Solidarity

I'm thinking that of all the states in which conserviative governors are gearing up to try to destroy public sector unions, maybe Wisconsin wasn't the right place to start.

Mahlon Mitchell, president of the Professional Firefighters of Wisconsin, who pledged solidarity with his fellow state workers, even though firefighters and police were spared from Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to bust state unions' bargaining power. Among Mitchell's pledges: The state's safety workers would agree to forgo some of their privileges and benefits to preserve collective bargaining for all the state's union workers. "We have a unique job," he said, "but so does the snow-plow driver, so does the janitor, so does a nurse, so does a teacher at UW college.

Honestly I can't tell what's going to happen here. Russ Feingold is going around describing our time as "the Gilded Age on Steroids," and I'm not sure he's wrong. But I also don't see the antidote, so I'm hoping he's wrong and that we bounce back towards something like the mid-90s status quo.

Green tooling, green growth, organizing

Obama is giving a lot of signals that his agenda is going to be to link massive fiscal stimulus to projects that are intended to address global climate change. As policy, this strikes me as exactly right. Politically, well, we shall see what we shall see.

For my part, I'm optimistic. I think Obama's political initiatives are often best looked at through the lens of his background in community organizing. In that vein, one of the pieces of wisdom that gets handed down in the organizing business is that a campaign needs two kinds of hooks. There has to be, on the one hand a piece to satisfy the self-interest of supporters, and on the other a piece that appeals to some sort of moral cause or principle. Purely from the point of view of building strength, the closer the link between the two the better.

In this case, the faltering economy makes the self-interested piece possible. Unemployment just hit a 16 year high. The middle class has been shrinking for a decade and buying power, already in long decline, is threatening to dive off a cliff. A green jobs program, in this context, is first and foremost a jobs program.

The moral piece, obviously, is the green. You need the moral piece because it addresses supporters who need to be reassured that the benefits they receive from the fiscal stimulus package -- which have no doubt about it, is going to require deficit spending -- are deserved. People care about their own self-interest, but they also care about fairness and the common good. Put another way, "give me a job!" is a less ennobling demand than "give me an opportunity to save the fucking planet!"

Notes on storming the ivory tower

Over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, D has a post up about the new CBA for Profs at the University of Alaska. In it and in the comments are a few despairing remarks about the prospects for organizing in academia. I have my own thoughts on the subject, but it was striking that I came across the following passage in an email having to do with the Andrea Smith tenure case immediately after reading D's post. It's from a short essay Andrea Smith wrote called, "Social-Justice Activism in the Academic Industrial Complex."

Academics give one of several excuses as to why they cannot engage in collective engagement, all of which are indicative of the extent to which academics become unconsciously (or consciously) loyal to the current capitalist system. Academics will often say, for instance, that they are "too busy" to do activist work. The reality, however, is that everyone is "too busy" for organizing. If we were to build mass movements around those who are not busy, we would have three people to do the work. So, the assumption behind this excuse is that academics should have some kind of special dispensation from activist work. But why should academics be any less responsible for taking part in activist work than florists, garbage collectors, or beekeepers? The assumption that academics should have some special dispensation suggests an investment in social elitism that would hold academics in a special category from other workers of the world. |Andrea Smith|

Incidentally, you should sign the Grant Andrea Smith Tenure Petition.

Union thug fashion

I saw one of these numbers for the first time yesterday morning. I was on campus on my way to do some face to face organizing. Having no way to carry it, I had been forced to leave my bat back at the office.

Somehow I managed to get the card anyway, and to hear horror stories about funding and workload in the department, and to look at baby pictures, but it sure would have been reassuring to have a weapon handy just in case.