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?
No comments:
Post a Comment