"The emperor has no clothes"

The title of this post comes from something NZ yelled yesterday in front of Bobst, itself culled from that horrifically awesome picket sign of Sexton's junk designed by one of the folks from GET-UP.  "Wiz" has an excellent account of yesterday's announcement that GSOC has reached majority yet again and of our demand for voluntary recognition from the administration.  I'm too lazy to add anything other than that if we are really being paid 50,000 a year I am owed over $130,000 in back pay, and I'll take it in installments of tasti-d-lite, ipads, and comic books.  Also, @JohnBeckmanisaLiar, this is only a "puzzle" if you're as stupid as you think we are.

I was going to write something about the "rotting husk of Keynesianism an anonymous commenter on this post once accused GSOC of attempting to resurrect, but all the comments seem to have disappeared.  (I did not delete them.)

Instead, it's worth noting, I think, that today marks the four year anniversary of an earlier declaration of majority which culminated in a huge membership convention at Judson and 57 arrests, including this blogger.  I've been a little less involved this year than in the past, though i am still organizing, but I remain committed to building a just and democratic member-driven union and "taking back NYU" in the streets and the libraries and the third floor cafeterias and the cubicles and carrels and laboratories every day.  Kudos to everyone responsible for yesterday and let's all help Mr. Beckman work through his inability to understand that we, not he, determine who our union is.

More later, but this past weekend's Beneath the University, The Commons conference was exciting, inspiring, and an utterly unique exprience.  I'm still in Minneapolis, heading out to try to find some archives to deal with, but i wanted to post a link to all the video that folks from the nonstop liberal arts institute (antioch in exile) shot of almost every panel, so you can get a sense of just how amazing the conversations taking place were.  I say "um" way too much, apparently.

In case you were wondering what it looks like when anarchoinsurrectionists run for student government positions...

From the archives

That image is from the December, 1991 issue of The GESO Voice, a publication whose later iterations I became intimately familiar with during the 2001-2003 contract fight and the continuing recognition struggles that bookended it.  It depicts a march of Yale University graduate employees during a one-day strike on December 4, 1991.  (I think this was the first strike by Yale grad students since the 1972 Teaching Assistants Organization grade strike, though I remember reading about some solidarity work by folks during the '84 strike that probably also counts.)

I spent spring break looking through the archives of District 65, an important and powerful NYC union which was, among other things, the precursor to the local that GSOC is now in (it also made several attempts to organize Yale's C&Ts between the late 1960s and 1981, organized New York department store workers in the 1930s, and - and this is why I was looking through the collection - successfully organized Barnard and Columbia clerical and technical employees.)  While waiting for the relevant boxes to arrive, i decided to examine two boxes of material from Yale's TA Solidarity and the early days of its successor, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, both of which were donated to Tamiment by the labor historian Gunther Peck sometime in the last eighteen years.  In both collections I found some pretty amazing stuff, and my research is still continuing.  In the weeks ahead, I'll try to use this space more frequently to think about what I'm finding and hopefully have some good conversations with readers about what it all means.  For now, I need to put the finishing touches on my conference paper for Beneath the University.  I'm writing about the role of service work in the political economy and cultural imaginary of university capitalism.  I'm having fun, but I'm not sure my intervention's going to be a particularly useful or competent one.  I'll soon dfind out, I guess.  In the meantime. I'll leave you with this.

edit: should note that the second image, from a later GESO Voice is from the 1992 strike, which was a three-day general strike by graduate students, food service workers, maintenance, custodial, and physical plant workers, and clerical workers and technical workers.