Five years ago yesterday, hundreds of NYU graduate students took to the streets, beginning a seven month strike which was the longest in the history of the US academic labor movement, though recent strikes in Canada have given it a run for its money. we picketed outside of Bobst Library for most of my first year of graduate school, we hauled giant green dumpsters full of gas-guzzling inflatable rat, we screamed at John
Sexton, refused to shake Stimpy's hand, got arrested twice, stormed the library, busted up lobbying day, got divorced and played spin the bottle and became organizers and researchers and jaded and we processed stuff and did shit we shouldn't have and we sat through long meetings, long, long meetings, and we struggled together and sometimes against each other and sometimes we betrayed each other and sometimes we learned how not to.
so many of the posts on this blog form an archive of that strike. some of them are far too boastful, read to me now as naive or dismissive of the many contradictions and conflicts and problems and just plain shit that got fucked up. some of them read now, for me, anyway, as indices of my own ambivalence and my ambivalent position as pseudosalt no one asked for, as transplanted UOCista, as anarchist, as first-year, as useless organizer. As if I felt compelled - as I not infrequently did, to mask the contradictions, to smooth them over, to downplay my fears and my concerns and do what needed to be done because of affective crises, diplomatic necessities, the guilt of the tactless fuckhead inept wannabe. I still feel this call to self-censorship, this reified and alienated regulator of affects, when I blog about stuff i am close to but feel conflicted about. I suppose that's somewhat natural, though I guess, being an American Studiesist, my instinct is to note that nothing is ever natural, or nothing human is only ever natural, more accurately, that my anxieties and ambivalences about how I write about the strike and everything else are conditioned, their limits produced in part, by the social relationships in which I am situated and which I help to constitute, how I lived the strike, how we continue to live in it's shadows even when we don't acknowledge them out of what we understand a's organizing necessities.
Anyway, my point is that the strike has ghosts, Avery Gordon ghosts, something I've written about before, though not posted here, ghosts of Monday night meetings and Frank Hoppensteadt PhD letters and endless department meeting shitstorms and oh so many mustache rides and "scab unions" GHODs and escalation/penis and TL calling the provost wilford brimley and "what makes you think you have the right to hug me" and "you want to take money out of my pocket so I will not tell you my name" and sundry other awesome things AC said in town hall meetings and detached crybaby white virus white supremacist extirpation poison pill missed paycheck captive audience third way proposals ("third way, historically means fascism"- HH) collapsed steward systems anonymous blog posts fights in bars letters cab rides picket lines picket lines ISO RMO cultural capitalist lapdog union busting marxists roll the sausage factory on.
the strike has ghosts, and one of the ghosts is us. we are still here, we endure, we have not let NYU destroy us, we shout at John Sexton in Bobst imperial photoshoots, we march with immigrant workers centers we march on bobst we organize we get kicked out of labs we ask Stimpy about attrition we get far 4ed we work and we practice Moten/Harney theft and try to constitute and undercommons and eat pizza and we meet and meet and meet until
we're still here because of the determination of hundreds of graduate employees not to let the bosses win. we're here because of SV and MWP and TL and JH and RJ and MC and hundreds and hundreds of others who would not let NYU beat us, who kept fighting, kept building. And we're still here because the UAW didn't sell us out, and we're here because we still want power over or power against our work, because the university is in crisis, because we are the crisis, because it's been five years and I have never worked under a union contract and this is the sixth class I have taught and the union I want to build is the union of university labor beyond the university "we carry a new world in our hearts.". because Rana put two and a half years of her life into keeping the union alive, into organizing in new places, into fighting the attempts to restructure us into oblivion.
yesterday was November ninth, the 5th anniversary of the GSOC strike date. today was November tenth, the 69th anniversary of Local 142 of the United Construction Workers-CIO's first strike at Yale University, in 1941. FUE, the UOC, and the greater new haven labor history association organized an event tracing the history of Yale labor from
that strike through '53, '68,
'71, '74, '77, '84, '91, '92, '95, '95, '96, '03, '03,'05, and everything for which those numbers stand as insufficient metonym. i am writing a chapter on yale workers in the 70s, so I came up from NYC, and this blog post emerges in nonsmall part from my desire to keep putting the NYU struggle in conversation with the Yale fight.
November 10th 1941 inaugurates 425 college street, local 35 and the organization of the dining halls, Vincent Sirabella, John Wilhelm, Local 34 and everything that Yale clerical and technical workers and food service and maintenance workers built and won together, TA solidarity and two decades of GESO hundreds of thousands of struck hours, insurgent alliances, who knows how many organizing conversations, hard pushes, tough decisions. stake take do.
there are important links between these strikes. there were the five GESOistas who suspended their lives and their work and dissertations to help GSOC strike, the two GSOC rank and filers who went to new haven to organize with clerical workers and cafeteria workers, the busloads of Yale workers who came down Wednesday after Wednesday throughout November, December, January, who got arrested with us and hounded NYU trustees into the toney depths of Fairfield County country clubs, who translated Scott Marxist picketline chants into new idioms and taught many of us what it meant to be organizers. And last and least there's me, who still feels liminal sometimes but precisely because i owe so much to both these trajectories, these histories of struggle and sweat and freezing for a reason.
the university has been a site of labor struggle for a very long time - janitors organized elsewhere long before they organized at Yale. we need to remember that. there never was a university divorced from and free of the labor that makes it possible. what kind of university, what kind of city, what kind of world, can we, in union, create for each other and ourselves?
this is the 1800th post on this blog.
