The title of this post comes from something NZ yelled yesterday in front of Bobst, itself culled from that horrifically awesome picket sign of Sexton's junk designed by one of the folks from GET-UP. "Wiz" has an excellent account of yesterday's announcement that GSOC has reached majority yet again and of our demand for voluntary recognition from the administration. I'm too lazy to add anything other than that if we are really being paid 50,000 a year I am owed over $130,000 in back pay, and I'll take it in installments of tasti-d-lite, ipads, and comic books. Also, @JohnBeckmanisaLiar, this is only a "puzzle" if you're as stupid as you think we are.
I was going to write something about the "rotting husk of Keynesianism an anonymous commenter on this post once accused GSOC of attempting to resurrect, but all the comments seem to have disappeared. (I did not delete them.)
Instead, it's worth noting, I think, that today marks the four year anniversary of an earlier declaration of majority which culminated in a huge membership convention at Judson and 57 arrests, including this blogger. I've been a little less involved this year than in the past, though i am still organizing, but I remain committed to building a just and democratic member-driven union and "taking back NYU" in the streets and the libraries and the third floor cafeterias and the cubicles and carrels and laboratories every day. Kudos to everyone responsible for yesterday and let's all help Mr. Beckman work through his inability to understand that we, not he, determine who our union is.
Monday, April 12, 2010
More later, but this past weekend's Beneath the University, The Commons conference was exciting, inspiring, and an utterly unique exprience. I'm still in Minneapolis, heading out to try to find some archives to deal with, but i wanted to post a link to all the video that folks from the nonstop liberal arts institute (antioch in exile) shot of almost every panel, so you can get a sense of just how amazing the conversations taking place were. I say "um" way too much, apparently.
That image is from the December, 1991 issue of The GESO Voice, a publication whose later iterations I became intimately familiar with during the 2001-2003 contract fight and the continuing recognition struggles that bookended it. It depicts a march of Yale University graduate employees during a one-day strike on December 4, 1991. (I think this was the first strike by Yale grad students since the 1972 Teaching Assistants Organization grade strike, though I remember reading about some solidarity work by folks during the '84 strike that probably also counts.)
I spent spring break looking through the archives of District 65, an important and powerful NYC union which was, among other things, the precursor to the local that GSOC is now in (it also made several attempts to organize Yale's C&Ts between the late 1960s and 1981, organized New York department store workers in the 1930s, and - and this is why I was looking through the collection - successfully organized Barnard and Columbia clerical and technical employees.) While waiting for the relevant boxes to arrive, i decided to examine two boxes of material from Yale's TA Solidarity and the early days of its successor, the Graduate Employees and Students Organization, both of which were donated to Tamiment by the labor historian Gunther Peck sometime in the last eighteen years. In both collections I found some pretty amazing stuff, and my research is still continuing. In the weeks ahead, I'll try to use this space more frequently to think about what I'm finding and hopefully have some good conversations with readers about what it all means. For now, I need to put the finishing touches on my conference paper for Beneath the University. I'm writing about the role of service work in the political economy and cultural imaginary of university capitalism. I'm having fun, but I'm not sure my intervention's going to be a particularly useful or competent one. I'll soon dfind out, I guess. In the meantime. I'll leave you with this.
edit: should note that the second image, from a later GESO Voice is from the 1992 strike, which was a three-day general strike by graduate students, food service workers, maintenance, custodial, and physical plant workers, and clerical workers and technical workers.
Friday, November 20, 2009
It's been a pretty rough week. I sat through one of the most difficult meetings I've ever been party to. That NYT article I shouldn't talk about here. I have some difficult stuff going on in my family right now. Two nyu undergrad activists were attacked by the cops and arrested the other night at an impromptu solidarity action with the incredible mobilizations across the UC system. One of those arrested was a former student. I hear a certain law student anarchist friend got hit with a police baton in Berkeley. I got stuck in an elevator with about fifteen other people. Actually that was pretty fun. Etc.
I feel a bit better today, excited about organizing possibilities albeit mostly ones outside of my current comfort zone, and excited about my research and its political possibilities and talking a bit about them hopefully at the Minnesota conference in April. I'm excited about the movements folks are building, the actions folks are taking in CA even if the regents just voted to up tuition by 32% in the next two years, which is obscene even by NYU standards, which are themselves obscene.
What is taking place there, and in Bern, and in Austria, is incredible despite the police repression and the neoliberal state's unflinching acceleration of its privatization/privation engine. Another university isn't just possible, it's being made on the streets and in the occupied spaces of these movements every day.
But what about those whom the university's discursive practices and regimes of looking cast to its "margins?" Specifically I am thinking - a more urgent question for the elite private universities, perhaps, than those which can still claim to belong to the public in however extraordinarily attenuated a manner and however attenuated and circumscribed a "public" - and when we say public we are never talking about the commons - about the service labor that makes possible the acts more traditionally associated with the "work of the university," the clerical and technical, service, maintenance, culinary and caring labor that supports the teaching, research, study and policing, the administration and investment and gentrification and enclosure, all the many things that universities do. In california the UPTE and the UAW are on strike too, and some of the occupations are directly challenging worker firings, I know, but I worry about the extent to which student movement rhetorics marginalize and exclude such workers as subjects of the university. But maybe too much time in grad school has led me to privilege word over deed, when what we should be paying attention to is not rhetoric but tactics and strategy and action, at the very least what's said in organizing conversations and in strategy meetings rather than in communiques and newspaper articles? In New York, though, such concerns seem entirely absent from what some anarchists are doing. Which is ok, I support them anyway, even as I wanna engage them critically, as others have done and continue to do, on their racial politics and anarchohipster exclusions and ennui and hypermasculinism. Because I believe an organizing conversation can be as transformative and perhaps even moreso as/than a building occupation (and i am all about building occupations) and i believe a wider understanding of what the university is, who is the university, and what the university does, makes for a more radical set of questions and goals than those currently being put forward in some circles. That's the kernel of the paper i want to give in MN, I think.
Anyway, as I get deeper into my research, I'll try to blog here more regularly. I missed the GEO Strike entirely, and I'm not really providing the coverage of the UC struggles the title of this blog suggests I should be. But i was about to quit blogging altogether before Eli suggested the group blogging experiment, and I think i still have blogging fatigue from four years ago, and I'm going to try to make this a useful space for me and for folks who are still reading this thing anyway.
OFFICIAL PRESS RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: FOR THE FIRST TIME, MAJOR STUDENT UNION AT UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS OVERWHELMINGLY VOTES TO AUTHORIZE A STRIKE GRADUATE EMPLOYEES’ ORGANIZATION REPRESENTS ONE OF LARGEST LOCAL HIGHER EDUCATION BARGAINING UNITS IN THE UNITED STATES
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, ILLINOIS (November 7): On Monday, November 9th, the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) will hold a press conference at 1:00 pm at 1001 S. Wright Street in Champaign, IL to announce the results of its strike authorization vote.
Over the course of a three day vote, an overwhelming 92% of participating GEO members chose to authorize a strike against the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. With the vote, GEO members have given the strike committee of the GEO a clear mandate to call a strike at any time. The Graduate Employee’s Organization, American Federation of Teachers/Illinois Federation of Teachers Local 6300, AFL-CIO, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a labor union representing all teaching and graduate assistants (TAs and GAs) on the UIUC campus. With over 2600 GEO members, and over 2600 graduate employees represented in the bargaining unit, the GEO is one of the largest higher education union locals in the United States.
The GEO has been negotiating with UIUC administrators for over six months. The GEO seeks a contract that will set the minimum salary for a 50% nine month appointment at the University’s estimate of a living wage for a graduate student in Urbana-Champaign and protect tuition waivers for TAs and GAs. While the GEO presented the administration with a full contract proposal on the first day of negotiations, the UIUC administration declined to offer a counterproposal until August 11th, just four days before the GEO’s previous contract expired. The UIUC administration’s initial contract proposal sought to freeze GEO wages for three years, reserve the right to furlough and layoff graduate employees in good standing, and to count “in-kind” compensation such as housing or meal vouchers toward the minimum salary mandated in the contract.
The GEO understands that the state of Illinois is in dire economic straits, but as University administrators pointed out in their FY 2010 budget request, this is the result of long standing deficiencies in state level budget prioritization and not a sudden result of the recent national recession. Instead of championing the university’s historic land grant mission, UIUC administrators have embraced the national tendency toward the corporatization of the public higher education system. Their consequent failure to secure adequate state funding leaves the social science, humanities, and fine arts especially vulnerable. Worse, it jeopardizes access to higher education for many who have the capacity and desire, but not the financial resources to attend the University. If increased state funding is also necessary to providing at least a living wage for all campus employees, then the GEO expects the UIUC administration to forcefully make that case to the Higher Education Appropriations Committee, other state legislators, and the Governor.
Instead of advocating on the behalf of students and workers, administrators were granting costly favors to state politicians. The former Chancellor diverted $450,000 of discretionary funds to provide jobs and scholarships for politically well-connected but undeserving applicants. Another $400,000 went to the attorneys who represented the University before the Governor’s investigative committee, and another $550,000 to new faculty appointments for the former President and Chancellor. In this context, the GEO finds it hard to trust the UIUC administration when it argues that there is not enough money to provide a living wage. From the GEO’s perspective, it appears that budget priorities are simply out of place. When campus revenues rose by 7% in FY 2009, only 0.8% ($2.7 million) went to undergraduate instruction. Meanwhile, the Chief Information Officer’s budget rose by 10.9 percent ($1.6 million), and the Division of Intercollegiate Athletics budget increased 6.2 percent ($4.1 million).
GEO bargaining unit members teach 23.1% of all undergraduate course hours at UIUC, and perform comparably to faculty in official student evaluations of instructor performance as measured by the University of Illinois’ Center for Teaching Excellence. Yet our salaries draw only 6.5% of state funding, including salaries for GAs and Research Assistants, who don’t teach. By contrast, faculty salaries draw over 55% of the University budget. Graduate employee labor is vital to the fiscally efficient provision of the University’s core service, academic instruction. Should graduate employee salaries be set to a living wage, the University would still have a large pool of inexpensive and high quality instructional and administrative labor.
GEO members have been working hard to avoid a strike. Hundreds of GEO members have participated in three major rallies, and GEO members have also lobbied the Illinois House of Representatives Higher Education Appropriations Committee, spoken with state legislators from Champaign, actively informed campus community members about the issues, and maintained a constant presence in Urbana-Champaign print, radio and television media. The Illinois Student Senate has passed two resolutions in support of the GEO and the decision to authorize a strike, and GEO supporters in the faculty senate are working to pass a similar resolution. GEO members and allies will hold a rally at the University of Illinois Board of Trustees Meeting in Springfield, IL on November 12.
As with any labor negotiation, however, the most effective pressure has been the threat of a strike. Only after GEO members at a General Membership Meeting voted unanimously to file an “intent to strike” notice did the University administration offer their first compromise proposals. Accordingly, the Coordinating Committee and Steward’s Council of the GEO voted unanimously to hold a strike authorization vote from November 4-6. By voting to authorize a strike, GEO members have taken a vital step in holding the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign administration accountable to its stated commitment to excellence in research and undergraduate education. FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT: Peter Campbell, GEO Communications Officer, odell.campbell@gmail.com, 253-222-5861, or the GEO office at geo@uigeo.org, 217-344-8283, 1001 S. Wright Street, Champaign, IL, 61820. Information about the GEO can also be found on our website at www.uigeo.org. ###
Sunday, November 1, 2009
TAs at McMaster University have called a strike for 8 am monday. Info and updates here.
