258 candles-one more day

day after labor day

the author of the blog vagabond scholar did a good job yesterday of posting a labor day commentary, better than I might do (although I would connect too to this list). because I was involved instead in shabbating for the weekend, I'm taking the easier way out of simply linking to it. but as a way of making up for this lazy practice, I am reposting 1 of my favorite mashups from a year and a 1/2 ago.

people are political animals

aristotle said it 1st but it bears repeating. wherever 2 or more are gathered, so there will be a caucus.

here on the rim we went through another seismic shakeup that wasn't, with a result similar in 1 district to another seismic shakeup-that-wasn't just in april. (I've begun to be asked when voting to provide identification which the state republicans, in a solution in search of a problem, insist will counter voter fraud, but seems to have no impact on actual voter fraud.) the democratic party won 2 seats in the recall--and there is reason to see hope in that--but lost the other 4 by margins that the gop will surely consider an electoral mandate. there will continue to be no compromise on the part of the state ruling group.

I'm not a believer in a golden age. but a mere 2 years ago there was an incredible outpouring of relief and hopefulness when barack obama, a candidate whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. we've lost that hope somewhere as we have moved from a political culture of "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

this is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. of sharing. of community. of helping 1 another. we have entered a time and political place when a majority of voters--as opposed to a majority of citizens--feel the motto of the us ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

decades ago, after I'd graduated from college the 1st time but was still hanging around new paltz, word got around that the student senate had voted to cancel spring weekend. this was a special time for people in the area, a weekend when a major bands were brought in to play free concerts in the rear fields of the campus, a place dubbed "the tripping fields" by grace slick when jefferson airplane and the who played there in 69. it was an incredibly unpopular decision but the senate had good, solid reasons for doing so: every year the senate, which footed the bill from student activity fees, lost money because of injuries, arrests, vandelism to the property and cleanup. I'd attended for years and the place on monday morning looked like parts of britain currently look.

a guy I knew from my time as sports editor, marty, was on the senate and he and a small coterie of senators had spread the word that there should have been public discussion of the decision since it had an impact on a huge number of people. the following week a special session of the senate was held and the meeting, which normally took place in one of the smaller rooms of the student center, opened in the auditorium, which had been outfitted with bleachers and stacking chairs. it was packed, and by the time I got there a half hour before the meeting, it was standing room only.

to call the meeting contentious would be an understatement. it was raucous and loud and the senators tried valiently but in vain to keep the crowd from interrupting proceedings. it soon emerged that the senate was overwhelmingly against footing the bill for a drunken orgy every year.

but the noise and the tumult was democracy in action. soon the senate voted to hold its meeting in executive session, which meant only senators present, a vote that was immensely unpopular with the visitors. marty led the effort to rescind that vote, listening to the hundreds of people who'd come to make comment on the decision. there was 1 guy, I never knew his name, but he was among the loudest and most adamant that spring weekend ought to continue as it had and that he was there to make certain that it did. marty seemed to look on him as an ally in the crowd.

1 by 1 the senators recanted their votes on the executive session and the noise when they reappeared in the auditorium was deafening. 1 by 1 people stood up and addressed the senate and the group and it was obvious that springweekend, whatever the cost, was a popular and extraordinarily well-received tradition. 1 by 1 the senate votes changed until, at about midnight, the vote stood at a plurality of senators in favor of continuing the practice, damn the cost.

the place erupted in applause. and almost immediately emptied out. but the meeting wasn't over yet: there were still a number of issues to consider like a possible rise in student fees to cover the costs, new rules for student organizations, additions to the campus code of conduct and others.

I remember marty standing in the center of the room saying vainly, "stay and have a voice about what to do with these issues too." but everyone swarmed out of the room, and I remember marty addressing the guy he'd seen as his ally and the guy saying, "I got what I wanted." soon, there was no one in the room except the senators and about 12 people, including me, and I left soon after because it was getting late and the bars would close soon.

teach naked

"When I started graduate school in 1989, we were told that the disastrous job market of the previous two decades would be coming to an end because the large cohort of people who had started their careers in the 1960s, when the postwar boom and the baby boom combined to more than double college enrollments, was going to start retiring. Well, it did, but things kept getting worse. Instead of replacing retirees with new tenure-eligible hires, departments gradually shifted the teaching load to part-timers: adjuncts, postdocs, graduate students. From 1991 to 2003, the number of full-time faculty members increased by 18 percent. The number of part-timers increased by 87 percent—to almost half the entire faculty.

"But...the move to part-time labor is already an old story. Less visible but equally important has been the advent and rapid expansion of full-time positions that are not tenure-eligible. No one talks about this transformation—the creation of yet another academic underclass—and yet as far back as 1993, such positions already constituted the majority of new appointees. As of 2003, more than a third of full-time faculty were working off the tenure track. By the same year, tenure-track professors—the 'normal' kind of academic appointment—represented no more than 35 percent of the American faculty.

"The reasons for these trends can be expressed in a single word, or buzzword: efficiency. Contingent academic labor, as non-tenure-track faculty, part-time and full-time, are formally known, is cheaper to hire and easier to fire. It saves departments money and gives them greater flexibility in staffing courses. Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment...

"Well, but so what? A bunch of spoiled kids are having trouble finding jobs—so is everybody else. Here’s so what. First of all, they’re not spoiled. They’re doing exactly what we always complain our brightest students don’t do: eschewing the easy bucks of Wall Street, consulting or corporate law to pursue their ideals and be of service to society. Academia may once have been a cushy gig, but now we’re talking about highly talented young people who are willing to spend their 20s living on subsistence wages when they could be getting rich (and their friends are getting rich), simply because they believe in knowledge, ideas, inquiry; in teaching, in following their passion. To leave more than half of them holding the bag at the end of it all, over 30 and having to scrounge for a new career, is a human tragedy.

"Sure, lots of people have it worse. But here’s another reason to care: it’s also a social tragedy, and not just because it represents a colossal waste of human capital. If we don’t make things better for the people entering academia, no one’s going to want to do it anymore. And then it won’t just be the students who are suffering. Scholarship will suffer, which means the whole country will. Knowledge, as we’re constantly told, is a nation’s most important resource, and the great majority of knowledge is created in the academy—now more than ever, in fact, since industry is increasingly outsourcing research to universities where, precisely because graduate students cost less than someone who gets a real salary, it can be conducted on the cheap...

"It isn’t just the sciences that matter; it is also the social sciences and the humanities. And it isn’t just the latter that are suffering. Basic physics in this country is all but dead. From 1971 to 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in English declined by 20 percent, but the number awarded in math and statistics declined by 55 percent....On the work that is done in the academy depends the strength of our economy, our public policy and our culture. We need our best young minds going into atmospheric research and international affairs and religious studies, chemistry and ethnography and art history. By pursuing their individual interests, narrowly understood, departments are betraying both the values they are pledged to uphold—the pursuit of knowledge, the spirit of critical inquiry, the extension of the humanistic tradition—and the nation they exist to serve.

"We’ve been here before. Pay was so low in the nineteenth century, when academia was still a gentleman’s profession, that in 1902 Andrew Carnegie created the pension plan that would evolve into TIAA-CREF, the massive retirement fund. After World War II, when higher education was seen as an urgent national priority, a consensus emerged that salaries were too small to attract good people. Compensation soared through the 1950s and ’60s, then hit the skids around 1970 and didn’t recover for almost thirty years. It’s no surprise that the percentage of college freshmen expressing an interest in academia was more than three times higher in 1966 than it was in 2004.

"But the answer now is not to raise professors’ salaries. Professors already make enough. The answer is to hire more professors: real ones, not academic lettuce-pickers."

--from "faulty towers" by william deresiewicz in the may 23, 2011, issue of the nation (my emphasis added)

an excellent article that I could have written, since all the information, sans the supporting evidence, was known to me by personal experience (and that he entered graduate school the same year I did, and heard exactly the same spiel I heard, both excites me because it proves I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's, and depresses me because I am not crazy and my experience is like almost everyone else's). I suspect almost anyone who's looked hard the past decades for a college teaching position without the magical phd (or abd, which according to deresiewicz is preferable as they are "people who have [already] entered the long limbo of low-wage research and teaching that chews up four, five, six years of a young scholar's life" and will accept less pay with the lure, which is increasingly disappearing, of a steady lifetime gig, one that often never materializes) could have written much of this. it's a depressing sight, postsecondary education in the 21st century, and less and less alluring. in the course of the article he covers a dozen books, some of which I'm going to have to read.

unions make us strong

"Workers can't pay rent, pay the mortgage, get a credit card, find a job, buy clothes or schoolbooks for their kids or retire. They face increased divorce rates as family tensions rise, and they have lost their sense of dignity. They don't care about labor law reform, and they don't care about unions (at least in their current form). They are in despair, and unanswered despair quickly becomes either fertilizer for the fearmongers or the reason to not bother showing up at the polls.,,

"Rather than posting links to the websites of housing groups, how about starting direct worker-to-worker conversations about occupying mortgage company headquarters across the country until the banks stop foreclosing on their members' homes? Rather than suddenly calling for members to picket banks or take seemingly random militant actions, how about sitting down with union members and talking about what actions everyone can take to force solutions to the housing crisis—solutions such as making banks revalue mortgages to the actual value of homes and creating lines of credit so workers can move to places where they might find a job?

"Unions need to start connecting with workers face-to-face through house parties and worksite and home visits to ask what's keeping them up at night. Then unions should plan direct actions with workers that respond to the issues facing them. How about taking over the offices of big credit-rating agencies and occupying them 24/7 by the thousands until they agree to erase all the bad credit heaped on anyone who has made a late mortgage payment because they lost their job or their hours were cut back? The housing crisis ties directly to the wage crisis, which ties directly to the jobs crisis. People in this country are screaming for a fight, but the only people offering one have been from the right wing. All these issues have been staring labor in the face for several years. Why hasn't any union turned the crisis facing workers into a crisis for capital and the political elite?"

--from "making unions matter again" by jane mcalevey in the december 20, 2010 issue of the nation

why not? excellent question and I think I have a part of the answer. I've asked students, who you would think would be most interested in making tomorrow better and making a revolution in the workplace that could do nothing but benefit them, variations on this question for years. and the answer has come back every time: things are too good. things at work might be bad, they may be making less money than their parents--indeed, they may be the 1st generation since wwii to do poorer than previous generations--but so long as their life outside work remains relatively attainable (television, games, alcohol, gas, entertainment) to the majority of them, they will do nothing to upset the applecart. in fact, many of them have an outright disdain of unions, especially government unions, for being able to wring concessions in the past that they themselves are unable to get. (as I explain to them, for not having joined a union; their response to that is usually that they don't want to pay dues or be beholden to some shop rep, thereby ensuring things will never improve at their worksite.) most haven't a clue about the employment laws already guarenteed them--10 minute breaks and separate lunch spaces and automatic overtime and not needing to find their own sickday replacements--and their employers certainly aren't about to make them aware of them.

I will be delayed

since the school where I teach was on spring break this past week, I thought about taking some time to drive down to madison and join the hoopla protesting the rollback of union rights. but almost immediately I knew I couldn't do that. or more accurately, I could, but to do so would require changing my whole week around.

here on the rim I'm only a 3 1/2 hour drive from mad-town, an easy two-cigar trip, and have people there with whom I knew I could stay, one of whom even works near the capitol, so I could be, in effect, a commuting protestor for a day.

but to do so meant discounting my responsibilities. I was responsible for church services both sundays and had older testament class monday night, dog-training class tuesday night, internship hours and 2 meetings on wednesday, and internship class thursday night, and that isn't even to mention doing the laundry and dishes and walking the dogs. I decided I should be able to drive down early morning friday the 11th and come home saturday night.

but I was felled by a cold the previous friday night that made even speaking painful and caused me to miss tuesday's class and reschedule my meetings and internship for friday. I knew that to get down there, even for a day, would require changing everything for that day and maybe the days surrounding it.

I spent the entire week feeling, in addition to ill, a nagging sense that I should be down there. this is important, this fight for bargaining rights. I've belonged to 3 unions in my working life, and I've walked my share of pickets, even picketing for a union that wasn't my own. I'm a staunch believer in the necessity of unions and collective action. I know there are excesses and abuses but show me a human organization where there is none.

but I couldn't rationalize my desire to be in mad-town beyond the dull sensation that I itched to be there. there is a history happening there and I am close by and want to be a part of it and that is about it. I am aware of how little I might do there--all I could do is observe, which is important in itself--but there is no lack of eyes already available there. I might say something to someone, an offhand comment to a fellow protester, say, or a word to someone who disagreed with me that might in some way change the way he thinks. but to think a single day is time and opportunity enough to accomplish anything like that is to engage in a delusion of influence and presence that would put me head and shoulders above even the place scott walker imagines himself.

so, with a depressing sense of obligation, I put off going to fight the good fight and stayed home to fulfill my duties. I felt like everyone else had gone off to the dance while I practiced my violin.

but at my postponed meeting on friday, which was supposed to be a casual discussion over coffee with the chair of the planning committee for one of the churches where I intern, I quickly realized that what I was actually doing there was providing a listening post for him to talk about, among other things, the goings-on in madison as well as nearly every other left-of-center event and idea that has happened in the past year and a half. he is an attorney specializing in divorce and family mediation, a specialty that is in its definition a conservative activity, and it dawned on me after the first 1/2 hour he simply wanted to talk about what he saw going on around him with someone who wasn't going to tell him he was crazy or wrong, with someone who would listen attentively and respectfully and even chime in with his own observations. and I came to the epiphany that while I wasn't likely to make any effect at the dance, where I'd be 1 among thousands, I could do good staying at home, where I was 1 of 2.

the protests don't show any sign of stopping despite walker's attempts at undercutting the state constitution--in fact, they may be gaining momentum--so I may end up out there sometime soon. in the meanwhile, I've made this request of my friends who've gone on ahead to join our brothers and sisters on the line. kiss them for me, I will be delayed.

union maid

I had an interesting argument with a friend this morning at church about the protests going on further out on the rim in madison. she's a former union member who's now a member of management and thinks the protestors are overreaching. I disagree. we went back and forth about this for at least 10 minutes while preparing for a church breakfast for the kids and what made the argument interesting is the realization I had as it was winding down that we had arguing past one another at an opponent who was elsewhere.

essentially, her argument was that unions make unreasonable demands that hinder efficient operation of a business or an institution. she gave a couple examples from her own workplace. my argument was that those were examples of a poor negotiating team on her side and that it isn't a sufficient reason to eliminate collective bargaining. it was awhile before I realized that neither of us had made the argument the other was responding to: I hadn't said that unions were perfect and she hadn't said bargaining should be eliminated. this is a prime example of the effect that media have on determining the terms of debate between people: what we were arguing against was not what each of us said but what each of us had heard said.

shaking the gates of hell

"People create institutions for a variety of reasons: to nurture life and serve the common good, to advance their own self-interested goals, sometimes to accomplish both. People create institutions to promote agendas that may either help or harm human beings or the earth. They invest their energy and resources...serve them, become loyal to them, and promote and defend them...When an institution invested with authority assumes this degree of importance in people's lives, the survival and growth of the institution itself may become paramount...

"What many people do not realize is that institutions are not simply groups of individuals working together. Invested by humans with authority, institutions tend to take on a life of their own, to develop their own personality, goals, ethos, culture, milieu. As an institution becomes larger, wealthier, and more powerful, individual human beings within the institution have relatively less control over what it does...

"In other words, an institution is more than the sum of the human beings who make it up. It is an actor, a protagonist, an agent, interacting for better or for worse with human beings, with other institutions, and with the nonhuman parts of creation. It is a Power. In a very real sense, through the people who make it up, it takes on a life of its own.

"In theological terms, one could say that the Powers are primarily concerned with their own survival and growth, even at the expense of mortal human beings. An institution demands loyalty from those who identify themselves as part of the institution and have an interest in furthering its goals...When this happens, people end up serving the institution, instead of the institution serving life..."

--from Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization by Sharon Delgado

if this is so--and I submit it is at least partly so--then theargument can be used in at least 2 ways: to further the legal argument that corporations become citizens, with rights and responsibilties, because they act in society's interest (or against it); and to argue that opposition to corporations and institutions is a holy act that religiously-inclined individuals are obligated to be a part of, even if it conflicts with their role as part of the institution.

mischief

I was born to listen to the blues. when I'm driving somewhere during rush hour, like friday's all-day union meeting, I put on some blues and crank it up, and you can tell which driver is me cuz my head is swinging like the polar bear at the como zoo. when traffic stops it just means I can close my eyes.

I'm a believer in the power of unions. I've been a teamster (for a very short while, long enough to walk a picket with them), a food service member (while working at a group home--it was the only union that would represent us), and for the past decade I've been with mscf (minnesota state college faculty) which I call "mischief." I'm a state delegate each year because union work is important and because there are few better ways to make an impact on my profession and other practitioners of it.

it's also like church. we gather from separate rooms and come together to hear the good word. there is a head priest, the union president, and his coterie, the board and campus representatives. we are given an order of service in the form of an agenda. there are no songs but there is a call and response (voice vote) and, as in the uu tradition, congregational dialogue (presenting questions, clarifications and challenges to individual proposals). there are rites and ritual since we operate by robert's rules of order and there is a parliamentarian who keeps track of procedure. just like in xian and muslim services there is a villain, in this case the governor, who cut $290m from higher education's request to the budget (which itself already reflected a rollback to the 2004 budget, thus cutting a number which itself hasn't changed in six years), and saviors in the form of legislators who support the needs of higher education, especially tom rukavina who chairs the higher ed committee (and whose run for governor the union supports in the next election).

we sat there from 10 o'clock to 3 o'clock, like good puritans, and in my experience this was a short meeting. but I was tired and wanted nothing more than to get home and beat traffic. I'd made plans to get together with my friend cheryl afterward and called to beg off. but she convinced me to get together for a single beer since it would force her to stop grading and out of her house. we met at sweeney's in st. paul and talked a couple hours, mostly about union stuff (she was a delegate last year but opted not to go since she was heavily involved in al franken's victorious senate run and felt politicked-out), but also about what was going on in our lives. and then she said something that made more sense to me than anything I'd heard or said all day. she said, "we need to connect with each other more often than we do. friends help friends keep it together through the bad stuff and we haven't been doing that."

I think she expected me to argue, if only because I argue with her all the time, but she was right. unions on the professional scale are necessary, but union on the personal scale is even more important. we aren't solitary, we're collective. we don't generally refer to ourselves as "peoples," emphasizing the plural and separation, but as "people," singular and connected. this is what union is in the real, unexpurgated world: people coming together for each other's benefit to share the good and bad times, to touch one another's hands and hearts and say, "you aren't alone."