well grubbed old mole blah blah blah
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Friday, March 9, 2007
Thursday, March 8, 2007
Just Ask Marna: Stories From The Ground of Shameful Union-Busting Tactics
This is profoundly dirty and wholly demonstrative of just how committed to anti-union terror tactics Marna "The Borg" Borgstrom really is. I want to write more about this, but have to read some Capital Vol 3. and Limits to Capital and write a 2 page response paper and get to Manhattan all before 11 AM, and last night's protracted HOD meeting left me a bit drained but also excited for our "conference committee" to finally start "conferencing" with the administration on the terms and conditions of our "not-work." So I will be back, sometime after my class and some time before this weekend's birthday celebrations for both my nonagenarian grandparents, for which i will wear a tie and jacket for the first time since my senior prom, I think, and for which i am told my awesome cousin Kyla has returned early from the antarctic. Thankfully, as always seems to be the case in New Haven, that movement Sherman Chickering saw in the picket signs and faces of the local 35 strikers in 1971 remains very much alive.
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
expropriations
I stole a bottle of Diet Coke from the House of Delegates. If the GHOD is going to flagrantly violate the coke boycott, i'm stealing their shit. I'm not sorry.
I also nominated myself to be on the "constitution committee." This should be interesting.
I also nominated myself to be on the "constitution committee." This should be interesting.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
The Times bacs the Employee Free Choice Act
The bill’s opponents charge that replacing secret ballots with the majority signup would be undemocratic. But the current system is by no means fair. The law prohibits union advocacy by employees during work hours and allows employers to ban organizers from the work place. But employers can require workers to attend anti-union presentations, and can discipline or fire those who refuse to attend.
In 2005, according to the most recent annual report of the National Labor Relations Board, 31,358 employees were receiving back pay after being discriminated against for their union-related activities. In research for a bipartisan Congressional commission in 2000, Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor relations professor at Cornell University, reported that 25 percent of employers illegally fired at least one employee during organizing campaigns.
Labor unions have a role to play in helping to fix today’s economic ills — most notably, worsening income inequality, a problem that’s caused in part by unions’ decline and the workers’ resulting lack of bargaining power. What’s needed is a Congressional drive to help Mr. Bush see this obvious connection. The Senate should take up the House bill promptly and send it to the president for his signature.
Monday, March 5, 2007
It's now - barely - officially March 6, 2007. This means that my grandfather joins my grandmother in the ranks of the nonagenarians, so happy birthday to him.
It also marks four years since my grandfather's 86th birthday, and this:
On March 6, 2003 hundreds of workers and students and other members of the New Haven community came together in the middle of a snowstorm to demand a new relationship with the university and a new set of contracts for each of four bargaining units - five if you count the new social contract, which you should, though the picket sign on the back of one dog read, if i remember correctly, four legs, four unions, one contract, and that was kind of awesome. Folks came to teach each other about what education and justice can and should mean, to articulate and bring to birth - to use Ralph Chaplin's gestational-apocalyptic metaphor - a new university from the ashes of the old, radically participatory and indeed performative, but with a tone firmly (sorry) rooted in histories of the transnational labor migrations - forced, nominally volitional, or otherwise, which built - or at least completely reordered New Haven and constituted the movements which had struck Yale eleven times before March 3 of that year, and have done so three more times since then. I haven't really felt that sense of possibility and, um, power - in a subversive, non-Foucauldian, liberatory sense, since then. I hope to soon. Because i think actions like the AJH-masterminded E.I.T.S. are so powerful because they articulate on the ground organizing and demands (and this foreshadows a response to Alek which I may or may not ever get around to dealing with more formally) with the simultaneous eruption of the Harney-Moten undercommons into a realm in which the "criminality" of the subversive academic "refugee" is however momentarily displaced and utopian possibilities become plainly illuminated, from the undercommons the spectre of a new commons, perhaps - and concretize a shared vision of what it is we are fighting for, which cannot be contained in Harney and Moten's formation of the Cary Nelson-Bill Readings reformist impulse in even its strongest iterations. Also, we need a fucking contract, but that demand isn't just about reforming something gone awry, or stopgap measures meant to slow the erosion of job security and labor rights and the forward march of casualization, because we can't let it just be that. We have to always demand and imagine more.
It also marks four years since my grandfather's 86th birthday, and this:
On March 6, 2003 hundreds of workers and students and other members of the New Haven community came together in the middle of a snowstorm to demand a new relationship with the university and a new set of contracts for each of four bargaining units - five if you count the new social contract, which you should, though the picket sign on the back of one dog read, if i remember correctly, four legs, four unions, one contract, and that was kind of awesome. Folks came to teach each other about what education and justice can and should mean, to articulate and bring to birth - to use Ralph Chaplin's gestational-apocalyptic metaphor - a new university from the ashes of the old, radically participatory and indeed performative, but with a tone firmly (sorry) rooted in histories of the transnational labor migrations - forced, nominally volitional, or otherwise, which built - or at least completely reordered New Haven and constituted the movements which had struck Yale eleven times before March 3 of that year, and have done so three more times since then. I haven't really felt that sense of possibility and, um, power - in a subversive, non-Foucauldian, liberatory sense, since then. I hope to soon. Because i think actions like the AJH-masterminded E.I.T.S. are so powerful because they articulate on the ground organizing and demands (and this foreshadows a response to Alek which I may or may not ever get around to dealing with more formally) with the simultaneous eruption of the Harney-Moten undercommons into a realm in which the "criminality" of the subversive academic "refugee" is however momentarily displaced and utopian possibilities become plainly illuminated, from the undercommons the spectre of a new commons, perhaps - and concretize a shared vision of what it is we are fighting for, which cannot be contained in Harney and Moten's formation of the Cary Nelson-Bill Readings reformist impulse in even its strongest iterations. Also, we need a fucking contract, but that demand isn't just about reforming something gone awry, or stopgap measures meant to slow the erosion of job security and labor rights and the forward march of casualization, because we can't let it just be that. We have to always demand and imagine more.
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