Response to Katehi's anti-divestment e-mail

As the time of publication this statement has not been endorsed by any organization or caucus, the views expressed represent only the views of the author. (Though hopefully the Davis UAW will be signing on to this statement soon.)

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On the morning of Friday January 30, Chancellor Katehi sent out an e-mail to the entire UCD community in regards to the previous night’s successful passing of a bill through the ASUCD senate that calls for the UC to divest its funds from companies that profit from human rights abuses in Occupied Palestine. We would like to deeply examine just what is being said in this letter and its implications.

Clowns to the left of me, Jokers to the right

**The views represented in this post represent solely the views of the author, and not of the UAW 2865, the AWDU caucus, or the BDS caucus.

December 15, 2014 two hit pieces were published against our unions work. One was a Zionist rallying cry against the now coming tide of BDS resolutions in the labor movement that the author predicts our union will initiate (let's hope they're right!!). The other is a laughable rant by the former leadership who lost our union elections by a landslide. I think there's articles speak volumes about the successes of our union in the last year as much as it says about their authors. I want to take a moment to discuss both articles, both in correcting some some of the (many!) (deliberate) errors in the articles, and to talk about what they mean for us.

Divestment and Affordable Housing

Reflections on the Fall 2014 UAW 2865 Joint Council Meeting: Or How Zionism Stifles Union Democracy

The views expressed in this blog post reflect the views and opinions of the individual poster and not any organization he is affiliated with, including but not limited to the UAW 2865, the Joint Council, the AWDU caucus, the Anti-Oppression Committee, the BDS caucus, and more.
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Summary: 1. Zionism and labor law (which I guess I didn't mention labor law as much as I should have) can restrict union democracy and force us into practices which are overly formal  2. it is these root problems that we must blame, not AWDU or the e-board or the BDS caucus for the way the Fall JC was conducted and 3. asking (because I don't have an answer other than "fight!") how can we move forward democratizing the union when the obstacle is much bigger than for example just an admin caucus in power, but is social conditions far greater in scope than the UC?


Background on the UAW 2865 Joint Council Vote to Call for a Membership Vote to Join the BDS Movement

This summer, especially in light of the massacre in Gaza, my union, UC Student Workers Union UAW 2865 - which represents academic student employees across the entire UC system, voted to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people and particularly in response to the call from Palestinian unions and civil society to engage in these actions to help stop human rights abuses and hopefully eventually bring justice and end the occupation of their land (and all that is implied with that - the system of apartheid or Jim Crow style 2nd class citizenship that Palestinians living in Israel must live with, the lack of a right of return to the millions of refugees who were cast out of their home by the Israeli military, the stealing of land and resources, and more). This vote was made by the Joint Council, the body of all elected officers, and which is the largest and most representative body in the union.

There's more to union power than membership numbers

ABSTRACT:
This essay does argue:
- Membership numbers are only a single measurement of union power
- Solely focusing on membership numbers ignores the other ways of measuring union power
- Ignoring other measurements of union power traps unions into a 1-dimensional practice of union power that can be very misleading

This essay does NOT argue
- Membership numbers aren't important
- Let's not measure membership numbers
- Let's ignore membership numbers
- I don't want a powerful union


I wanted to write the above first in order to be upfront about the argument because I'm sure someone will troll/distort what I am going to say. That being said, let's get to the essay!
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UAW 2865 elections: AWDU and SWITCh

Once every three years the entire leadership of our union UAW 2865 is up for grabs, every single officer position is vacated. Three years ago a reform slate (AWDU) that was tired of top-down business unionism took power and promised to democratize the union and get involved in struggles for social justice and in defense of public education. Remnants of the old leadership has rebranded itself and is trying to make a come back.

The SWITCh slate is being run by the same group of top-down career-oriented  business unionists. Let's examine who the leadership is, what their ideas and strategy for the union are, and just how honest their campaigning is.

The SWITCh leadership

Three people are major players of the SWITCh leadership, Rob Ackermann (UCSB), John Gust (UCR), and Jason Struna (UCR). All three of them ran in 2011 as part of the USEJ caucus slate, but have since claimed that there is no USEJ. However, just like in the 2011 election they have rebranded themselves, this time they are going under the name SWITCh, Student Workers for Inclusive Transparent Change.

Interview by Daniel Gutierrez

I recently was interviewed by Daniel Gutierrez, who publishes at Conjuncture Magazine and San Diego Free Press, for an article about the UAW 2865 contract negotiations. It was by far the most fun interview/conversation I've ever had and since only a small portion of it will make it into the article I thought it would be fantastic to publish the full interview here.

(DG is Daniel, DW is me.)

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DG: What I'd like to know from you is your thoughts on AWDU's [Academic Worker’s for a Democratic Union] strategy. That is, building grassroots support, including what is normally seen as social issues into the labor realm and how this changes the way unions are normally seen.

DW: Well I see my role as challenging that framework that unions have established for years. By focusing on bread and butter issues only and by saying other issues should be dealt with by other groups allows the union to default to fighting for and from a working class straight white cis-man position and ignores the fact that women, people of color, LGBTQIA folks and others are workers too.

It is a weak model of organizing because it hides the connections between class oppression and other oppressions and therefore doesn't put forth a critical enough or correct analysis of the system we live under and if you analysis isn't correct how can you have the right strategy to win?

That’s why the old slogan "An injury to one is an injury to all" to be has to be any union’s starting point.

DG: This seems like a pretty radical departure from what unionism has come to be known for in the United States. It definitely seems like a much more critical, more much adapted analysis of a neoliberal reality, critiquing assumptions of equality, Am I right?

DW: Definitely. As we have seen union membership and power decline its painfully obvious that that model doesn’t work, you can't start from a position of exclusion and expect others to just get on board with the struggle and patiently wait for their turn for their issues to come up.

And I say painfully obvious because of the state of working class people in this country. Inequality is ridiculously high, unemployment, homelessness, the number of people in prison, the number of people deported and the families and communities that are torn apart because of it, and more. That is some pain.

DG: I recently was looking at labor history figures in the United States and the amount of strikes in the United States have declined dramatically since the 1980s. In fact, someone told me yesterday that only three strikes were registered last year. Yet, in less than six months the UAW under the leadership of AWDU has called two strikes. How effective has the strike been in the union's struggle?

Why AWDU's model is winning contract negotiations

If you have not yet read my previous post about the struggle in the UAW 2865 between two models of unionism please check out "Why Paycheck First is an Anti-paycheck strategy".

Background of Intra-Union Politics

In the spring of 2011 a reform caucus going by Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU) took over the union, after seeing the union have no involvement in the UC student movement and building occupations of 2009 and 2010, and after a huge "No" vote was organized (that just barely lost) on a contract that many felt was a sell-out to university management. 

The former leadership, which has been pejoratively called the "admin caucus" because of their conciliatory attitude toward administration, during the election where AWDU formed to challenge them they called themselves USEJ (United for Social and Economic Justice), and since then they have relinquished all claims to their (very direct) ties to the old administration (including some of them being in the old leadership and others working very closely with the old leadership members who are now involved in Democratic Party politics to this day on their campus, and they claim "You keep calling us USEJ, we aren't USEJ!" and "we aren't a caucus, we are opposed to the caucus system" (despite the fact that they constantly vote in blocs). They also recently tried to form an anonymous front group called Paycheck First, complete with a laughable blog full of deliberate distortions that was basically only read by members of AWDU in their spare time looking for a laugh. For the sake of ease I will just refer to them as USEJ just because its easier when I reference them below. 

Since taking power AWDU has done much to make the union more democratic and is more active in social justice work. Campuses now have their own budgets so that they don't have to ask permission of the local President every time time they want a ream of paper for example (there will certainly be a post about this in the future, and at that time I will make sure to link to it here). Campus leaderships can now email their membership directly instead of submitting everything for approval to the President. Paid staff now make average TA salaries, not $50-80k. The examples go on and on, but the focus of this article is how AWDU has improved the bargaining process for new contracts.

 AWDU has improved and democratized the bargaining process

Previously, bargaining sessions were closed door, bargaining team only, events that members could only hear about second-hand. Under AWDU every single bargaining session has been open bargaining, meaning open to all UAW members, and allies and members of the campus community. As such members have been able to not just come and witness the bargaining process, but more importantly PARTICIPATE in the process. 

Previously bargaining began at the start of summer, when the vast majority of members aren't working and new agreements were reached typically before fall quarter started or during fall quarter. The previous contract was almost never allowed to expire. 

Any historian of labor will tell you that negotiating a contract when your members aren't working, and not having the ability to strike, is a guaranteed way of getting a terrible contract. This is why our pay hasn't kept up with inflation over the last 10 years.

This has to do directly with the view that one has of the negotiation process itself, and the bargaining room in particular. AWDU realizes that negotiations have to be backed up with real on-the-ground member power, and that that will only come about by having a strong participatory process. People will only fight for something when they feel ownership of it, not when they think someone else will get it for them. 

AWDU kicked off the contract campaign at the start of classes in the Fall. We invited members to come speak in the bargaining room about issues important to them. In this way, the bargaining room was not seen as a place where two small groups of advocates meet and try to come to a friendly agreement (read: the union conciliates and then pitches it as a victory to the members who were not involved and therefore have no way of judging what was possible and therefore if this was a win or a loss), this is why business unionism has lead to the decline of union membership in this country over the last 6 decades or so. The AWDU bargaining room was a place of mobilization. It was another arena in which we could use to mobilize members and through their participation get them more agitated and invested. We understood that we weren't going to come up with a clever argument to get a contract, that we were going to have to pressure management to give it to us, and that means building the mobilized member base. 

This means that bargaining team members had to see themselves primarily as organizers, and that we needed to invest our time organizing on the ground, NOT spend it all in the bargaining room by ourselves with management, as the USEJ bargaining team members suggested. One USEJ member, from UCSB actually proposed that we meet 4 days a week every week in September! Aside from being problematic because it meant that we would be guaranteed to be working more than double the hours we were paid for, but also that members with children (such as myself and both the members from UCSC) would just NOT be able to participate. The biggest problem is that it would have forced us to literally spend 200% of our time in the bargaining room, and no time organizing.

Why Calculus Won't Bring Social Justice: The false consciousness of the intellectual class

Background on the AFSCME 3299 ULP strike and UAW 2865 sympathy strike

On November 20, 2013 my union, UC Student Worker Union UAW 2865, went on strike for the first time in nearly ten years in sympathy of AFSCME 3299, UC service workers, who were illegally intimidated. AFSCME 3299 represents over 22,000 campus cooks, janitors, and gardeners, and medical center patient care workers. They are among the lowest paid workers in the university and are mainly people of color. They went on a one day ULP strike to protest a pattern of harassment and intimidation that appears to be very systematic in nature - in others words a calculated attempt at shutting down worker self-agency and resistance to pay and pension cuts that was unilaterally imposed on them. AFSCME workers in the UC Med Centers are also fighting for safe staffing levels, which the university has taken a hard line against despite the Med Centers making more than $400 million in yearly profits and patient deaths as a direct result of lack of safe staffing levels.

My union was only able to strike in support of AFSCME (and workers rights more generally) because of a successful bid for leadership by a reform caucus called AWDU, which grew out of the student movement at the UC in 2009. AWDU took control of the local in 2011. We entered contract negotiations in the summer of 2013. The AWDU dominated bargaining team let our contract expire on November 5, 2013, despite protestations from the more conservative members in the union and on the bargaining team who were aligned under the caucus USEJ (pejoratively called "the admin caucus" due to their history of conciliation toward administration and their paternalistic relationship with the UAW international - which is a perfect example of business unionism.) 

Letting the contract expire was a strategic decision. Under the contract the union was subject to a "No Strikes" clause, that had prevented us from going out in sympathy for AFSCME 3299 in their strike in May 2013. As such, the union was hamstrung in its ability to stand by service workers in solidarity. Six months later and the UC hadn't budged on safe staffing, wages, or pension issues. Fighting along, service workers were subject to illegal intimidation and threats. 

It is our hope that standing together we are stronger, and that by going out in sympathy and shutting down some of the academic work that the university relies on to function that the university might think twice about violating basic rights of workers again. AFSCME 3299 has been an ally of the student movement and we want to stand with them. 

The letter

The day before the strike a UC Berkeley lecturer in the Math department sent a letter to his students that has since become very popular in the internet. In this letter the lecturer not only says that he will be crossing the picket line that day, but that he will be teaching the discussion sections that his striking grad student workers canceled. 

The e-mail reads a bit like stream of consciousness at parts, and actually contradicts itself at times. But style and structure aside for now, the piece engages in an oversimplification of the educational process while simultaneously obfuscating the strike and its context. 

He actually says, "the reason for me taking this decision is extremely simple", the decision being to cross the picket and to scab on his grad student workers, and the simple reason: education is the most important thing in life and furthering your education isn't selfish, on the contrary it is a way of "helping people with the age old search for human happiness and meaning."

Politics, and specifically the social context of the strike, is "very big, very complicated." 

By overly complicating and refusing to actually engage with the reasons for the strike (these were never mentioned, UC service workers were never mentioned) while over simplifying and actually misrepresenting education he manages to make an already marginalized group totally invisible in his argument while framing the argument in such a way as to make the next day's class infinitely more important than the cause of the workers who don't even exist in his narrative. It is little surprise then that those unfamiliar with the struggle of the UC service workers and the context of the strike read this e-mail and came to agreement with the lecturer. His framing allows for no other option.

Why Paycheck First is an Anti-Paycheck Strategy

(Originally posted on Raises and Roses)

There are plenty of reasons to oppose Paycheck First’s narrative, ideology and strategy toward UAW 2865’s bargaining campaign, especially their collaborationist attitude toward management and their marginalization of anti-oppression work. However, I don’t want to reproduce a framework that assumes that AWDU is only about social justice and PF is stronger on economics, because, frankly, that is without a doubt completely untrue. There will be more essays on why anti-oppression work is central to union democracy; the point of this article is to challenge them on their own ground: namely, that they are the ones who stand up for Academic Student Employees’ (ASE) paychecks.

1.Their Record

First, Pay Check First is led by a group of people who are part of the old leadership, (a caucus called USEJ), that lost statewide leadership of the union to AWDU in 2011. So what is the old leadership’s record? Are they and the people that they agree with ideologically and strategically actually able to fight for good wages?

The data says no.

The report put out by the original wage committee early this summer (WAIT! I thought the bargaining team didn’t even discuss wages until September? At least that’s what I read on PF….) includes the following important graphs.

What these two graphs show is the following:
1.ASEs make significantly more than they would have if they hadn’t unionized.
2.However, we are making relatively less than we did in 1999, because
3.Our wages haven’t kept up with inflation since 2001-2002.

AWDU took statewide leadership in 2011, the previous two contracts were agreed to by a majority USEJ union and Bargaining Team in 2010 and 2007. So we are still losing pay thanks to USEJ. In fairness, I have heard them argue that the wage settlement in 2010 was during budget cuts to the UC so we couldn’t expect to have gotten better than what we did. But that is precisely the point! Their leveled expectations and conciliatory attitude has over the last ten years led to the devaluing of our labor and has put student families into poverty. They claim to be standing up for our paychecks by attacking fellow workers with their tabloid-esque blog, but when was the last time you saw them organize a mass protest or work action that confronted management? Never.

I think this history is crucial to really understanding their project, which is about taking the 2014 triennial elections, NOT about fighting for better pay. But there’s much more to my argument. Let’s say you don’t believe that they are these former leaders or have any association with them. Fine. Good point. Union activists know who they are but the general public doesn’t because instead of debating us out in the open they hide behind anonymity. So let’s move on to the other arguments, as to why they aren’t actually looking out for our paycheck.

1.Their strategy this time