ABlog

Nobody knows he is tired. Nobody knows he is hot. We are all swung into the most intense and natural organization I have ever seen. These men are on the spot, acting on their own, visible and known within the city, acting outwardly and militantly for all, and they know it. I remember hearing once how the Russian peasants walked into the cities after the Revolution, saying this is our responsibility now. This is organization that comes naturally from the event, of thousands of men conducting themselves as one man, disciplining themselves out of innate and peculiar responsibility. What is done by one member is instantly known by all. This is a quickening of the social body, this is an enlivening of the social responsibility.—Meridel LeSueur, “What Happens in a Strike”

Everyone is crabby. Everyone is weary. We have been negotiating for seven days straight: Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The bargaining sessions start at 10 or 11 a.m. and go on most of the day and sometimes well into the night. Committee members drift in and out, departing to teach their classes, marking student papers in the lulls between the flurries of activity. The negotiators on the UAW’s International staff, by contrast, display unbelievable stamina. “Wait till you get to the end, where you’re bargaining all night,” these veterans tell us.

We ought to be on the phones, organizing our colleagues in ACT-UAW, the union for New School part-timers—our bargaining unit sisters and brothers, who are incredibly hard to reach because they are adjuncts like us, and hence are kept running hither, thither, and yon to patch together a living. But how can we be on the phones when we are spending all day every day sitting in airless conference rooms drinking the same old coffee and eating the same old muffins and melon slices?

Did we ever make that modified proposal on Affirmative Action? Who can remember where we are on Intellectual Property?

What happens now happens not for one bargaining unit, but for all adjunct faculty everywhere.

People’s quirks are thrown into sharp, irritating relief. We repeat ourselves. We drift in and out of focus. “We’ve got to get airtight job security. That’s what matters most.” We are waiting for the management committee to come back to us. We ought to be going over the rest of the non-economic proposals. Instead, we are telling stories about somebody’s vacation, somebody’s dog’s seizure, somebody’s class’s art museum field trip. We are reminiscing about Broadway musicals we enjoyed at an early age, to which we still know all the words. We are singing those songs. We are telling dirty jokes. Someone is remarking on the amusing slogan scrawled on the wall of a bathroom outside one of the conference rooms, on an upper floor of Parsons. (What did it say? The gentlemen won’t tell—they can’t repeat it in the presence of ladies. The “ladies” hoot with derision. The gentlemen, chagrined, reveal that it said: Bob Kerrey Can Suck My Ass. One of the ladies cries, bring me my smelling salts.) Three people are talking on their cell phones. Someone is documenting an Unfair Labor Practice charge on his laptop. Someone is going out for sushi, for falafel, for Vietnamese takeout.

The bargaining committee members are queens and kings for a day. We alone have gazed into the crystal ball that foretells the future; we alone hold the key to whether the semester will be permitted to unfold in predictable fashion, as it has always done before. We, the lowest of the low, the ultra-flexiblized, the undocumented workers of the academic world! Partly because we hold this key, but more—I suspect—because we might help to relieve the intolerable boredom of academic business-as-usual, all eyes are trained upon us. Everyone hopes for a contract settlement, so their work won’t be in vain—but, secretly, underneath it all, hopes for disaster, derailment, something spectacular, the storm of the century.

Behold, the mighty union! (The circus has come to town!)

Right here at the liberal New School.

Which side are you on?

People knock on my office door posing absurd questions. What is the percentage probability of a strike? Is it 50-50? 60-40? Has the union considered the fact that, as the end of the semester approaches, any action it might take will become less effective?

Who’s got the power?
We got the power.
What kind of power?
Union power.

Colleagues commend our efforts. “Thank you so much for everything.” “You’re doing a fantastic job.” Not so many show up to make those phone calls.

The posters go up. The posters come down. Management tears them down. We put them up again: General membership meeting on the 21st. Topic: Strike or Settlement. Every part-time faculty member at the New School has a critical stake in this vote!

We’re back at the table. The administration team is in a jolly mood, joking about wanting UAW regalia…when this is all over. “I want a bomber jacket,” says one. “You’ll get,” I say, “a T-shirt that reads, ‘I survived contract negotiations, and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Later, I tell our committee we should present the management team with personalized T-shirts modeled on those silly shirts that say, “Because I’m the Mommy, That’s Why.” Ours will read: “Because I’m the General Counsel, That’s Why,” “Because I’m the Associate Provost, That’s Why.” The one bestowed on their lead negotiator, a smarmy thug from a corporate law firm, can read very simply, “Billable Hours, That’s Why.”

I have written a thousand and one letters beginning “Dear Colleague” and ending “In Solidarity.”

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night.

I hate and love the organizing. I love it because it truly is participatory, fundamentally democratic. It has brought into the open some incredibly basic questions about indefensible inequities. Questions like: why is my time worth a fraction of the time of my office mate, who has a fulltime job, even though we teach exactly the same types of writing courses, in the same writing program, to the same pool of students?

And even if those inequities aren’t nearly as bad as others I could name, not by a long shot—for my union comrades and I are not New Orleans residents displaced from the Ninth Ward, or Iraqis subjected to war and occupation at the hands of an imperial power, or Pakistani farmers in the wake of a terrible earthquake, but only immiserated adjuncts forced to live on cultural capital in lieu of a living wage—still, it feels right to rebel.

I hate the organizing because it eats my time and because I yearn to be freed into art, into some moments of detached observation, into Robert Lowell’s “just say what happened.”

The truth is that I can’t really tell you what actually happens in a pre-strike situation. Later, maybe, I’ll be free to write it. Right now, I’m in it. I have a part to play.

I’d better stay on message.