I strongly disagree with the way David Schraub described the York TA strike in his post on Alas. Given that the strike was only incidental to his point, I thought it would be much better to talk about the strike here.
I had been following this strike over at Monuments are for Pigeons for quite some time. Here’s what he said relatively early on:
Being on strike has also revived the socialist whipping boy: consciousness is contradictory. I was expecting angry students who feel they’re being ripped off, since they’re not going to class. There are some of those. It’s unfortunate: undergraduates already feel like cogs in a machine, and forcing the people who do 50% of the teaching to live below the poverty line isn’t going to help. If we get a good settlement, we’re happy and secure, and we teach better. But I understand why, if you’re paying close to $6000 a year for tuition, you feel like you’re buying a degree, rather than participating in a collective learning process, in which the workers who teach you deserve a decent standard of living.
However, I wasn’t expecting fellow grad students, walking the line with me, to believe that we’re not workers. According to some of them, our massive debt & below-poverty-line wages are a sacrifice for future jobs. I call it the ‘guild mentality’: just like an apprentice at a medieval guild, you think you’re getting training for future earnings.
The TAs were on strike with a university who refused to negotiate with them. The strike ended after three months because the government ordered the workers back to work. To me, that’s not a situation you don’t take a position on. As Howard Zinn said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train. If you’re not supporting the TAs you’re supporting the university (and in fact I think David Schraub did make it clear that he was on the side of the university with the way he worded his description of the strike). Anyway I’m a unionist, and I believe that one of the most fundamental part of any politics worth a damn is supporting strikes. So I didn’t want to let what David Schraub said pass uncommented on.
“I know nothing about the specifics of the labor dispute, and thus take no position as to what position on the matter is correct.”
I reiterate the claim, but it doesn’t matter. The sole purpose of my post was to say that, regardless of your position on the strike, chasing down a group of Jews who support ending it, barricading them in an office and screaming “Die Jew bitch die” until they’re forced to leave under armed guard is intolerable behavior. Do you disagree?
According to some of them, our massive debt & below-poverty-line wages are a sacrifice for future jobs. I call it the ‘guild mentality’: just like an apprentice at a medieval guild, you think you’re getting training for future earnings.
Or like the modern guild of medicine, in which residents at hospitals work the kind of hours that would be prohibited if they were in a factory, and are all paid a set wage (no competition among employers) that per hour is less than the minimum wage in some states, because the residents are getting an education in the process. And are carrying some pretty massive debt. Are universities colluding on their offers to PhD applicants to ensure that there’s no real competition in wages and working conditions?
Anyway I’m a unionist, and I believe that one of the most fundamental part of any politics worth a damn is supporting strikes.
What do you consider “politics worth a damn”? Politics where you have to respect your opponents as reasonable people with a reasonable disagreement? I tend to support TA strikes because teaching assistants — or indeed any non-tenured faculty at a North American university — are so lacking in power that striking is their only way to obtain a decent wage or benefits. However, I am much less sympathetic to strikes by long-unionized workers who are paid wages and benefits way above market rates. And I consider myself to be an economic moderate — I’m sure there are people even further to the right on this issue whose politics are still “worth a damn” in the sense that they’re worthy of debate rather than categorical dismissal. (Contrast with, say, people whose political positions are animated by animus.)
“If you’re not supporting the TAs you’re supporting the university” ?
I call BS.
I support neither side and think the whole dispute accomplished nothing but hurting the students, who will now have a month less in the summer to make the $6000 to be able to afford tuition next year.
Someone should tell the other grad students that the guild model only works if, y’know, there’s room in the guild for most or all of the apprentices. Otherwise it’s just a shell game. And with universities taking on lots more grad students than there are real academic jobs (and shoving post-grads into “adjunct” and “soft-money” positions that depress the compensation of tenure-track academics as well), it sure looks like a shell game.
The fact that guilds generally have bad effects because you get to seek monopoly rents once you’re in is just gravy.
David, I think she’s referring to your line about the strike having “crippled the university for months.” As a formerly exploited TA (in my first year of grad school, I made $4,000 after tuition was deducted) and a currently exploited adjunct, that rubbed me the wrong way. TAs work with a heavy load of privilege, denial, and the guild mentality mentioned above, so it takes a lot to push them to a strike.
I think the overall situation – TAs whom I would normally side with in a second turning into snarling maniacs the minute there are some Jews to hate on – paints a depressingly complete portrait of kyriarchy mentality.
I understand how it could have been taken that way, although the goal of a strike is to “cripple” the target to force it to the negotiating table. I very specifically don’t want to take a stance on the strike, because while in general my sympathies lean pro-labor, I don’t like taking positions on events where I know very little of the relevant facts.
But I found it very distressing that Maia’s reaction to a post in which a given group of people (in this case, pro-strike activists) (a) resorted to mob violence, (b) specifically targeted Jewish students, (c) utilized anti-Semitic slurs, and (d) changed the subject, unprompted, to criticism of Israel, was “you’re not showing enough support for the strikers.” Given the event which gave us our “hook” to the topic, I think you kinda need to segue to that, no?
I don’t think the action of this mob requires one to change their opinion on the strike, but I think if you’re writing in response to a post in which your “side” just besieged a group of people in their office, screaming slurs and calling for their death, you do have to acknowledge that happened in some way. I don’t think it goes without saying — the tenor of this post was that the mob violence here is relatively trivial and unimportant compared to the overriding necessity of supporting the strikers, and that mentality is distressing to me.
I don’t think it’s Maia’s whole reaction to the post. I think it’s her reaction to a small part of it, which she knew was a derail, which is why she brought the conversation *into another topic* instead of putting it in your thread. This seems reasonable to me.
I don’t agree with Maia that one can’t be neutral on a topic about which one knows nothing — but I do agree with Julie that the phrase “crippling the university” rubbed me the wrong way, although I appreciate your explanation for why you used it.
Oddly, as an exploited TA, I didn’t feel exploited. I was terribly grateful not to be going into debt for my tuition and to have some money left over. I’m from a background where my parents were able and willing to help me with my living expenses, though, and I knew my happiness over having my tuition paid for, even though I didn’t otherwise make a living wage, was from privilege. So I would have supported other TAs if they decided to strike.
I do prefer it that Maia created another post, but I think given the context a more explicit segue (“I wanted to add a brief quibble with David’s post on the events at York University, specifically, how I think he characterized the strike in question. I want to emphasize that this act of anti-Semitic mob violence is inexcusable, and I stridently condemn it — it is wholly inconsistent with the progressive ethos that makes me support the strikers in the first place. But the actions of these persons shouldn’t obscure the fundamental issues of the York University strike ….”) is a reasonable request.
My girlfriend is always talking to me about proper norms of discussion (one of the many areas she’s far more knowledgeable about than I am). I have a habit of making transitions rather abruptly, which comes off as “yeah yeah, but here’s what I want to say”. It’s not intentional, but it still can be patronizing. The better thing to do it, she says, is to affirm, segue, and then transition (“I think that’s a really important point. But I also think it raises this other question/we need to explore this assumption/part of what you said seemed problematic…” etc.). That way, it doesn’t feel like you’re getting brushed aside.
“If you’re not supporting the TAs you’re supporting the university”
“You’re either with us or you’re against us.”
The university’s operations have literally been crippled for months because of the strike. From what I understand, their semester is going to run at least a month into the summer, which students were definitely not planning on or prepared for. Student applications to the university are down a statistically significant amount. Can you argue that the university was functioning optimally during the strike, and that the repercussions of the strike will not follow it into later operations?
That is a point of a strike as far as I can tell. It’s a last ditch effort to point out the importance of the workers. You cannot run the university without us, so recognize us and negotiate with us. You yourself recognize that TAs have a lot of work to do; if that work isn’t being done, wouldn’t that be a problem for the university? TAs do a whole hell of a lot for a university. That’s why it was crippled.
I’m not sure the point that the university has been crippled can be used in support of or against the notion of the strike. It just is. I’m not sure that the government ordering the union back to work made a whole lot of sense, as a crippled university does not have the same consequences as, say, crippled transportation or crippled medicine. There’s a lot to discuss regarding this strike.
—
And then I just have to get back to the point of the previous piece. Saying the accused statements in that piece, and generally verbally and physically threatening people is not OK. It doesn’t matter if the event started because of a strike or because of other previous issues between two groups on campus. Nothing makes it right. I’ve been seeing a lot of people trying to justify the event on other sites, and it’s been hard to read.
So, thank you, Maia, for creating a separate thread to discuss the York strike, so we can better separate the two issues and discussions. :)
David Schraub – this was not my reaction to your post, this was, as I said, my reaction to the way you talked about the strike. I object to the fact that you are ignoring the topic of my thread, even though I respected the topic of yours.
I do not see the events you talk about in your post as being by people on ‘my side’. It was actions taken by a group of people to support a group of people who supposedly supported the strike (but not int he way that I’d expect them to support the strike according to the post I link to further down). You didn’t need to talk about the strike at all, but you did, and so I’m responding to that.
It wasn’t just the way you described the strike (and I agree with Plaid that strikes that stopping businesses from functioning is the raison detre of strikes. Although I wouldn’t use ‘crippled’ as a metaphor), it was the combination of the description and your supposed neutrality.
PG – No – I don’t think politics worth a damn involves respecting your opponents as people you have a reasonable disagereement (if you want to sure, but it’s not a priority for my politics). Politics which is worth a damn for me, is about solidarity.
Julie – I’ve done some reading around the situation, and I don’t think there’s any suggestion that it was the strikers who were the majority, or even necessarily part of this action. In fact this post seems to cast doubt on the level of the support the student government even gave to the strike (which I disapprove of – the students should ahve given their unconditional support to the workers).
Mandolin – I think there’s a huge difference between ignorance and neutrality. It’s one thing to say “I don’t know anything about the strike so I can’t comment” (although I wouldn’t). And “I don’t know anything about the strike so I’ll remain neutral. Neutrality is a position (and often a disingenuous one)
I know my position on strikes isn’t held by many Alas readers. One of my very first posts on my blog was despairing about the way American feminist blogs were talking about Transit Strikes
I don’t understand people who consider themselves progressives and don’t support workers self-determination in their struggle. My question is what do people need to know about a strike? What is stopping them from supporting it, because it’s a strike?
My positions on strikes is that I support them unconditionally unless there’s a really, really good reason not to (for example, although the recent strikes wildcat oil refinery strikes in Britain had a racist slogan, that no radical could ever support, there was also a legitimate grievance. If i’d lived in Britain I would have supported those strikes but opposed the racist slogans. I was going to write a post on it, but I ran out of time).
idyllcmollusk – in union circles it’s usually “Which side are you on?”
Students preparing to be psychologists are required to work 1000 unpaid hours (unless they get very very lucky and find a place with a monthly stipend of about $200) in order to graduate. They must then compete for a small number of paid year-long internships, and likely settle on another year of unpaid work, in order to get licensed.
In other words, solidarity, TAs!
But could someone expand on the relationship between that issue and the attack on Jewish students? This is by no means the first story of two oppressed groups turning on one another.
Being on the ground when something like that is happening is like being in Trafalgar Square. There are whole huge buildings you don’t know are there.
And here I was telling Purtek about how people in general and Canadians in particular (typical stereotype from us USAians) need to get madder so we can confront some of the institutionalized racism, etc that hides under a blanket of normativity.
Be careful what you wish for was my lesson.
There were 3 units involved in the strike of which TA’s are only one. Each unit has different issues. The other large unit consist of contract faculty. Many classes at York are not taught by tenured professors but by contract faculty who get 8 month contracts and have to re-apply every year. These people have been teaching at York for many years, are supporting families and homes, have no security, a teaching load much heavier than tenured profs at a much lower rate. It’s only because of the union that these folks have any benefits at all. Some years negotiations revolve more around the issues of one unit or another. But it’s all moot because they got legislated back to work.
Vellum – I meant to reply to you specifically and forgot. Of course the strike achieved nothing, the university used the force of the state to order the workers back to work. If the strike had won, then this would have had a series of gains for students. Most obviously, less exploited teachers lead to better teaching. But equally importantly TAs are part of a job market that studetns operate within. If universities can get away with paying peanuts then students will get peanuts, particularly those who become TAs, but also other industries such as the psychologists that DonaQuixote mentioned. That’s why students should have supported the strike, not out of some abstract goodness of their heart, but because it is their own best interests.
Thanks for that info Lillian – I think I’d got the TAs and contract staff confused in my mind, because the New Zealand teaching system is quite different (what was the third unit?)
Also if there’s anyone from Canada on this thread who can explain what kind of industrial relations system allows government’s to legislate workers back to work, I’m really curious.
I wrote a post. You responded with a post of your own, linking to it. That’s a “reaction”. It is a valid reaction, but it is a reaction that I think requires a segue, given the circumstances and how (as we agree) minor a role the question of the strike itself played in the post. Even the simple affirmation, at the start of the post, that you too found what this mob did abhorrent would have sufficed to this end (the sort of statement/position you said you’d make with regards to the UK wildcat strike; supporting the strike, opposing some of the racist ideology carried out on its behalf). Again, I don’t think this is a wildly unreasonable request for a preface.
But you did not say anywhere in my thread or anywhere else that you object to the mob action. I don’t know that you do, and I don’t think it’s something that goes without saying. It worries me, because I really don’t know your opinion on events such as these, and the people or groups which propagate them. I don’t want to believe that you find it anything but repellent, but right now the only information I have is a yawning silence.
No – I don’t think politics worth a damn involves respecting your opponents as people you have a reasonable disagereement (if you want to sure, but it’s not a priority for my politics). Politics which is worth a damn for me, is about solidarity.
Solidarity with your allies doesn’t necessitate disrespect of opponents or regarding them as crazy people with no reasonable position, and such an attitude makes democratic functioning almost impossible. (“My opponents won the last election, but since they’re my opponents they’re unreasonable, so I will disrespect them instead of trying to find ways to compromise until such time as my side can win an election.”) Politics without respect is just a series of coups.
Re the use of the word “crippled” to describe the effects of the strike on the university: The people who pointed out that it is accurate and, in some senses, the point of a strike are technically correct. However, I have yet to see a situation in which someone describes X as “crippling” Y in which the sentence didn’t mean that X was bad for doing something damaging to Y. It may be ablist, but when you say someone or something crippled someone or something else you are implying wrongdoing. It’s a bit like describing a child whose parents are not married as a “bastard” and then claiming that you didn’t mean anything bad by it because technically that is the meaning of the word.
And mobs which threaten and harass people based on their perceived religion or ethnicity are scum.
David Schraub – this post is about the strike. I was clear that I’m writing about the strike. I think a writer’s obligation is to be clear about what they are writing about, not to cover everything . Indeed I think writing about things in passing that one has little knowledge and nothing of substance to say can be deeply problematic (that was what I objected to in your writing about the strike).
I have made a decision in my writing to write about the things I want to write about. Not to do posts or comments out of a sense of obligation and that it was OK to stay silent (one day I may write a post explaining this in full, but in the meantime that’s where I stand).
I didn’t try and turn your discussion into something else. I’d appreciate the same respect.
Dianne – I think you’re right about the implications of the word ‘crippled’. I try to avoid using impairment as a metaphor anyway.
PG – I don’t think you qutie understand what I mean when I say solidarity. It’s not about people I agree with, my politics aren’t divided into those who agree with me and those who disagree. I think solidarity is for those who are taking collective action against oppression. Sometimes when we disagree that solidarity might be critical support. But the solidarity isn’t about our agreement, it’s about their resistance.
Maia,
Thanks for explaining about the meaning of solidarity in your politics — you’re right, I hadn’t realized that you were tying it specifically to resistance to oppression. If your politics is solely about solidarity, it would seem a bit limiting (who is resisting oppression in the fight over TARP?), but it makes more sense in that context.
Re: your comment to David,
You don’t see any disparity between criticizing David for saying this:
“Rather, the situation flowed out of a press conference Hillel students participated in support of impeaching the York University student government for its support of a TA strike which had crippled the university for months. I know nothing about the specifics of the labor dispute, and thus take no position as to what position on the matter is correct.”
And your saying this: “it was OK to stay silent”
So when David explains that the situation flowed out of a press conference that was about a labor dispute unrelated to Israel/Palestine and says he doesn’t know the specifics so he won’t take a position on it, that’s bad.
But when you are commenting about the labor dispute that turned into a mob’s converging on the Jewish students and driving them to hide in the Hillel office until they could be taken out under armed protection, it’s OK to be silent. David mentioned the context of the mob without taking a position on it; you dwell on the context without taking a position on the mob.
I realize that you’re drawing a fine distinction between “I don’t know enough so I won’t comment” and “I don’t know enough so I won’t take a position,” where the first is OK and the second is bad when it involves a labor dispute because you believe one’s position in any labor dispute automatically ought to be with the strikers (really? even a strike by a white union that had screwed over their black counterparts in the past?), but it seems to me essentially a distinction without a difference.
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PG – I didn’t intend to come across as asking anything of David. If I did then I agree that it would be a distinction without a difference, but my response wasn’t meant to ask anything of him. The only reason I responded to his post was because it was on a blog that I contribute to and followed quickly on the heels of a post that said “Yay Regan”. I’m a unionist and I couldn’t continue to be part of a blog that had “yay union busters” and “bad strikers” in the same day without putting a different view.
I’m also not quite saying “I don’t know enough so I won’t comment” but I’ve commented on the toher thread and I think that’s probably enough explaining what I mean.
As for my view on racist strikes – I might have got into this some more if I had written about the British Wildcat strikes, but I tend towards critical supporting strikes rather than opposing. I study labour history and I’m a socialist, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about different hypotheticals (My least favourite is prison guards, but that’s just because prison is a touchy subject for me). I’m fairly sure i would have supoprted the Pullman strike though – it seems Eugene Debs did right by pushing for an integrated union, and the striking workers felt the consequences of their lack of solidarity. But that’s not reason not to support their strike.
Hell no. That’s gross.
Just like Bush’s administration, this is flat out wrong. You don’t get to define the “acceptable” limits of discourse or belief, even–especially–when there are plenty of alternatives which are valid. Howard Zinn may have said it; your best friend may have said it, but it’s still wrong. The fact that you are even trying to do so is a bit distressing.
That type of black and white thinking generally leads to a lot of bad shit. There’s no “but I’m a liberal!” exception. And incidentally, if that’s the standard line for union organizing, then one can no longer even use actions as a proxy for thought. You can’t conclude that everyone who is striking actually supports a strike, because the threat of “with us or against us” provides its own motivation for striking. (the reverse is also true, if the university uses similar tactics.)
And you think that kind of thinking is (1) justified, and (2) good? Damn, it’s no doubt that folks would like secret ballots.
Maia,
Don’t get me wrong, as someone who intends to be hopefully paid for my TA-ing (what an awful word) services in the near future (fingers crossed) I would love to be paid more, rather than less. It’s a raw deal to be a TA these days, because there isn’t enough money to go around. I think part of what they wanted was just the right to take on a second, non-school-related part-time job, which I believe at present to be something they sign an agreement not to do. And it was the government, not the university, who legislated them back to work, though I imagine the university had been asking them to do so for the full three months of the strike.
While I admit that better paid TAs probably equals a better calibre of education for the students, I can’t help but think that it’s all going to seem a bit theoretical to the students missing their classes. I keep putting myself into the places of the students hurt by the strike, and keep thinking how pissed off I would be if my school year were interefered with to that degree. The students don’t get any compensation for the loss of the summer months’ wages. Anyway I guess mine is just an emotional response is based on how hard it was for me, as an undergrad with no government support, to pay for my tuition on 4 months’ minimum wage — let alone 3 or 2.5 in the middle of a recession.
As for your question about what kind of a system it is that allows for the legislating of certain sectors back to work, I believe some of it may rely on where the money comes from. In Canada, our universities recieve substantial funding directly from the government, based upon the number of graduates the previous year. As a public institution recieving taxpayers’ money, I believe the theory is that it falls under the jurisdiction of the government to safeguard that interest. It’s not a decision taken lightly (I believe the government waited three months here, which is a long time to the students), but the government can legislate back to work teachers, medical workers and public transit workers, as well as public servants, and enforce arbitration of the dispute, which I believe to be the case here. I’m not sure they have the right to legislate back non-public industries, but I believe that to be the logic behind it.
Hope that helps,
Vellum
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