social entrepreneurship?

The first in the speaker series endowned by Catherine B. Reynolds, NYU Trustee for Life, student debt profiteer (I'd link, but the WSN site is down,) and purveyor of a $50,000 scholarship to the guy who's responsible for our company union debacle, is none other than (drumroll)

Union-busting anti-union ideologue Whole Foods CEO John Mackey!!!11!1??!1!

That's the NYU vision of social change right there.

dispatches

"Pure maths be damned." The Washington Square News reports on the Courant Institute's ties (the Math department, specifically) to Wall Street, through fields like financial math and programs to train PhDs in the kind of mathematics valued by money managers. By the way, capitalism appears to be in crisis - though that didn't stop Yale's endowment from growing. At whose expense this time, we wonder...

(Wouldn't it be nice to have similar data on NYU...?

Wal-Mart's damage control is falling flat for some workers...

Under the program, store managers are to meet each week with 10 employees who sign up to discuss concerns, suggestions and ideas for improving operations. The program also requires regional general managers to conduct monthly town-hall meetings that are open to every worker in the area.

A new management training program, called “Leaders Out in Front,” is intended to encourage hourly workers to advance their careers and help existing managers become “better ambassadors and mentors,” according to the memo.

Not all of these perks are new. During previous holiday seasons, Wal-Mart has paid health care premiums and offered an additional 10 percent discount. But they were sporadic or at store managers’ discretion, rather than offered annually across the chain, said Ms. Clark, the spokeswoman.

Other perks, like a shirt that states length of employment in five-year increments starting with 20 years of service, appear designed to build morale, but might do the opposite.

Cleo Forward, a 37-year-old support manager at a Wal-Mart in Dallas, said the new program was promising, but that it fell short in recognizing long-time workers who felt unappreciated by the changes.

“They are going to spend $15 on a Polo for you after 20 years? Give me a break,” he said. “We would rather they lift the wage caps.”

This is an anti-union strategy as well as a desparate attempt at morale-boosting in the wake of "associates'" reactions to the corpopration's attempts to "to create a cheaper, more flexible labor force by capping wages, using more part-time employees, scheduling more workers at nights and weekends, and cracking down on unexcused days off."

The policies angered many long-time employees, who complained that the changes would reduce their pay and disrupt their families’ lives. Workers even staged small rallies in Nitro, W. Va., and Hialeah Gardens, Fla., the only such protests in recent memory.

"Associates Out in Front" is predicated on the notion that what will quiet the workers is more contact with the pacificying voices of middle management and a few scraps. But Wal-Mart's massive corps of low wage workers seem - at least according to Barbaro and Greenhouse, less enthused about the attemps at mollification than the company's spokespeople.

Kory Uselton, a 35-year-old overnight floor cleaner at a Wal-Mart in Tyler, Tex., said his store manager offered “robotic” company-approved responses during a recent meeting when workers questioned the new attendance policy, which originally called for disciplinary action after three unauthorized absences (although it was later revised to four unexcused absences).

Asked if absence for a family emergency, like a sick child, would be authorized, Mr. Uselton recounted, the manager said, “No, it’s not.”

“Many of the associates were very upset,” Mr. Uselton said. “Management is just not listening anymore.” Some Wal-Mart employees said workers might be afraid to speak up because they have seen coworkers retaliated against — for instance, transferred to worse shifts when they voiced their complaints.

Ms. Clark said Wal-Mart already had several systems in place that allowed employees to criticize company practices. Among other things, she said, there was a toll-free hotline workers could call to report ethical lapses, a Web site on which chief executive H. Lee Scott Jr. answered questions and a policy, known as the “open door,” that permitted anyone to bring complaints to officers at the highest level of the company.

Yeah, right.

Wal-Mart, Free Trade Zones, and Murdered Labor Activists (a blockquote)

In the interstitial, deregulated, outsourced manufacturing nodes of global capitalism, the "race to the bottom" apparently doesn't stop at murder.

Liza Featherstone at The Nation's blog.

Bishop Ramento was chair of the board of the Philippine Workers' Assistance Centre (WAC) in Cavite, where workers have also been under violent attack in recent weeks. (His colleagues there feel strongly that his was a political murder, not a robbery.) According to WAC, a church-affiliated labor organization that has had phenomenal success organizing workers in the intensely militarized Free Trade Zone, the owners of the Chong Won Fashion factory have been trying to destroy their employees' union by force.

Last week, a combination of municipal and free trade zone police, and private security, attacked strikers who were peacefully picketing, injuring twenty-two of them. It was the second violent attack on the picket line since September 25, when the workers first went on strike to protest the owners' refusal to negotiate a first collective bargaining agreement. At least sixty-six of the striking workers have also received termination notices, according to WAC.

The factory's largest customer is Wal-Mart. Last month, after repeated violations of workers' right to organize, the retailer audited the factory at the request of Maquila Solidarity Network (MSM), an anti-sweatshop group based in Toronto. But Wal-Mart ignored some of MSM's more crucial requests: the company did not meet with WAC to hear the workers' side of the story, nor did it put enough pressure Chong Won's owners to respect freedom of association, so violence at the factory has escalated.

Last year, around the same time that Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott started finding his inner tree-hugger, Wal-Mart also began cultivating a better relationship with North America-based anti-sweatshop groups. The company had been so notorious for ignoring these organizations and their findings, that even the ever-forgiving Domini Social Investment Fund had dropped Wal-Mart for "unresponsiveness."

Wal Mart and Flexiblization of Retail Workers

Greenhouse/Barbaro piece here. Walmart internal memo here.

I'd say something insightful but I'm too hungry. The whole secular fast thing really isn't working for me that well right now - i'm too stressed out and hungry to think straight.

So I think i'm going to break my fast and eat something and then try to get some work done.

Always Racist. Always

Oh, Walmart.

Wal-Mart stirred outrage yesterday when its Web site suggested that
shoppers who wanted to buy a "Planet of the Apes" DVD would be interested in
biopics of famous black Americans like Martin Luther King Jr.
The giant
retailer blamed a computer glitch for the "offensive" recommendations - and said
it was overhauling its online operations until a fix could be made.
"We are
heartsick that this happened and are currently doing everything possible to
correct the problem," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Mona Williams said. "We are deeply
sorry that this happened."
When visitors to Walmart.com plug in the name of
a movie they want, the site also pulls up the name of several other "similar
items" they might like.
For instance, a shopper who enters "Million Dollar
Baby" is offered other 2004 hits like "The Aviator" and "Ray."
But in the
case of "Planet of the Apes," consumers who clicked on the DVD of the original
TV series - a cult classic in which the Earth is ruled by gorillas - were routed
to four movies about King, actress Dorothy Dandridge, boxer Jack Johnson and
singer Tina Turner.
New Yorkers were disturbed.
"They are making a
statement relating apes to black movies?" wondered Denise Brown, 36, of East New
York, Brooklyn. "'Planet of the Apes' was a science fiction movie. What does
Martin Luther King have to do with that?"
"It's outrageous. I've never heard
of anything like that," the Rev. Al Sharpton said when he was told of the
pairings.
"They need to straighten it out, and if they do not clarify what
happened, we need to take some action."

Update: here's more from the Washington Post.

some thoughts on academic capitalism.

I have a bone to pick with the academic labor movement's discourse. Specifically, i'm a little perturbed by the discourse of corporatization as applied to the contemporary situation of universities in the global North, like NYU.

See, here's my beef: The corporatization of the university is a process which, I want to argue, is something that we should be talking about in the past tense to some extent, a process which we need to situate in between the late 1940s and mid to late 1960s as the moment at which the growth and importance of the corporation in the post WWII world and the GI Bill university become incredibly important in the logics of cold war mobilization, ergonomically inclined industrial psychology projects in the university seek to rationalize the homo economicus necessary for the kinds of work discipline demanded by the jobscape of the American Century's postwar boom, and the university-corporate nexus forms the site of the emergence and generation of the various models of international economic and socio-cultural development projects. Corporations acquire campuses and dub themselves think tanks, unversities streamline, Taylorize, and speed up. If my periodization is off, it is because i may be marking the emergence of some of these trends as far later than they actually are. So i should clarify by noting that i think there's a specific iteration of industrial psychology that emerges in these years, or perhaps the old strain, which dates back to the 1920s and has far earlier roots in the scientific management community, is vested with new attention or authority.

We also need to look at the politics of the relationships between institutions like universities and the spatial politics and built environment of the cities they occupy. See, for instance, Columbia's gymnasium project in Morningside Park, or the anger that erupts in the early 1970s over Yale's sometimes stealthy expansion in the previous two decades.

By the late 1960s, and particularly 1967-68, when there is across the globe a revolt against this corporate multiversity and its strong links to the Vietnam War and the policing of social movements, I want to argue that this corporatization comes into a state of crisis and the beginnings of something new start to emerge and attempt to replicate and replace it. In Yale's case, between 1968-1973, when the dollar is yanked free from the gold standard forever, the oil crisis erupts, and Local 35 is beaten bloody on college street outside the annual commencement ceremony while Hannah Arendt recieves an honorary doctorate, crucial shifts inaugurate the social relations of the deindustrializing city and its neocolonial relationship with the university. I tried to argue in my senior essay that there is a powerful link between this process and the fashioning of Richard Levin's enumerated global university, that this is when the neoliberalization of the univeristy begins in earnest, a process not merely about turning the university into a corporation, but about colonizing new realms of knowledge, about, particularly in the wake of the bayh-Dole act (1980) refashioning the university as a neoliberal instrument global inequality in the name of a politics of scarcity. At Yale, i was fortunate enough to be around the loudest evangelist for this new(er) reconsitiution of the university as a site of knowledge production in relation to the coloniality of power and knowledge, and also to get to work with and learn from federation folks doing innovative and awesome research on how this process worked -- whre the money went, how the board of trustees that controlled it functioned, and the crucially important place of international student workers in this new economy of the university.

I don't know enough yet about NYU's own history, but i suspect it is not different enough not to warrant a somewhat similar reperiodization. Ours is a movement against neoliberalism. Knowing this and being able to articulate it greatly enriches the possibilities for how we understand our struggle in a global context.

[acknowledgements to the researchers and organizers working on the Yale fight and to the GSOC people organzing for the strike, from whom i draw a great deal here.]

US District Judge Joseph Greenaway has certified a class action lawsuit by undocumented, subcontracted Wal-Mart workers who were denied fair wages and overtime and were locked in stores overnight.

U.S. District Judge Joseph Greenaway's decision to let stand
the wage charges, which were brought under the Fair Labor Standards Act, helps
explain the court's thinking about the claims of undocumented workers. First, he
rejected Wal-Mart's argument that because the workers are illegal, they can't
seek relief from the law. Greenaway wrote, "This court only joins a growing
chorus acknowledging the right of workers to seek relief for work already
performed under the Fair Labor Standards Act."

Next, he rejected Wal-Mart's assertion that since the janitors
worked for contractors rather than Wal-Mart directly, Wal-Mart was not their
employer. Greenaway also rejected Wal-Mart's claim that the wage issue should be
dismissed because it had paid above minimum wage to some of the workers and
"near" minimum wage to several others. "Simply put," Greenaway wrote, "payment
of 'near' the lawful minimum wage is not payment of the minimum wage."

On the allegations of false imprisonment, the workers will
have the opportunity, as a class, to sock Wal-Mart with punitive damages, should
they win this issue at trial. Linsey says he'll be able to present testimony not
only from workers who were locked into the stores but from their friends, family
members and neighbors who sometimes couldn't find the workers because of their
confinement.

Here's Nathan Newman on why the current absence of the RICO charge from the suit is probably a good thing.

Hartford Connecticut kicks (Walmart's) ass.

With all this blood flowing from the television

Wal-Mart and marines commercials suceeding each other on channel 11 during Smallville.



"You will become one of the world's greatest [class] warriors."

Special Interest?

This article was a topic of conversation tonight, so i figured i'd blog it.

"It appears the unions want to take millions of dollars in dues

from their members and use them to rob average Americans of their right to pay

less for the basics in life," Ms. Gallagher said. "You need to ask one question:

Is it fair to ask American consumers to pay higher prices to subsidize a

relatively small pocket of individuals just because they are making the most

noise?"

Which "small pocket" would that be - Wal-Mart's 1.2 million "associates?" God forbid those dastardly unions should like, organize new workers or something. I mean, really. The labor movement clearly needs to listen to James Kirchick, stop organizing, and start helping the government kill trade unionists in other countries, like we did back in the good old days, when the threat of Nucular Annihilation forced the US to come up with slightly better justifications for invading and destroying sovereign nation states, back when we didn't need to invade outright, we could get right wing generals to stage coups and kill all the leftists all by themselves (i.e., with lots of guns we sold them and which they paid for with money we gave them for "infrastructure." (Notice how the "we" of the labor movement clumsily slips into "we" of the masters of war. I am the best writer ever.) Gotta love that AIFLD. Yes, if the labor movement would just get back to celebrating the neoconservative imperial project, i'm sure all Wal-Mart's troubles would evaporate.



PS: Hey James - what happens when your call for "Gay History" winds up clashing with your antihistorical panegyrics to cold war liberalism? (Except without the whole welfare state or civil rights movement part?)

as if you needed more reasons to hate wal-mart

Ehrenreich has a great column in the times today about Wal-Mart as a global sweatshop, which, like Yale, depends on the state to provide benefits to many of its employees rather than actually provide them itself.

Andy Stern, the president of the Service Employees International Union, writes



Wal-Mart is to the 21st century what the Dutch East India Company was to the 17th century. Global enterprises who salute no flag, but their own corporate logo. Traders who travel the world in search of profit. For these global corporations, workers are simply an input, and countries are obstacles or vehicles to promote their company's bottom line.



Yes. In addition to being "China's fifth-largest export market -- ahead of Germany and Great Britain," Wal-Mart is also the largest employer in Mexico and the United States. The "Walmartization" of the service sector carries dire portents for a globalized working class, as Stern points out. Yet will the solution that Stern and American unions pose in response simply be to ressurect the rotting corpse of the welfare state as an insufficient insulation against capital's ravages - is such a gesture even possible? Or will American unions join global social movements in envisioning self-active, global transformative actions "more transnational" than wal-mart could ever hope to be?