Carl Paladino, Lee Abrams...  What's up with these capitalist plutocrats' apparent compulsion to send pornographic emails to their entire fucking companies?  What kind of arrogant shit do you have to be to casually sexually harass like three hundred people with the click of a button?  What does this say about the role of digital communications technology and the construction of the gendered workspace?

dispatches from the dissertating, II

I'm still trying to get a handle on the complicated dynamics between university administrators, military officers, and union leaders, let alone rank and file workers and armed services members during the University of Minnesota's multiple wartime strikes during the 1940s, the subject of the chapter I'm currently working on, but if you'd care for a glimpse of how awkward and complex these relationships were, here's one example, where military personnel berate university administrators for one aviation instructor's lack of access to the mimeograph machine due to picketing service workers.

The union seems to also have been in direct contact with the armed services leadership personnel, proposing to them how the military might conduct bargaining unit jobs with soldiers as scabs during the strike. This, I don't understand at all.

dispatches from the dissertating.

Yes, this blog still exists.

ar/ has me on the "three pages a day plan", which is more hortatory than prescriptive, or so i fervently hope.  I'm currently sitting in one of the grad employee cubicles in the department of sundry and copious acronyms trying to live up to these expectations with little success today - i've written about a page, but squeezed in some archival research into the origins of BSEU (now SEIU) Local 113's organizing at the U of Minnesota.  In so doing, I came across this article in the January 16, 1931 edition of the Minneapolis Labor Review, which was and remains the organ of the AFL's Central Labor Union (we now call them central labor councils) in the Twin Cities.  It's a craft unionist framing of what folks now call the edu-factory, seven and a half decades before that term came into vogue, having been described elaborated by the eponymous collective and more recently been transmogrified into a book and a most excellent webjournal.  The edufactory - "what was the factory is now the university" - is the articulation of knowledge and labor within the global neoliberal university as the social factory was the articulation of production and consumption, of productive and reproductive labor within and beyond the factory walls during the moment of the crisis of the bretton woods regime, the crisis of state corporatism, the crisis of disciplinary governability.  So what's this paleo-edufactory then, produced by its own moment of capitalist crisis, articulated by a Yale professor half a decade before the first stirrings of local 35 to a Minneapolis audience three years before the Trotskyist teamsters' frontal attack on the Citizens' Alliance's open shop repressive parastate apparatus?  I don't think this is a vestige of the moment Clyde Barrow so ably dissects in Universities and the Capitalist State -- if anything, it speaks more to the kinds of formation Michael Denning describes in The Cultural Front, the "laboring of American culture," the hegemony of a language and consciousness of labor and work among cultural producers and the protocognitarians Henderson describes here.

You'll have to click on the image to see the whole thing, and i apologize for its horizontality.

Minneapolis Labor Review, 1.16.1931

"The emperor has no clothes"

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.

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.

In case you were wondering what it looks like when anarchoinsurrectionists run for student government positions...

From the archives

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.