Date: Sat, 6 Dec 1997 17:34:59 -0800 (PST)
From: Dennis R Redmond <dredmond-AT-gladstone.uoregon.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Re: All Work and No Play... Makes Jack a Dull Boy


On Fri, 5 Dec 1997, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

> I think you got it right. I am one of those unproductive public-sector
> workers who live on crumbs off the bourgeois table, and teaching two
> classes and grading 50 papers per week while trying to work on my
> dissertation don't leave much time for actual play. And that is why our
> generation of bohemians, feeling overworked and undersubsidized, are
> organizing grad employee unions. Isn't that right, Dennis? (Maybe he's not
> on this list.)

Oh, I'm still here -- was busy reconfiguring the warp core on my
Net-browser -- and yes, graduate student unions are popping up around
the USA faster than you can say "Bob Rubin is a weasel". Incidentally, the
surge in grad activism is just beginning to have interesting effects
on state and national organizations, where the Old Guard, Cold War-era
business unionists etc. are slowly beginning to feel the street heat from
below. My own union here at the U of O, the GTFF, for instance, is now
pushing for more representation and radical democracy on our state labor
council (we're affiliated with the AFT), and has scored some impressive 
victories; this in turn has brought us into conflict with the late and
unlamented Al Shanker's AFT apparat (the "Shankleratura", as dissidents 
like to say), currently headed by the dismal Sandra Feldman. 

What's different about this new labor wave is that it's culturally
very hip, it's multinational and has paid attention to linking workers'
struggles here with workers' struggles abroad (the GTFF has done some
stuff with labor unions in Tijuana, for example, as well as with the
anti-Nike campaign), it's very, very Green (in terms of the importance of
local democracy and rejecting consumerism as such) and it's all about
information democracy. Call it a nascent cybersocialism, if you will, just
beginning to take root in the silicon proletariat.

-- Dennis



     --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---