Been neglecting the blog a bit while writing.  I learned two things today that here seems as good a place to write about as anywhere else, though.  Thing 1: During the organizing campaign for the Yale Non-faculty action committee, a clerical worker drive based in the Yale school of Epidemiology and Public Health from 1969ish to 1971, HERE intervened with the National Labor Relations Board to contest the unit that YNFAC, an affiliate of the National Council of Distributive Workers of America, a lefty breakaway from the RWDSU, was arguing for.  YNFAC wanted to organize an EPH-only unit.  Vinnie Sirabella told the NLRB this was wrong.  HERE had recently tried to organize a universitywide clerical union in 1967-1968 that couldn't get past workers' fear of the boss, and fizzled.  YNFAC eventually brought a universitywide election before the board and lost.  In a lot of ways, it's the most interesting of the pre-Local 34 organizing campaigns.  It's the most feminist, the most progressive, and the most expressive.  But it got crushed by the university's anti-union campaign.

Other new thing I learned today: Joe Lieberman's 1970 campaign for the CT state senate against an incumbent who was the senate majority leader became entangled with a conflict between the conservative democratic mayor of New Haven Bart Guida and his political machine and Yale University over taxation.  Supporters of the incumbent claimed that Lieberman, a 28-year old "liberal" Yale graduate and assistant dean, was getting campaign funds from money the university had earmarked for "the community."  (This would have been illegal on like fifteen levels.)  Meanwhile Lieberman's people accused the mayor of announcing plans to unilaterally add 11 Yale properties to the city's Grand List as a way of drumming up anti-Yale fervor against the Lieberman campaign.  (Meanwhile, -I knew about this part already - the university is suing the mayor over the tax stuff and imposing a hiring freeze on service workers which winds up leading to the second near-wildcat strike in under a year and fuels a lot of the militancy that explodes into the 7-week long strike in May-June of 1971, the 10-week long strike in 1974, and the 13 week long strike in 1977.

Oh, also, two months ago I wrote a 3,000 word essay on the UAW, the university, organizing, capitalism, mustaches, bureaucracy, winning, etc that I have only shown to two people and don't know what I am going to do with.  If I publish it, it will need to be edited and rewritten, and I don't really have the time to do that at the moment or know when I will or if I even want to publish it.  But I was going to post it here, and I want to note that just so you know I haven't entirely ignored this space for the last however many months it's been since I published anything.