Oh, hey, so my first published work as an academic, "The limits of work and the subject of labor history," appears in the brand new book Rethinking U.S. Labor History from Continuum Press. My essay looks at the racialized and gendered applicability of the term "labor" as a descriptor for selective human activities, and argues that two projects labor scholars should take up are the continual reexamination of both the shifting geography of the boundaries between work and not work and a corresponding shift in who or what ought to be the privileged subject(s) of labor history. I think my original draft was rather awful, and I think that the revisions process and intervening year and a half have convinced me that the finished project is significantly less awful, though you are of course welcome to disagree, and if folks who read it want to engage me on it, I'd welcome that, though I'm finding the temporality of publishing somewhat disorienting - i submitted the final draft of the essay 15 months ago and have been working on other projects since - a conference paper here, a diss chapter there, and hadn't really thought much about this essay in the interrim until i realized i needed to be able to say stuff about it for a panel Wednesday night. I should also note that the other essays in the book that I've read are really interesting, especially Dan Bender's article on the senses and the cultural turn. I'm also looking forward to reading the essay on home health care workers by Eileen Boris and Jennifer Klein.
Today's November 20th. That makes it the 1 year anniversary of this: At a moment in which the UCPD is pulling guns on protestors, academic neoliberalism continues expansionist coloniality at home and abroad and neoliberal assaults on campus workers, students, and spaces, we need to be inspired by and learn from the struggles of the last two years as we work to build new cycles of whatever. I meant that less in the agamben sense than in the "insert your radical noun here" sense, "insurrection, insurgency, transformation, strikes, resistance, organizing, etc." They're all problematic and insufficient in one way or another, but also all necessary in one way or another. Alright. Solidarity from the purple tendrils of the global network university
Saturday, November 20, 2010
NO GOD, NO COUNTRIES, NO YALE!
In honor of the Harvard-Yale game, which I have never been to, and the inevitable flood of nostalgic and slightly jingoistic, though i don't mean to be an asshole, facebook updates from people i haven't seen in at least five years. Obviously I'm riffing off Ni dieu ni maitre and "for god, for country...", and I don't actually really want to claim secularism as some kind of revolutionary position at this point, when in many ways it's profoundly not and is often complicit in projects like homonationalism and other ways in which folks deploy liberalism to justify postmodern imperial projects like the invasion of Afghanistan. Plus, I know many great organizers and committed radicals who approach what they do from a (critical engagement with their) religious standpoint, and I have a lot of respect for them. I also believe strongly in the power of ritual in anticapitalist and antiauthoritarian forms of religious practice, and here i'm thinking of stuff like freedom seders, even though i'm pretty estranged from Judaism - maybe even moreso than i'd like to be. I should also probably throw in "no bosses," or risk overdetermining the role of the state in relation to the capitalist class whose interests it mediates and regulates.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
postscript: November 11th
this is an addendum to last night's post on the nyu strike and it's transinstitutional valences.
today is November eleventh. before that meant veterans' day, it meant something else. 123 years ago today the anarchist and socialist organizers and leaders of the movement for the eight hour day in Chicago, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hanged.
We ought to remember the haymarket "martyrs," ought to remember Peter Linebaugh's insights about the ways that the gallows, like the prisons, function as instruments of class struggle from above, of labor discipline and primitive accumulation.
also, let's remember Spies' last words: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!"
today is November eleventh. before that meant veterans' day, it meant something else. 123 years ago today the anarchist and socialist organizers and leaders of the movement for the eight hour day in Chicago, Albert Parsons, August Spies, George Engel, and Adolph Fischer were hanged.
We ought to remember the haymarket "martyrs," ought to remember Peter Linebaugh's insights about the ways that the gallows, like the prisons, function as instruments of class struggle from above, of labor discipline and primitive accumulation.
also, let's remember Spies' last words: "There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today!"
All We Do Is Work
union-busting law firm Jackson Lewis LLP notices the most recent ruling on grad employees, uses it to drum up new clients or reactivate old ones.
Jackson Lewis's motto is "all we do is work." This is profoundly ironic, given their involvement in NYU's long years of denial that what we do is work, an argument that was always ridiculous, always fraudulent. And it's ridiculous because as an antiworker labor law firm, their work is to bind us to ours, to impose work-discipline, produce fear, to help the boss maintain control, police the workers into submission. "Union avoidance" means violence, whatever you think about trade unionism, business unionism, unionism as a mode of organizing labor. However well or ill fought, there is always more at play in a labor struggle than everyone admits. This is why Joe Leiberman's claim during the summer before the second 2003 strike, that workers "were not asking for much" struck me as so flawed, because he could not possibly know what they were all asking for, because they were not asking but demanding, because by demanding, they were asking for everything, because this minimizing of the scope of what was at stake was always a reactionary project, was never strategic.
"All we do is work" is also a double-edged sword, of sorts - at once the colonization of everything in the Capital V.1 sense, i.e., originary accumulation as real subsumption - everything is work, all we do is produce surplus value, there is no escape - and an unwitting endorsement of expanding the terrain of struggle into new contexts and forms, because if all we do is work, then what does that yield us but yet more ways to strike?
Jackson Lewis's motto is "all we do is work." This is profoundly ironic, given their involvement in NYU's long years of denial that what we do is work, an argument that was always ridiculous, always fraudulent. And it's ridiculous because as an antiworker labor law firm, their work is to bind us to ours, to impose work-discipline, produce fear, to help the boss maintain control, police the workers into submission. "Union avoidance" means violence, whatever you think about trade unionism, business unionism, unionism as a mode of organizing labor. However well or ill fought, there is always more at play in a labor struggle than everyone admits. This is why Joe Leiberman's claim during the summer before the second 2003 strike, that workers "were not asking for much" struck me as so flawed, because he could not possibly know what they were all asking for, because they were not asking but demanding, because by demanding, they were asking for everything, because this minimizing of the scope of what was at stake was always a reactionary project, was never strategic.
"All we do is work" is also a double-edged sword, of sorts - at once the colonization of everything in the Capital V.1 sense, i.e., originary accumulation as real subsumption - everything is work, all we do is produce surplus value, there is no escape - and an unwitting endorsement of expanding the terrain of struggle into new contexts and forms, because if all we do is work, then what does that yield us but yet more ways to strike?
we should all be so despicable
Nina Power on the student occupation of the conservative party headquarters yesterday:
Numbers were massive too, with around 52,000 turning out – more than double the NUS's original estimate. Police helicopters circled above the crowds, as protesters carried giant vultures, carrots, coffins and effigies of Tory politicians. But media reports will inevitably focus on one thing, namely the spontaneous occupation of and protest in Tory HQ at 30 Millbank Tower. Aaron Porter, the NUS president, was quick to condemn the breakaway protesters, describing their actions as "despicable".
As I write, about 200 people have occupied the building, and bonfires burn outside. Some arrests have been made and eight people – protesters and police officers – have been injured. Protesters have broken windows and made their way on to the roof. Twitter reports indicate that some have taken a sofa from inside Millbank and put it outside, with the quite reasonable argument that "if we're going to be kettled we may as well be comfy".
Direct action this most certainly was, the kind writers such as John Pilger have recently been calling for. It is hard to see the violence as simply the wilfulness of a small minority – it is a genuine expression of frustration against the few who seem determined to make the future a miserable, small-minded and debt-filled place for the many.<\blockquote>
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
November Ninth, November tenth
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Saturday, November 6, 2010
MOAR DISPATCHES! MOAR DISSERTATIONIZING! ZOMG!
Well, I'm sort of stuck. I need to figure out why the 1942 and 1943-4 University of Minnesota nonacademic worker strikes weren't illegal - or if they were, why no one seemed to care. Minnesota labor law, unlike NY, permits strikes by "nonessential" government employees after a 10-day cooling off period and, in some cases, an arbitration process. But the Minnesota Public Employee Labor Relations Act only dates back to the 1970s, and a morning and a half's worth of searching has yielded little help as to what the status of public employee strikes was in the period i'm looking at. Labor historian and lawyer Joseph E. Slater's Public Workers: Government Employee Unions, The Law, and The State 1900-1962 suggests that strikes by public school janitors were very much illegal in the 1930s, yet strike votes recur into at least 1940, and the objections Slater recounts of BSEIU brass to the proposed job actions hinge more on public perception than perceived illegality. I'm debating submitting a query to H-labor or something. The point is that neither state labor law nor the WLB - one would think one or the other would have gotten involved - seem to have been pressuring the local against a strike, at least until the governor intervened to end the 1942 strike on the promise of some form of continuing mediation. Minnesota Governor Howard Stassen's intervention isn't surprising given the role the university was playing in housing and training armed services personnel in the middle of world war II. Nor is it entirely suprising that the international leadership of the BSEIU, an AFL craft union with historical links to organized crime, also opposed the strike, even if the Minneapolis Central Labor Union supported it. What's odd is the lack of evidence I've found that anyone was seriously pressuring the union against striking prior to picket lines going up around campus. Or maybe I am just not looking in the right places, relying too heavily on press clippings, not looking at a wider span of archival press coverage from before the strike. The Minneapolis Labor Review makes no reference to any such pressure before the strike, and none of the other press coverage of the actual October '42 strike lists any such concerns or any state response to the strike save Governor Stassen's attempt to convince the workers to go back by promising to mediate.
Anyway, If you, dear reader, have ideas about how I might figure out the answers to some of these questions, I would be in your debt.
Anyway, If you, dear reader, have ideas about how I might figure out the answers to some of these questions, I would be in your debt.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)