AUC Strike ends

Click on the link for the campus paper's report...

short update on the auc strike

The strikers have a blog, on which they have posted a full list of demands, and some amazing photographs.

Update on the AUC strike

Sounds vaguely familiar to those of us who remember the March 2003 Yale Strike.

American University in Cairo, on strike.

Custodial workers at American University in Cairo are on strike.  Wages and insurance and other deductions are a major issue - when the company subcontracted to the global food service giant compass, workers had to pay ridiculous percentages of their wages towards "commisions" and insurance.  Now this "proletariat" is still being charges such fees - directly by the university, and workers are demanding to know why.

Here's a petition being circulated via twitter by supporters of the strikers.  It lists the workers' strike committee demands as the following:

1. Receive a gross minimum monthly wage of 1,200 EGP (which means less than 1000EGP net) with equal pay for all workers who hold the same position. 
2. Have Saturday as an official holiday for the AUC workers as it is for all those employed in the maintenance, service departments and the administration. If one is to work on Saturday they shall receive overtime pay for their work. 
3. Receive 200 EGP as meal compensation (or an adequate meal) in addition to the salary. 
4. Receive annual salary raise of no less than 10% on the original wage of each worker. This percentage is subject to be increased by the administration. 
5. Receive Social Insurance coverage that includes all the years of service to the AUC. 

AUC and NYU's new campus in Abu Dhabi are very different institutions in very different places, serving very different groups of people.  AUC is not a branch campus of a U.S. higher ed brand - it is a separate independent institution founded by U.S. missionaries nearly a century ago, although it does host hundreds of U.S. study abroad students every semester, and models itself on north american higher education institutions.  I'd be interested to know if the majority of workers at AUC are Egyptian or, as in NYU's new node in the global newtowrk university, originate elsewhere, especially in south and southeast asia.  But nevertheless, what links this strike to the enduring questions that surround the proliferation of satellite and branch campuses and study abroad programs that lie at the heart of the ongoing NYU controversy is the question of how the workers whose labor makes possible the spread of U.S. higher education institutions and models abroad will be treated, how an increasingly global university system exists in relation to the labor of thousands of blue collar low-wage precarious service workers, and what it does to and with their labor in order to reproduce itself and expand its reach.

According to Amin, Brian MacDougall, AUC vice president for planning and administration, had offered to give workers an additional LE200 per month, but workers rejected the proposal.

“Last month I took home LE400," cleaner Ahmed Omar told Al-Masry Al-Youm. "This isn't enough to pay rent and living expenses."

"They kept promising to raise our salaries, but this never happened," he added.

Nasser Sayed, of the university's housekeeping department, said: “I usually get LE650 per month, but now I take only LE500. I’m married and have two kids and I’m in debt, and have to borrow money from people. When I tell people that I work for AUC, they think I get a good salary, but this isn't true.

The student newspaper, the Caravan, has previously reported on worker deaths during the construction of the university's new campus in one of Cairo's mega-exurbs as well as on the poverty conditions which are forced upon campus janitors.  (In the first article, scroll down from the discussion of the deaths to read another interesting article about janitors' grievances and acts of rebellion against Compass.)

If you want to follow the strike, which is set to continue into next week, one way to do so is by checking the twitter hashtag #AUCworkers, where supporters and activists have been posting pictures, links, and updates about the latest moves by the administration and updating the interwebs on the workers' struggle.

Now back to previously scheduled dissertating...

Apologies for the cryptic nature of the post immediately preceding this one.  As you may have surmised from following the link, the NLRB has remanded our filing from last May back to the regional office, which means we are going to have hearings, and probably, at some point, an election.  So that's interesting.  I'm pretty skeptical of the NLRB election process, but it worked for NYU the last time around, so I'm not ruling anything out.  Of course, back then, the president was a drunkard, now we have an evangellically neoliberal megalomaniac who has publicly vowed to destroy us.  I suspect it will be a much more difficult process to gain recognition a second time around.

Quick thoughts on the decision: who are the "15 people" excluded from the post far-4 restructuring?  We know that the picture the employer presents is wrong on a bunch of levels which I won't get into here because I don't think it's strategic to preview arguments the lawyers might take up later on a random blog that John Beckman might be reading (if you are reading this, please quit, and by quit i mean your job.)  But I have no idea who they're talking about and I have read their initial filing, which, yes, claims that an election to recertify GSOC would interfere with the adjunct unit.  Unbelievable.  Anyway I am wondering if these are the same 15 people who Sexton claimed before the UN were the only people in the world who cared about grad employee labor, or if they're the same 15 people whom Josh Taylor claimed were the only people still on strike in spring '06.  (Our numbers then were, I still believe, significantly higher than that by an order of magnitude at least.)  It must be nice to be so rich you can pull numbers out of your tukhes at random.

Two - in Hayes' dissent, who are these people supposedly excluded under the NYU decision?  Is he talking about the hard science RAs?  As always GSOC UAW has nothing to do with and no control over or culpability in this blog.  More later.

edited to clean up rushed grammar.

NLRB

Here we go.

I was looking through the front material of Historical Materialism 15.1 (2007), at the voluminous list of brilliant scholars and radicals who constitute the journal's advisory board, when I was struck by something.  All of the people listed have a parenthetical location next to their names, e.g., Aijaz Ahmad, (New Dehli), Robert Brenner, (Los Angeles), etc etc etc.  For folks not affiliated with universities, it's the same as those who are - thus (labor notes founder) Kim Moody, (New York) - though last I heard Moody was in the U.K., but the journal is several years old.  There's one exception, a senior scholar in marxist cultural studies and one of my intellectual heroes, who is listed with the designation "(Yale.)"  There are two other instances of this.  Fredric Jameson is listed with "(Duke)", Simon Bromley with "(Open University)".  Bromley's situation is a bit different, since his university is understood to be not fixed to any particular geographical location.  With the other two, though, it's two distinguished Marxist scholars at two very wealthy private universities in two deindustrialized small cities whose economies are now dominated by universities and hospitals.  What does the erasure of New Haven and Durham from Historical Materialism mean?  What does it tell us about the practice and praxis of marxist theory within and without the academy, about the place of the university in radical politics?  As the frontispiece of an issue including Toscano and Vercellone on cognitive capitalism and the general intellect, I think these are actually important questions to take up.  I'd add more, but i have an organizing meeting to run to.

I think, though, that there is a tension here that's a lot like the one I see in this video which is currently making the rounds on the internet among my fellow cognitarians:

specifically I'm interested in the presumed supremacy of mental over manual labor, the differential valuation of cognitive and affective labor explicit in the assumption that there's something horrible and undignified in getting paid less than secretaries and janitors.  It seems to me like what academic workers need to be doing is organizing in solidarity with secretaries and janitors and other campus workers, whether we're fighting the bosses, radically reconstituting the spaces we inhabit, building counterinstitutions, going on strike, or engaging in a wide variety of other kinds of projects, and I think we should be doing all these things at once, combining them and ourselves into new and powerful forms.

Ok, meeting now.