{"id":6653,"date":"2009-02-16T03:45:55","date_gmt":"2009-02-16T11:05:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6653"},"modified":"2009-02-16T03:45:55","modified_gmt":"2009-02-16T11:05:43","slug":"york-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=6653","title":{"rendered":"York Strike"},"content":{"rendered":"

I strongly disagree with the way David Schraub described the York TA strike in his post on Alas<\/a>. Given that the strike was only incidental to his point, I thought it would be much better to talk about the strike here.<\/p>\n

I had been following this strike over at Monuments are for Pigeons<\/a> for quite some time. Here’s what he said relatively early on<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\nBeing on strike has also revived the socialist whipping boy: consciousness is contradictory. I was expecting angry students who feel they\u2019re being ripped off, since they\u2019re not going to class. There are some of those. It\u2019s 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\u2019t going to help. If we get a good settlement, we\u2019re happy and secure, and we teach better. But I understand why, if you\u2019re paying close to $6000 a year for tuition, you feel like you\u2019re buying a degree, rather than participating in a collective learning process, in which the workers who teach you deserve a decent standard of living.<\/p>\n

However, I wasn\u2019t expecting fellow grad students, walking the line with me, to believe that we\u2019re not workers. According to some of them, our massive debt & below-poverty-line wages are a sacrifice for future jobs. I call it the \u2018guild mentality\u2019: just like an apprentice at a medieval guild, you think you\u2019re getting training for future earnings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6653","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6653\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}