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.

Condemning anti-Semitic hate speech @ UCD

I did not write this, but I did sign it. So I am putting it up on this blog for all to see because I think it is important for people to see that the Divestment movement condemns all forms of hate speech.
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Dear UC Davis Community,

As a coalition of students and campus organizations at UC Davis, we condemn the actions taken sometime during the night of January 31st, 2015 by an unknown person(s) who defaced the Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house, which is a Jewish interest fraternity, with swastikas.

Just as we condemned the hanging of a noose, the defamation of the Palestinian dove, or calling students ‘terrorists’ based on their physical appearance or beliefs, we equally condemn the display of the swastika. This reminds us that anti-Semitism, along with all other forms of hate, including, but not limited to, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia, racism, and misogyny, still exist and are rampant trans-nationally and on our university campuses.
We reject any attempts to blame this on any single student community, including the UC Davis Divestment movement. We hope that the university investigates and exercises due diligence in holding those responsible for this hate crime to the fullest extent of the law.

Sincerely,
The Undersigned:
Students for Justice in Palestine at UC Davis
Muslim Student Association at UC Davis
Arab Student Union at UC Davis
Pakistani Student Association at UC Davis
Afghan Student Association at UC Davis
M.E.Ch.A. de UC Davis
Black Student Union at UC Davis
Sikh Cultural Association at UC Davis
S.M.A.R.T. (Students Matter: Activism, Retention, Teamwork) Coalition
Officers of the Davis Unit, UAW 2865
Hannah Kagen-Moore, Davis Unit UAW 2865
Duane Wright, Davis Unit UAW 2865
Mai Sartawi, National Lawyer’s Guild
Claire White, Student National Vice President, National Lawyer’s Guild
Gonzalo Cortes Moreno, Lawyer and Constitutional Law Professor (King Law School)
Armando Figueroa, ASUCD President

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.

University-Banking Complex

On the University-Banking Complex

(Loosely based on a speech I gave in the bargaining room at UC Davis during UC/UAW contract negotiations)

After listening to all these members talk about how they have had to go into serious debt to make it through grad school, despite our so called “full-funding”, due to our extremely low salary I can’t help but make the connection of our current contract struggle for more competitive pay to the larger student movement against privatization and student debt.

On the other side of this wall used to be a US Bank, but students and workers sat down in front of it, day after day, protesting the fact that capital has literally been welcome and given a space on campus. They were protesting what might be called, the University-Banking Complex, that much like the Military-Industrial complex, has some scary implications for society.

After US Bank was forced to close these students faced trumped up charges that could have led to up to 10 years in prison and $1 million in “damages”. The Davis Dozen, or the Banker’s Dozen, as they have been called eventually got community service, but the threat was very real. If you attempt to interrupt the University-Banking Complex your life can and/or will be ruined.

I find it disturbing how many UC Regents are current or former bankers. Monica Lozano for example was on the board of Bank of America, while at the same time a UC Regent. She would literally vote to increase tuition in the morning and then watch as BofA made more money through student loans.

And its not just tied to tuition, but also as grad students, its about our pay. I personally have taken out a total of $16,000 in my three years to just help me pay the rent, since I am a student-parent. Now UCD wants to tear down the only affordable family housing on campus and replace it with housing that costs twice as much.

We demand better pay. We demand affordable housing. Our contract fight is just one small battle in this war against the University-Banking Complex, and is just one way in which we can push back the tides and reclaim our university, our lives, and our futures.

The Invisible Violence of UC Labor Relations

The Invisible Violence of UC Labor Relations

(Based on a speech given during UC/UAW contract negotiations bargaining session at UC Davis.)

I want to talk about violence for a minute - especially because we are here at Davis, just a few hundred feet from the Quad, where the globally infamous pepper spray incident happened on Nov 18th, 2011. UCPD has become the face of UC violence around the world, for both the pepper spraying at Davis as well at the batoning of students and faculty at UC Berkeley 9 days before that. These acts of violence represent the unchecked power and cruelty of the UC system and administration. They are not the root of the problem, as many have been saying, but merely the symptom of a more dangerous disease - privatization and austerity -  meaning the closing of the higher educational commons and selling it off piecemeal to the corporate and banker buddies of the UC Regents.

These highly visible acts of cruelty and authoritarianism are not moments when the system breaks down and must rely on sheer violence for its survival, however. These are just more visible acts of violence because they are public. What we don’t see is the constant and institutional violence of the day to day operations of the university because they tend to be private.

When UC management unilaterally implements pay cuts on unionized service workers, over 90% of whom qualify for public assistance, pushing them further into poverty, when the university refuses to pay Graduate Student Teaching Assistants a living wage and perpetually keep us in or near poverty -especially those of us with children - and when the university raises tuition on students who can barely afford to be here already and force them to take out further student loans, they put us all in a situation where we will keep having to make choices that we shouldn’t have to make: Do I want to visit the doctor or feed my kid? Do I pay the utility bill or my credit card? Do I eat healthy and go further into debt or buy cheap food? Can I visit my family this year or will I go yet another year without seeing them?

When workers have to choose between their long term health and homelessness, between feeding their children and putting the heat on in the winter, they are making impossible decisions. UC workers should not be put in this situation, but they are.

This is the institutional violence of the UC administration. It is an invisible violence, a private violence, and it manifests in our lives differently based on our own personal situations, yet it is a product of the decisions made by UC administration and carried out by UC Employee and Labor Relations (from here on in just referred to as Labor Relations).

When pictures and videos of Pepper Spray cop John Pike went viral many thought that it was a moment of the system stepping out of bounds. Chancellor Katehi and other administrators tried to appease the outrage by saying that this would never happen again, and that new policies regarding free speech and demonstrations would be enacted. However this further invisiblizes the other violence of the UC system, the day to day violence described above.The truth is just that this was a more public moment of the logic of the UC administration being mirrored by the UCPD.

This is why when I look across the bargaining table I don’t see mere administrators, I see a group of John Pikes. Actually I see something worse than John Pike. Pike’s violence was momentary and only affected a dozen or so people. Labor Relations is more sophisticated and doesn’t have to actually look at their brutality, they just pull the trigger and walk away before the pepper spray hits. And they do this to 13,000 Teaching Assistants (UAW 2865) and 22,000 service workers (AFSCME 3299) every day.

So I want to call you out, you specifically members of the UC management bargaining team, for your violence. We will not stand it any longer. We are organized and we will fight back.

About class size as a working condition

The UC Student-Worker Union UAW 2865 has brought a proposal to UC management that would give Teaching Assistants, who are the front line educators in the university, the right to have a say in setting class size policy. The issue of class size, and specifically our desire for smaller classes, is both about the work that we are doing and the service our students are receiving. As the Chicago Teachers Union has said, “Our working conditions are our students learning conditions.” Yet UC management has refused to negotiate this issue, despite labor law that says that working conditions are a mandatory subject of bargaining. Our response has been to file an Unfair Labor Practice Charge against them. The Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) has yet to rule on the charge and management has so far continued to refuse to bargain.

Management’s response so far has been to say that any issues having to do with class size do not need a new article in the contract specifically addressing it, instead it is merely a workload issue. This is my response to that argument:

Lets imagine for a moment that instead of being a university engaging in education and research that we were an organization that builds bridges. Now imagine that I used to build small simple bridges in the 220 hours that I work in a quarter but due to changes in how the organization is run I now have to build a much bigger and more complicated bridge in the same amount of time. Sure I could get the bridge built for you if just having it erected was the main goal, but I would have to do it quickly and cut corners to work within the time constraints. Would you drive over that bridge? Would you drive your children over that bridge? Knowing what you know about the way in which I had to have it built in order to meet time constraints, I bet you wouldn’t. The job I did was lower quality and the bridge is not a quality bridge. It is unsafe.

There is a reason that we have safety standards for bridges, buildings, cars, food, and other goods and services, because some things are too important to do quickly. Quality is important. What we are asking for is essentially quality standards for education. We are the front line educators in this world class university, yet our lack of a say in class size means that we are forced to deal with certain working conditions despite the fact that we care about our work and want to build something that we can be proud of.

And that’s the other aspect of what has been taken away from us. We are professional teachers, many of us come in with teaching expereince and or a Master’s degree, and after 2 years we all have both. But the one thing we have less and less of due to increasing class size is the one thing all professions are defined by: authority over our work and the ability to make decisions about our work.The authority we have lost is a pedagogical authority - the ability to choose HOW to teach.

Research shows that a student-centered and active learning approach to teaching is more effective, yet this style of teaching is made difficult to impossible with larger classes. So as class size balloons what happens is that a certain pedagogical approach is institutionalized, and thus our decision to decide which pedagogical approach to use has been taken away from us. What we are left with is what Brazillian educational theorist Paulo Freire called the “banking model” of education, one in which students are passive objects of a one way transmission of knowledge model of education that is alienating and not as effective.

That is why the issue of class size is not just about workload violations and why we demand to have the right to negotiate over class size in our contract, because we are talking about standards of education and pedagogical authority. Class size is undoubtedly a working condition.

Speech - UAW 2865 Contract Negotiations 2013 Opening Remarks

This was originally read at the first UAW/UC bargaining session at UC Berkeley in July 2013.
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My name is Duane Wright. I am entering my third year in the PhD program in the Sociology Department at UC Davis. I did my undergraduate work in Sociology at UMass Boston. My research focuses on teachers work and teacher and community movements for more control over schools.

Before coming to Davis I spent 8 years working in the Brockton Public School System in various capacities, as a substitute teacher, a paraprofessional in special education, and in an after school and summer program.
Neither of my parents has a college degree, and the only reason I can even be here right now working on my PhD is because of all the amazing work over many decades by UC TAs to establish our local union. Before the union was established in-state fee-remissions weren't fully covered. Had TAs not realized how central their labor was to the university and the strength had through collective bargaining I would not be here before you today.

As it was it took me until I was 27 to complete my Bachelor’s degree. I took out as much in loans as I could, but still I had to keep withdrawing from school so that I could save up in order to return. One time my family was facing some financial difficulties and my father dropped the family health insurance to decrease the monthly bills. He didn't know that my status as a student was dependent upon having that health care and because I couldn't afford the campus healthcare in such short notice I had to withdraw from the university. However this was 3 weeks into the semester so I was still charged 60% of tuition. This set me back a year and a half, paying this back and saving up once again.

I tell you all this so that you can understand how important accessibility and affordability are to me. According to the Department of Education, California has had the highest rate of growth in tuition in the country for years now. If it was difficult for me to afford UMass Boston, the cheapest state university in my home state, all those years ago; can you imagine how inaccessible this university is to all the potential undergraduate and graduate students now?

You and I will agree that there has been a serious lack of funding, however that is also a convenient argument and justification for the rising cost of attendance. The other important reason for skyrocketing tuition is that there has been a dramatic restructuring of the university - a shift in the budget which reflects a shift in the priorities of the university. Teaching and research are no longer the top priorities of this university. Nationally “From 1993 to 2007, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students . . . increased by 39.3 percent" at the average college while in contrast here at “UC-Davis the number of full-time administrators jumped 318 percent, while the university actually reduced its full-time instructional, research, and service staff by 4.5 percent” in that same time period. We are teaching more students for less money, our pay hasn't kept up with the rate of inflation yet top administrators like Chancellor Katehi and President Yudof received 7% pay increases from 2010-2011. Instead of spending money on those who directly educate, and do the research which makes this the great university it is, money is now being used to line the pockets of already overpaid and out of touch bureaucrats. Graduate students with families are eligible for food stamps while administrators are buying summer homes. And when we say enough is enough you call out the dogs to pepper spray us.

My first year here was 2011, and I was on the UC Davis quad on Nov 18th and saw my friends get pepper sprayed for sitting peacefully in opposition to this restructuring of the university that many call austerity. My son, 8 years old at the time, was also with me that day, and watched as students covered in a thick layer of orange pepper spray cried and threw up. In this moment he was literally confronting his future. He watched the brute force of this restructuring ensure that public higher education- for if it isn't affordable or accessible than it isn't public- will not be there for him when he gets older. My generation is the first in a long time that will not have better life outcomes than the previous generation, and the future looks bleak for his generation, unless we can drastically alter the course of austerity that UCOP and the members of the 1% who are on the Board of Regents have set for public higher education.

I have been too poor to leave the state since I moved here two years ago, but I would like to go back to MASS and visit sometime; and when I do I will undoubtedly go back and visit the schools I used to work in, and when I look upon the faces of all those bright, funny, and amazing children I used to work with I want to let them know that I am doing all I can to fight for their future. I want them to want to learn and go to college, instead of stop caring because they know that they have no future in this world of the neoliberal university.

This contract negotiation isn't just about TAs. It is about the direction and the vision we have for higher education, it is about social justice. That is why you will see some very strong demands, demands we are ready to fight tooth and nail for, because the situation we are facing -for us, for our students, and for our children- is dire.

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