Some belated thoughts on Wonder Woman, which we saw before the boycott conversation had really materialized, with a few spoilers:

1. It's certainly better than the other three DC films of this cycle.  This isn't saying much.  Man of Steel was a neo-Malthusian, protofascist mess, Batman v. Superman was this, but exponentially moreso and without much of the para-feminist take on The Any Adams Lois Lane which made the first film occasionally watchable.  Suicide Squad is just bad.  Wonder Woman is often a more light and comedic film, sometimes in ways that work, sometimes in ways that do not work, but it's certainly easier to watch because of this, less ponderous and pretentious.

2.  It deliberately parallels the first Captain America film, but substitutes the first world War for the second (despite the fact that, like Captain America, the character's origins are in WWII -- Wonder Woman first appeared in 1941, about 6 months after Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America debuted by punching Hitler on the cover of a comic that was released 9 months prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

3. Screenwriter Allan Heinberg's WWIIification of The Great War is problematic.  As untenable as the exceptionalist narratives around the Second World War may be, the centrality of Empire to both sides in the First World War receives no mention here.  There is a mild indictment of US colonial genocide from a native character named Chief, but otherwise the differences between the war that Wilfred Owen condemned and the one that an entire apparatus of bad historians and hacky journalists celebrate still is entirely collapsed.

4. One could argue that plot developments late in the film render an implicit critique of England's involvement in the war, but this is not explored and largely gives way instead to a bunch of special effects and explosions.  A scene is set in the Ottoman Empire with no awareness of what that might mean for the narrative.

5.  Spoilers in this one:  The most common criticism of Man of Steel involved Superman's decision to murder General Zod at the film's climax.  A similar event occurs in Wonder Woman.  There is far less ambivalence on the part of the titular character.  Indeed, she announces her intentions at multiple points throughout the film.  Yet there has been little discussion of this in the reviews of the film that I have read or the podcast discussions that have popped up in my feed.  I find that curious.  Is this because Wonder Woman is, here and elsewhere, a more martial character, more of a "warrior" than Superman, whose immigrant narrative is much more deeply linked to the ideological project of American exceptionalism?  The film wants to also present Wonder Woman as dedicated to peace, to ending war.  It's a contradiction which calls to mind the entire archive of ideological underpinnings for contemporary humanitarian imperialisms.

6. Gadot's casting illuminates the film's own Zionism.  Her performance is embedded in the logics of IDF militarist/imperialist feminisms, of exceptionalist representations of Israeli womanhood, such that Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen adopt Israeli accents.  The film imagines Themiscyra as Israel.  In this sense I don't think the criticisms of Gadot's support for genocidal IDF attacks on Palestinian civilians can be separated from the film itself.

I think that's all I have for now, but I may add more if it pops into my head.

Broken window theory: Corey Menafee and the history of university service labor

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

ZACHSW@GMAIL.COM

In November, 1969, a 30-year old black dining hall waitress at Yale University named Colia Williams threw a glass of water at a white student dining hall manager who'd harassed her continuously over the few short weeks that she'd worked in the university's dining halls.  Williams was promptly fired for her insubordination. As a new hire, she had not yet completed the 90-day probationary period that would qualify her for membership in Local 35 of the Federation of University Employees, Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union and thus secure her access to the union's then-flimsy grievance procedure.  Williams’ act happened to occur during a semester in which several members of Yale Students for a Democratic society had taken jobs in the dining halls, inspired by a broader current of “industrializing” – taking working-class jobs in order to organize mass workplace resistance – across the New Left.  Yale SDS in particular was part of the somewhat notorious Progressive Labor faction, which continued to claim the organization’s name following the split at the 1969 national convention (which led to the creation of the Weather Underground.)  The presence of these student radicals in the dining halls made workplace struggles that students might otherwise have ignored objects of widespread concern and political urgency.  Following Williams’ firing, a hundred students, members of Yale Students for a Democratic Society as well as the Black Student Alliance at Yale, marched into the university's human resources office in the basement of Wright Hall to demand the university reinstate her.  The students occupied the office and took several administrators hostage for a few hours.  With the conclusion of the occupation, 47 students were immediately suspended, though all were eventually reinstated.  (One alumnus, who’d taken a job as a university custodial worker, was eventually fired for his role in the occupation.) The occupation was successful - Williams won her job back – or rather, Yale administrators discovered, they claimed, that they had never actually fired her.  But, a month after returning to work, Williams had quit. Subjected to continued harassment from white supervisors due to her newfound notoriety, Williams explained that working at Yale was "agony."

Williams' action, and the actions of her supporters, directly implicated the racist and sexist conditions of service work at Yale in the late 1960s.  Over the last few weeks, a contemporary parallel has emerged in Corey Menafee's decision to destroy with the butt of his broomstick a stained glass pane depicting two enslaved people of African descent picking cotton in the dining hall of Yale's Calhoun College, where Menafee worked as a General Service Assistant.  Although Menafee broke the window this past June, his action has only become public knowledge in the past week and a half thanks to reporting by the New Haven Independent.  Like Colia Williams' defiant glass-throwing, Corey Menafee's window-breaking evokes a long, submerged history of property destruction and direct action by Yale employees.  Much of this activity occurred throughout the long, hard decade of labor struggles between the calamitous defeat of the workers in a truncated 1968 strike, when student scab labor blunted the strike's impact and a weak settlement prompted rank and file rebellion at the contract ratification vote and subsequent threats of wildcat strikes, and the 13-week long walkout in 1977, still the longest at a university with a history of long strikes.  During the 1971 strike workers slashed the wiring and tires of university vehicles.  They and their supporters among a now-radicalized student left also flooded dining halls and blockaded the university' power plants to stop oil deliveries.  (In a speech on campus during one of two strikes in 2003, then-presidential candidate Howard Dean recalled his participation in the blockade.)  In 1977, when a belligerent, right-wing anti-union white student provocateur tried to shove his way through a picket line of striking black blue-collar workers, a striker punched him in the face.  The student required 23 stitches.  (Even senior university administrators agreed that the student was “out to antagoniz[e] or incite violence.”  During the same strike, an unknown party firebombed a university safety office adjacent to one of the power plants, throwing a pair of burning whiskey bottles through a window. Though those responsible for the firebombing were never found, the incident was reported as if it were related to the strike, an act of sabotage by rogue workers or their supporters. 

Most of these actions were directly related to labor struggles, perhaps more so than they directly referenced the university's long history of profiting from and glorifying slavery and the trade in enslaved Africans and their descendents.  Yet these were hardly ever discreet, separate phenomena.  Yale’s labor struggles and battles over its legacy of slavery and genocide have often intersected.  It was three graduate student union activists, Antony Dugdale, J.J. Fueser, and J. Celso de Castro Alves, who wrote the 2001 report “Yale, Slavery, and Abolition,” tracing the university’s connections to slavery in the midst of its hagiographic tercentennial celebration. There's often been an explicitly Antiracist character to labor struggles at Yale, as true of when the vast majority of the university' black workforce refused to work on the day following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (The university had made work optional in the hopes of avoiding disruptions) as when thousands of striking workers and members of the New Haven community demanded equitable hiring of Latino workers during a weeklong strike in March 2003, or when the graduate employee union waged a campaign against the university’s investments in the Corrections Corporation of America which culminated with the university’s hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management LLC, divesting from CCA when Yale’s Advisory Committee on Investor Responsibility refused to do so. 

Make no mistake; Yale’s involvement with slavery far exceeds its continued honoring of John C. Calhoun, the pro-slavery ideologue, senator, and statesman.  As Dugdale, Feuser, and Castro Alves noted, the labor of the slaves who worked George Berkeley’s Rhode Island plantation provided the capital for Yale’s first scholarships.  The slave-trader Phillip Livingston financed the university’s first endowed professorship.  (Yale, in turn, trained Livingston’s children in the management of his transoceanic enterprise.)  The profits from slave labor funded the university’s library and laid the groundwork for its endowment, which now exceeds $25 billion.  Besides its close ties to slave-trade merchant capitalists, and the West Indies plantocrats in particular, Yale was itself a site of slave labor.  “Slaveholding,” notes the historian Craig Steven Wilder in Ebony and Ivy, his 2013 history of US universities’ relationships with colonial genocide and racial slavery, “was common among Yale’s early faculty and governors.”  

But if Yale’s legacy of slavery stretched back to its earliest days, the slave pastoral stained glass window Menafee broke is of a much more recent vintage.  Like the residential college in which it was until recently installed, it was constructed slightly more than eighty years ago, in the early 1930s.  Not only has Yale been slow to reckon with its past; well into the twentieth century, it was actively affirming the central role slave capitalism played in its origins and development.  Until 2007 the room where The Yale Corporation (the university’s board of trustees) meets prominently featured a painting of Elihu Yale, the notoriously abusive official of the East India Company whose name the university has borne since 1718 and who may have himself profited from the sale of slaves.  The painting depicts Yale with a dark-skinned child at his feet.  Around the child’s neck, an iron collar is clearly visible. 

Yale University has mostly avoided substantive discussion of its history, choosing instead to emphasize conversions to abolitionism or early African-American graduates.  But one is constantly reminded.  In some ways, conditions for dining hall workers are very different now than they were when Williams worked at Yale.  The three long strikes of the 1970s, the ten-week long strike in 1984, the two strikes in 1996, and the landmark settlement of the second strike of 2003 increased pay substantially, slowed the administration’s attempt to undermine the union by subcontracting and casualizing the labor force, ended the practice of routinely laying off hundreds of workers each summer, and won unparalleled job security language which prevents layoffs during the duration of the contract cycle.  But, in other respects, things haven’t changed that much.  Many food service and custodial workers still work 2 or 3 jobs to stay afloat.  Several stories about Menafee include the detail that he can’t afford a cellular phone.  Yale remains an institution soaked in and celebratory of a long history of white supremacy.  It is impossible to walk through, or by, the university’s many service entrances and not understand this, to not sense how interlinked white supremacy is with the everyday experience of work and/or study.  Indeed, Menafee's action might itself serve as a reminder of the continuities between racialized service work and slavery, at a university that slavery funded, a university where slaves labored, in a city profoundly shaped by the history of slavery and abolition as by the confluence of deindustrialization and capital flight, university tax exemption, real-estate speculation, and expansion, and a mode of racial capitalism which conjoined them through the labor of a predominantly African American workforce of food service and custodial workers whose history of struggle produced Yale's unprecedented history of strikes - as many as twenty between the early 1940s and 2005, depending on what and how one goes about counting.

Corey Menafee's act of refusal, the refusal to continue working under the symbols of Yale's history of chattel slavery and colonial genocide, punctures the hypocrisy which has suffused so much of Yale's recent hand-wringing over its white supremacist past and present, a hypocrisy which led it to try to fold Menafee's broken window into an ongoing "art survey" launched in response to student discontent over the decision to keep John C. Calhoun's name on one of its residential colleges.  Perhaps it also kept the matter quiet to discourage other such acts against other symbols of Yale’s racism and imperialism, of which many remain.  The tinted glass which quickly replaced the smashed panel could just as easily be read as a small form of counterinsurgency, rendering the university’s interior once more opaque to the New Haveners whose congress along Elm Street, the major thoroughfare adjacent to Calhoun College, has been so heavily monitored by the university’s police department, and projecting a pristine, undamaged facade to the world.

Menafee's act further makes transparent three fallacies: that recent campus protest over cultures of racism and white supremacy on US campuses speak more to the coddled nature of millienial students than the actual political economy of US racial capitalism, that the continued presence of such celebrations of the university’s racism is permitted only for educational purposes, and, above all, that service workers are not themselves implicated by and participants in those debates and struggles.  Maybe nowhere more than in their role as employers of racialized service work do US universities suture old and new forms of white supremacist racial capitalism.  Through studying the history of that labor and those who have performed it, we can gain better insight into how universities have continued to occupy slavery's afterlives.  Standing in solidarity with Corey Menafee and with those who have come before him requires both an unflinching and rigorous critique of this relationship between university service labor and the American college's debt to the enslavement of and trade in people of African descent, and a collective commitment towards its overturning.

Hillary Rodham, Bill Clinton, and the 1971 Yale Strike

Excerpted from Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, Beneath the University: Service Workers and the University-Hospital City.  unpublished phd dissertation, New York University 2015.  pp. 424-425

Yale Law School students Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton were both members, alongside future Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal and Bill Clinton’s eventual Secretary of the U.S. Department of Labor Robert Reich, of the Yale Law School Students Committee for Local 35, and signatories, during the week before the strike, to a statement asserting “WE BELIEVE THE UNION DESERVES THE SUPPORT OF YALE STUDENTS AND FACULTY.”[1]  Bill Clinton was even, John Wilhelm would note decades later in his eulogy for Vincent Sirabella, the Voter Registration Chairman of the Sirabella for Mayor Campaign.”  And yet, on her first date with classmate Clinton, Rodham would later recall:

We both had wanted to see a Mark Rothko exhibit at the Yale Art Gallery but, because of a labor dispute, some of the university's buildings, including the museum, were closed.  As Bill and I walked by, he decided he could get us in if we offered to pick up the litter that had accumulated in the gallery's courtyard.  Watching him talk our way in was the first time I saw his persuasiveness in action.  We had the entire museum to ourselves.  We wandered through the galleries talking about Rothko and twentieth-century art.  I admit to being surprised at his interest in and knowledge of subjects that seemed, at first, unusual for a Viking from Arkansas.  We ended up in the museum's courtyard, where I sat in the large lap of Henry Moore's sculpture Drape Seated Woman While we talked until dark.^[2]

The relationship between Rodham and Clinton, two instrumental figures in the decoupling of the Democratic Party from the priorities of the mainstream labor movement, thus began with the crossing of a picket line.  [3]  When Rodham and Clinton picked up the garbage strewn about the art gallery courtyard, (if, indeed, they ever did so,) they were doing exactly what everyone from Vincent Sirabella to the Black Student Alliance at Yale had asked students not to do – they were performing –or at the very least offering to perform -- the work that members of Local 35’s Grounds Maintenance division, had refused.  Rodham and Clinton were offering themselves as replacement labor, blunting, if only temporarily, the effects of the strike on the university.  The two law students then bartered their litter pickup, which was, in essence, scab labor, (or maybe just the promise thereof) into access to a struck buildings.  The art gallery and other nonessential buildings were closed because the university did not have enough managers to keep them open during the strike.  They were closed because the people who usually cleaned and repaired them, whose labor helped make the university’s display of art possible, had been forced to absent themselves by the necessity which fueled the ongoing strike.  For Rodham and Clinton, the workers concerns were at best secondary to the romance of the empty museum, the sophistication and transgressive pleasure offered not only by the modernist art, but also by the act of violating the strike.  Hillary Rodham Clinton offers this anecdote in her 2003 memoir Living History not in her discussion of how her time in New Haven affected her understanding of urban politics and life, but rather in a distinct chapter devoted entirely to the origins of her relationship with the “Viking from Arkansas.”  The “labor dispute,” not even named here as a strike, is not only abstracted from the very spaces the future Clintons inhabit in this narrative, it is made incidental to them, an obstacle which has to be sidestepped in order for the art to be viewed and the date to acquire its romantic ambiance.

---

[1] Law School Students Committee for Local 35, “Could YOU Raise a Family on $88 a Week?”, leaflet, Yale University Manuscripts and Archives RU 86 YRG 41 accn1971-A-004 Box 4 Folder 1.  April, 1971.

^[2] Hillary Rodham Clinton, Living History.  New York: Scribner: 2003.  53.  I thank Dan Gilbert for alerting me to this incident.

[3] The campaign, notes Wilhelm, was “not a high point for Vinnie.  It persuaded him that the careers of aggressive labor leaders and politicians were not compatible.”  John W. Wilhelm, “Eulogy for Vincent Sirabella,” 1995.   Reprinted in Frank R. Annunziato et al, Greater New Haven Labor History Association, 1995 Labor History Almanac.  1995. recovered by Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the webpage of the Greater New Haven Labor History Association https://web.archive.org/web/20070313192745/http://www.laborhistory.org/almanac_dedic.html accessed 1/30/2015 

I wrote a bunch of tweets about the the ongoing occupation at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge visitor's center that went semi-viral.

That turned into an 1100-word thinkpiece about settler colonialism, nature preservation, ranching, and primitive accumulation.  Happy new year

10 years

Today is the 10th anniversary of the 2005-2006 GSOC strike's first day. That strike is still the longest in the history of the north american academic labor movement (except for the 1999 student strike at UNAM.)  As any perusal of this blog suggests, the strike was a big part of my life for the better part of seven months.  I joined GSOC just over two months before the strike began, organized in the buildup to it, walked the picket line almost every day, organized throughout the strike, and kept organizing for years after it ended,  In the years after the strike ended, the organizing climate for graduate employees at private universities was a difficult one.  University administrations and the labor movement both rightly saw the NYU strike as a fulcrum.  Ten years ago, John Sexton said that GSOC was a "virus", that it could either die a quick death or a slow death.  Today there is a union contract at NYU.  Organizing drives are once again underway at Cornell and Columbia, with new campaigns at Harvard and the New School, alongside new unions or organizing campaigns at the University of Connecticut and the University of Missouri. A quarter-century into its own struggle, GESO is revitalized and holding enormous and energetic demonstrations.

While in many ways the strike was a defeat for the union, it was a testament to the tenacity and dedication of GSOC's membership and its organizers that the union emerged from the strike battered but also infused with new understandings of what it meant to organize and how to do it. The tragedy of the strike was the failure of solidarity between union members, but the lessons of the strike were altogether different, less about the shamelessness of faculty unionbusting - things the previous decade and a half had long since made clear - than about how to build power, how to talk to each other, how to fight. The failure of the years after the strike was the failure of the international union to sustain organizing which took into account the lessons we learned during the strike, a failure I could get into here in great detail but won't, both because I think those lessons were never entirely forgotten, at least by members, and because I still think that the experience of the strike, and the many sacrifices that strikers made (and I don't include myself in this, because I was on fellowship, and because the worst things that happened to me during the strike were getting yelled out of a bar by another first year in my department and having some people in my department who had returned to work write mean anonymous comments on this blog) played an important, if indirect role in the making the present moment possible. So I think it's good to think, at this juncture, with everything else that is happening today in Columbia, Missouri, in New Haven, in Madison, everywhere else, about what the strike got right and what we got wrong and what that experience might mean for the struggles which are now taking place at NYU and everywhere else.

Edit:  I wrote and edited and posted this several hours before Tim Wolfe announced his resignation.  Five years ago I wrote this post on the meaning of november ninth and november tenth in the history of university labor insurgencies.  It's amazing that this victory by the students at Mizzou falls on the same date that our strike began.  I can only hope that the next few months build on these insurgencies to create new anniversaries for us to celebrate in the years ahead.

2nd edit.  Also, I forgot to mention U Chicago's GSU, who are amazing.  Well, I didn't so much forget as intentionally steer clear of mentioning them because I'm out of the loop and wasn't sure what the status of their campaign is.  Thankfully, they're still going strong, and certainly deserve a great deal of credit for helping the movement to organize grad employees at private universities survive and grow over the last eight (?) years.

I posted this on Facebook this morning.  

"Nine years ago today, GSOC began the longest strike in the history of the US academic labor movement. For seven months, NYU TAs refused to work until union recognition was restored. Nearly two dozen of us were fired and blacklisted, and several never worked at NYU again. The strike taught a lot of us important lessons about the labor movement and the political economy of academic capitalism. It was generative and exhilarating and really difficult, and we went back to work in September 2006 without a contract. Today GSOC is negotiating a second contract with the NYU administration, which is, in itself, a testament to the sacrifices and determination of everyone who walked the picket line, told their faculty to fuck off or get their shit together, and spent the last three months of the strike organizing those who'd returned to work, keeping the union alive. Besides the determination of NYU Grad employees, the strike was a testament to solidarity of the broader contingent academic labor movement. Unions from as far off as Illinois sent organizers to us for weeks at a time. GESO sent three of its best full time lead organizers for as long as a year and a half, as well as a full time researcher and another part-time lead. (Two of GSOC's best organizers returned the favor by moving to New Haven and organizing for Unite Here.) The strike was exhausting and hard, and not being on strike and returning to Sextonian dystopian normalcy the year after that was even harder, but I am still in awe of the bravery and determination of all the people who kept the union alive that year and fought so hard against such a bunch of intractable capitalist shit-asses. Thanks guys."

Yesterday, I wrote about this photograph and the incident which produced it. The first time I wrote about this incident, ten years ago, I was relying on microfilm and the photos were too dark to see anything. Since then, this newspaper has been digitized, so we can all see the look of utter agony and dismay on the face of the wife of the President of the university after students supporting a service worker strike stole/expropriated a bunch of food from a scab-operated dining hall and then dumped it on the front lawn of the president's mansion. There’s something deeply sexist about the way Mrs. Brewster is represented in the photograph, as an object of simultaneous scorn and pity, as a symbol of the putative wrongness (or radicalism) of the students’ act, in the way she is only knowable here through her husband’s name, and in the invisibility of the male administrators who were also trying to pick up the garbage. But the photograph, and Mrs. Brewster’s dismay, also mark the dislocation, the profound disruption of the social order, which accompanies the moment when one has to do that work which others usually perform because those others refuse to do it any longer. In this sense, the photo of Mrs. Brewster thus suggests the reversals and utopic imaginaries which the strike had already enacted and made possible, even as it subjected the workers who waged it to insecurity and want.