciting and useful and good than it has been thus far, and that's no small feat given how low i've sunk at various points throughout the last year or two.

Anyway, random shuffle:
Pavement - "Here"
Ultramagnetic MC's "Mentally Mad"
Nick Drake - "Road"
Clipse - "We Got It For Cheap"
Charles Mingus - "Wham Bam Thank You Ma'am"
Super Rail Band - "Maliyo"
Clash - "Tommy Gun"
Spoon - "Sister Jack"
Desmond Dekker - "Music Like Dirt"
The Coup - " 5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO"

“The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.”

That's John Berger, from Ways of Seeing, i think. Anne McClintock quoted it today in her talk at the conference at Barnard to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood, in reference to Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and the visual politics of torture. McClintock's piece was insightful and provocative, but Berger's claim is itself deeply provocative, and i think it is often true, Cure songs not withstanding, ( or perhaps Smith's lyrical persona constructed through the tropes of loss and a very obvious disintegration is instead illustrative.) So I am glad that i took no pictures today, to apply said insight in the most banal, generalized, and dehistoricized of all possible ways, because it was not something I want or intend to forget.

racist ex-defense secretaries and their Yalien apologists

In a series of internal musings and memos to his staff, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld argued that Muslims avoid "physical labor" and wrote of the need to "keep elevating the threat," "link Iraq to Iran" and develop "bumper sticker statements" to rally public support for an increasingly unpopular war...

"You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos -- carefully picked from the some 20,000 written while Rumsfeld served as Secretary," Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail. "After almost all meetings, he dictated his recollections of what was said for his own records."

I'd post a link to that blogpost KU put up a couple years ago applauding a french motorist for running down and nearly murdering a muslim man on the grounds that he looked like Osama Bin Laden, but he wisely seems to have removed said blog from the internet...