NYU Roundup

NYU's outsourcing of its cleaning and maintenance workers, it turns out, means that some benefits will be cut, including a reduction in overtime. Some workers are refuisng to sign contracts with the Long Island-based subcontractor.

Kwame Patterson, a spokesman for 32B-J, one of two local unions whose employees have already moved to CBS, said the union hopes NYU reconsiders cutting the benefits.

A document provided to the employees said there would be no changes in pay, seniority and vacation time. The document said job security would increase, noting that if NYU ever downsizes or disposes of a building, employees could move to one of 250 non-NYU buildings CBS maintains.

But employees who have refused to resign with CBS say they worry for their jobs’ security.

“It’s a way for them to legally fire us,” one engineer working in a freshman residence hall said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “NYU really hung us out to dry on this one.”

Meanwhile, Sexton stepped up for his "buddy" Mayor Bloomberg to urge the city council to allow him to run for a third term last week. The blogger at NYULocal suggests reciprocity from the mayor in the university's continuing expansion plans.

NYU outsources its custodial workers to "save costs."

“We found out about this three weeks ago,” an FCM employee at Weinstein residence hall said on the condition of anonymity, since he was not authorized to speak about the situation. “They answered all of our concerns, but it’s not like we had a choice — they told us what’s going to happen, and that was that.”

And the locked out Saigon Grill workers win 4.6 million in back pay and damages.

Bunch of never completed draft posts recently, one a reprise of a long ago reflection on airports as sites of rupture in which a racialized coloniality of power becomes visible, one on the mets, one on the ways liberals and even some on the left have been critiquing the Palinite railing against elites (by poo-pooing class resentment rather than acknowledging it and the genius of the right's political project,) and one on Some Kind of Wonderful as a potential originary moment for hipster metrosexuality. I'm never going to finish them, because none of them were really all that good.

Albuquerque was pretty good. Bought a lot of cheap books. (Newfield and Gordon's edited volume Mapping Multiculturalism and Priscilla Long's 1969 collection on the new left dirt cheap from an awesome used book and record store. And Keywords in American Cultural Studies, Geoff Mann's Our Daily Bread, and Nancy MacLean's The Opening of the American Workplace from the university press displays. I haven't cracked any of them yet, because I'm too busy, but i did read about 150 pages of Alicia Schmidt Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries on various planes and airport stopovers, and it's really great.

quo usque tandem abutere, Zache, patientia nostra

Marc Bousquet has posted video of the interview he did with Andy, Monika, Rana, Steve, and me at last April's Rethinking the University conference in Minneapolis. View it here. Monika has many insightful things to say in the latest installment. I am the fidgety bearded man in the back.

I'm feeling ambivalent yet again about graduate school, about professionalization, about my project, about New York, about the skillsets required to perform the administrative labor of the professoriate, and to play the game of marketing my self and my project as a graduate student, but this will seem like whining to folks not in the academy, and, i am sure, many in it so i will stop there. I believe very much that another university is possible, i'm just not sure i want to stick around and wait for it much longer, and, with teaching, my diss proposal, and my incompletes all weighing on me, i'm not really doing enough to bring it about at the moment. Enough about that.

I'm flying to Aluquerque tomorrow for my first American Studies Association conference. My passport is a mess and i really hope they let me fly on it. Right now i'm sitting here in my apartment preparing to return to planning my lesson for tommorow, wanting to go to sleep, and wanting more to figure out a way to do work that has a very different relationship to institutional logics of exclusion, control, discipline, and privilege. I'd rather be (figuratively) storming woodbridge (not as a return, which is impossible and politically useless, but as a continuing ethic) than sequestering myself in bobst, two floors beneath sexton, revisiting two year old trauma.

Cleaning up my apartment a bit tonight i accidentally ripped my picket sign from the March '03 strike. My superstituos side, the side that had to go to sleep with a stuffed animal into my tweens lest Freddy Krueger murder me in my sleep, feels gnawing anxiety about this. The rest of me feels gnawing anxiety about lots of other things.

My brother is a rock star.

My brother's band, Krallice, just got reviewed in the hipster soaked pages of pitchfork. It's a weird review - usually they don't go this short unless they're panning something, but very favorable, and they even quote Lev saying something silly about Jews listening to satanist neo-nazi norwegian metal bands.

You can view a live performance here and here, but the sound quality is poor, and i encourage folks to go see them live.

Saw this in an email just now, about a strike support rally for Stella d'Oro workers up in Riverdale, (just a few blocks away from my high school.) I'll be in New Mexico next saturday, but for those of you who won't be, why not help support these strikers?

SUPPORT THE STRIKING STELLA D’ORO WORKERS! JOIN US AT THE RALLY ON
OCTOBER 18, 2008 AT 10:00 AM
BROADWAY AND 237TH STREET
#1 train to 238th St. (at Broadway & Van Cortlandt Park South)
MAP http://tinyurl.com/4ehw3v
~~


Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers
International Union Local 50

Historic New York Biscuit Company, Stella D’Oro, Forced on Strike by New Owners, Private Equity Company, Brynwood Partners.

On August 13, 2008, over 135 members of the BCTGM, employed at the historic Stella D’Oro plant in the Bronx, began a job action because of the unreasonable and unethical concessions demanded by the company at the bargaining table. Negotiators for Stella D’Oro, now owned by an out-of-state private equity firm, want to:

~ Eliminate holidays, vacation and sick pay,
~ Slash wages,
~ Impose crushing healthcare premiums, and
~ Do away with Saturday premiums.

BCTGM Local 50 has represented the workers at the Bronx facility since the early 1960’s, and has helped build Stella D’Oro into an American icon. Now an investment company with no ties to New York want to gut the Company and profit from it.
PLEASE HELP STOP ANOTHER NEW YORK INSTITUTION FROM BEING SWEPT ASIDE BY GREEDY CORPORATE INTERESTS! SUPPORT THE STRIKING STELLA D’ORO WORKERS! JOIN US AT THE
RALLY ON OCTOBER 18, 2008 AT 10:AM
BROADWAY AND 237TH STREET __._,_.___

"financial aid" is just work they don't acknowledge

"financial aid" is an interesting term. On an undergraduate level, it often conceals a massive labor system of debt and exploitation - see the fourth chapter of Marc Bousquet's How The University Works, online here. (Doesn't mean we shouldn't absolutely be organizing for it, but we have to do so critically, understanding the fundamental inequalities it doesn't resolve.) At NYU in recent years, the term has also come to stand in and ideologically erase and deny the labor of contingent teachers and researchers, as NYU reorganizes its job structures in anticipation of the possibility of a new NLRB and the Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act.

No longer are we workers, now we are not even "graduate students who teach," but instead "students who recieve financial aid," not workers, but instead the overprivileged welfare queens of the academy, lucky to be here, lucky to be afforded the privilege of doing the "non-work" we are permitted to do.

This strategy on the part of the administration has material effects. This semester the administration has merged fellowship stipend checks and paychecks into the same system. For some reason this led them to put me on a direct deposit program i never authorized, and my last paycheck went to a bank account i don't have. What this ultimately means is that I haven't been paid for a month.

Apparently, we need a union.