On March 31, speaking before the International Donors’ Conference for Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the United States’ commitment to “help Haiti and to help the leaders of Haiti lead a recovery effort worthy of their highest hopes.” At the conclusion of the conference participants from the international community had pledged $5.3 billion to Haiti over the next two years and more than $9 billion for the next three years and beyond. It seemed that the international community had come to a rarely-achieved consensus and was united in its effort to help Haiti. In reality, what we saw on March 31 was a maneuver by the United States and the international community to strengthen its grip on the country. The battle for post-earthquake Haiti is underway.

It is illuminating to note what sort of future the international community envisions for Haiti. Some elements of the recommended “New Future for Haiti” are not so new, such as the central role planned for the low-wage, labor-intensive assembly industry. Such sweatshop-driven economic development was also the centerpiece of the US-imposed plan in the 1970s and 1980s and it failed to lift the majority of Haitians (even those with the manufacturing jobs) out of poverty. Other key elements include a rebuilt tourist industry which will create service jobs for Haitians and redeveloped agricultural production, some of which will supply international investors like the 25,000 farmers who will be growing mangoes for Coca-Cola.

Holding the purse strings for this grand redevelopment plan will be the World Bank. Though the international community is willing to concede that there should be some Haitian involvement, a majority of the representatives on the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti will be foreigners. In accepting this aid and reconstruction plan, Haiti Liberte journalist Kim Ives argues, Haitian President Rene Preval has “turned over the keys to Haiti to a consortium of foreign banks and governments.”

What’s more, members of Haiti’s grassroots and civil society organizations have been shut out of this discussion. Outside of the United Nations building on March 31 protesters drew attention to the exclusion of the popular movement in the planning of Haiti’s future. Likewise, earlier in the month grassroots organizations were excluded from an international donors’ meeting in Santo Domingo. The exclusion of the popular organizations should not come as a surprise, however, since they are calling for an economic model that breaks Haiti’s pattern of economic dependence on foreign powers and proposes to substitute a sustainable and decentralized Haiti with Haiti’s popular organizations playing a leading role.

Members of Haiti’s popular movement recognize that this is a struggle over the future of Haiti and we should too. Americans should remember that this is not the first time, even in recent history, that the United States has publicly claimed friendship with Haiti while simultaneously attacking the Haitian people.

Less than a year after Jean-Bertrand Aristide was first elected Haiti’s president he was removed from office in a coup, after which CIA-backed death squads systematically targeted members of the peoples’ movement. Publicly the United States condemned the coup and claimed to be horrified by this disregard for democracy, but behind the scenes it refused to enforce an embargo that would have cut off aid to the coup regime. Finally, in September, 1994, proclaiming “American steadfastness” and support for Haitian democracy, President Bill Clinton gave Aristide a military escort back to the country, but not before they had settled on a few conditions. As the terms of his return to the Presidency, the United States and other international “friends of Haiti” insisted that Aristide accept a neoliberal future for the country that included cutting public jobs and privatizing public services, eliminating tariffs and price controls, and generally making Haiti more hospitable to foreign capital. Then, as now, the real purpose of the much-heralded American support for Haiti was to benefit the wealthy and powerful of the international community.

The International Donors’ Conference and the Haitian popular organizations have presented two conflicting visions for the future of Haiti. Will the Haitian economy remain largely dependent on foreign investment for industry, agri-business and tourism and will Haitian grassroots organizations continue to be excluded from meaningful participation in the operating of the country? Or will the popular movement have a say in reconstructing a Haiti that is independent, sustainable, and concerned first-and-foremost with the well-being of the Haitian people? Seeing these visions side-by-side lays bare the reality that there is a battle underway for post-earthquake Haiti. Which side are you on?

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Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. Metropolitan Books, 2009

Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise. Harvard University Press, 2009

Many New Yorkers might wonder what use it is to understand a company like Wal-Mart. After all, with no Wal-Marts in the city most of us aren’t Wal-Mart shoppers, and the social and political culture of New York is far different from the one we regularly associate with Wal-Mart. Isn’t Wal-Mart simply a red state thing? Why should anyone not in “Wal-Mart Country” bother trying to understand this phenomenon?

In two important new works, historians Nelson Lichtenstein and Bethany Moreton each seek to answer those questions. To understand the important changes in the United States (and even the world) in the last thirty years we must understand Wal-Mart, they argue. Whether you are interested in political, economic, or cultural history, Lichtenstein and Moreton each make a powerful case for the decisive influence of Wal-Mart.

In The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business, Nelson Lichtenstein offers a comprehensive view of the company, detailing where it came from and how it became the largest retailer and private sector employer in the world. A distinguished labor historian who has also made major contributions to the history of politics and political economy, Lichtenstein goes beyond Wal-Mart’s impact on American labor, politics and the economy. As the title suggests, The Retail Revolution seeks to explain how Wal-Mart, as the “vanguard of the retail revolution,” has overthrown the previously dominant form of global political economy and has ushered in “a new stage in the history of corporate capitalism.”

In each chapter Lichtenstein focuses on a different aspect of Wal-Mart’s history and contemporary story. Telling the story of Wal-Mart’s origins, Lichtenstein places the company’s ascendance at the end of a one-hundred year period in which manufacturers dominated the American economy. Sam Walton, Wal-Mart’s founder and patriarch, grew up in a world where retailers played second fiddle to manufacturers. But by the 1970s—Wal-Mart’s “miracle decade,” in which the company cracked the $1 billion sales mark—manufacturers’ dominance was coming to an end.

In one of the most interesting chapters of this fascinating book, Lichtenstein explains just how Walton was able to raise Wal-Mart to such heights. Through an innovative use of technology to track and distribute products Walton transformed the relationship between merchant and vendor. He created his own distribution centers and network and he pioneered a barcode system to keep track of every piece of merchandise. After 1987 Wal-Mart’s communication was further aided by the world’s largest private, integrated satellite communication network. This was nothing less than a “logistics revolution” Lichtenstein tells us, and it allowed Wal-Mart to put the squeeze on its manufacturers and suppliers, employing this wealth of new data to “leverage their enormous buying power.” This ability to pressure manufacturers and suppliers was one of the major reasons the company could offer such low prices and it remains Wal-Mart’s major advantage in the global marketplace.

Having clearly established the logistical innovations that aided Wal-Mart’s growth, Lichtenstein’s chapter focusing on the role of China comes across brilliantly. Initially attractive to Wal-Mart because of its “stable currency, developed infrastructure, political reliability, and compliant workforce,” China is now crucial to Wal-Mart’s continued success. But Wal-Mart’s innovative methods to pinch producers and suppliers have created a nightmare for workers and labor standards in China. As the author explains, “an excruciating squeeze on all of its [Chinese] suppliers” has produced “a cascade of social pathologies that corrupt and distort every supply chain relationship: between the prime Wal-Mart vendor and its subcontractors, between factory inspectors and factory management, and between the production supervisors and the young female workers who compose the overwhelming bulk of the factory workforce.” So, during high-production season in China’s Guangdong Province, subcontractors producing Wal-Mart goods regularly require “seven-day workweeks and eighteen-hour workdays.” Lichtenstein makes crystal clear the horrifying image of a “vast new universe of sweatshops that fill the production end of the Wal-Mart supply chain.”

Although highly original information is packed into every chapter of The Retail Revolution, more familiar to observers of Wal-Mart will be Lichtenstein’s chapters on the company’s conservative and male-dominated corporate culture, its ties to right-wing political and religious movements, and its unabashed and unwavering attempts to keep out labor unions. Those keeping track of Wal-Mart in the news will also be familiar with the stories Lichtenstein tells of the union and community groups’ challenges to its expansion into Southern California, Chicago, and Maryland.

However, Lichtenstein captivates the reader by placing these well-told stories alongside Wal-Mart’s attempts to expand internationally. According to Lichtenstein, while the company has been enthusiastically embraced in many parts of Latin America and East Asia, Wal-Mart has run into roadblocks “in nations where either politics or a tough regulatory environment robs the company of the capacity to slash labor costs or build a new generation of suburban stores.” In the United Kingdom, for example, Wal-Mart has had considerable trouble while in Germany, where the company failed to grasp the significant differences in political culture, it has experienced “outright failure.”

Lichtenstein concludes The Retail Revolution by asking the reader to consider the future for Wal-Mart and what an opposition movement might be able to yield. Lichtenstein suggests that the decline of the labor movement and Wal-Mart’s hostility to unionism “has reawakened interest in what progressives and New Dealers used to call ‘the labor question.’” “On the agenda” for progressives and labor activists today “is not so much a struggle specifically against Wal-Mart, although that is well under way. In the end, it is Sam’s World, the one in which people are compelled to live under economic and psychological duress, that needs to change.” Lichtenstein predicts “a day of reckoning” for Wal-Mart, at home and abroad.

Bethany Moreton adopts a different approach to Wal-Mart that focuses instead on the region and the people that produced the company. Although To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the company, Moreton aims to do even more. She seeks to reclaim the people of Wal-Mart country from historical and political irrelevancy. Moreton makes a case for placing these people, especially Wal-Mart Moms (the white, rural women who worked and shopped in the early Wal-Mart stores) at the center of the political and economic changes in the last three decades of American history.

In a surprising and interesting argument, Moreton claims that the people of Arkansas, the original Wal-Mart country, held tightly to their 19th century populism, and that this political and cultural legacy actually helped facilitate the rise of Wal-Mart from the populist heartland. This shouldn’t be so surprising, Moreton argues, if we recognize that populists “were not purely hostile to business or bigness.” They proposed farmers’ cooperatives and producer’s monopolies over the farming sector, improved infrastructure, and they favored the idea of “federal resources for a favored segment of the polity, the virtuous farmers.” Thus, Moreton argues, the “fragmented legacy of Populism” facilitated the rise of “the mega-corporations of the Sun Belt.” Demands for the state to underwrite regional development and concern about keeping resources local all “contributed to Wal-Mart’s subsequent success” and “helped the world’s largest company win hearts and minds to the cause of corporate capitalism in the old heartland of anti-corporate agitation.”

Other values that workers and customers from Wal-Mart country brought into the stores were even more decisive. As the author puts it, these people, especially middle-aged mothers, “brought rural, Protestant family ideals into the workplace, changing the face of postindustrial America.” Although authority in Wal-Mart stores was clearly vested in men “as men, not as management,” and all women were therefore subordinate, Moreton maintains that Wal-Mart women still had a good deal of power. They “made their priorities known, and management responded accordingly,” thereby being the source of “the original momentum” for “a new service ethos” which would “grow to an economic gospel.” Through the “relationship between customers and clerks, the people in early Wal-Mart stores taught management how to function in the new economic niche it was creating.” This was the “ethos of service . . . a new ideological basis for valuing work and for explaining the radical inequalities it produced.”

Moreton intends this argument to be a response to journalists and scholars like Thomas Frank who fail to fully understand what happened in Wal-Mart country. The women and men of Wal-Mart were not duped into placing social and religious concerns before economic needs, nor were they simply exploited workers who were too stupid to realize it. According to Moreton, Wal-Mart shoppers and workers helped shape a company and a workplace that met their needs as well as those of Wal-Mart owners and management. Women workers at Wal-Mart “did not automatically claim the identity of ‘worker’ or, indeed, of ‘woman.’ Their own preference was for a different cultural tradition, that of Christian service,” Moreton claims. So, even though the servant model that Wal-Mart moms helped promote offered management a new claim to authority and even though it solidified patriarchy in the workplace as well as the home, it also offered female service workers a new source of respect and it ensured greater participation by husbands at home. This was, according to Moreton, an acceptable compromise for Wal-Mart women.

In addition, To Serve God and Wal-Mart tells the story of the simultaneous rise of the New Christian Right, ascendancy of free-market ideas, and growth of Wal-Mart as an international corporation. Finding many points of intersection between these three stories, Moreton argues that Wal-Mart country became, through the direct support of Wal-Mart, Inc., the home of Christian free enterprise, a movement that fused religious and economic ideas to evangelize for free market capitalism.

In the early-1970s, the United States was experiencing the political and economic tremors that would cause the New Deal state and New Deal liberalism to collapse. Wal-Mart and the people of Wal-Mart country played an important part in this process, Moreton observes. Contributing to the growing “prestige of the market,” Wal-Mart and the Walton family provided “a highly productive laboratory of free-market faith during the 1970s and 1980s.” By introducing a free market educational campaign among its management as well is in regional Christian colleges, Wal-Mart helped plant the seeds that would grow into the neoliberal “Washington consensus.” Wal-Mart became the main benefactor of conservative Christian colleges like University of the Ozarks, John Brown University and Harding University, giving them key financial support when other sources of funding were hard to come by. In return, regional Christian colleges moved economics courses and business departments to the center of the curriculum, promoting a widespread regional embrace of free market ideas and creating ready avenues for future company management. Housed at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri, Students in Free Enterprise, an extracurricular organization that promoted free enterprise ideas among college students, represented an exceptionally “outstanding laboratory for the elaboration and dissemination” of these ideas. In all these ways, Moreton shows, Wal-Mart country was especially fertile ground for the seeds of Christian free enterprise to take root.

The ideology of Christian free enterprise that grew out the careful collaboration between Wal-Mart and conservative Christian colleges had an important impact on the course of economic globalization, particularly as it would affect Latin America. Moreton demonstrates how this movement tapped into an evangelizing spirit that extended south of the border to Mexico and Central America. Offered Walton Scholarships, Latin American students came to Sun Belt Christian colleges to receive training in the virtues of free market capitalism as well as evangelical Christianity. When they returned to their home countries, these Walton Scholars could be depended upon to help establish international branches or at least spread the gospel of free enterprise.

To Serve God and Wal-Mart is a fascinating and useful work of US cultural and economic history. Moreton adds much to our understanding of the people of Wal-Mart country leaving the reader with a better idea of the complexity of this group. Even as it answers certain questions, however, Moreton’s work raises others. In her attempt to understand the agency of Wal-Mart employees, Moreton eclipses workplace concerns these laborers must have had, and she fails to fully engage with them as workers, an identity that likely persisted even if in a subordinate position alongside the identity of Christian servant and woman. Nelson Lichtenstein acknowledges the widespread devotion to Wal-Mart that many of its workers had, but he also details the many complaints that these same workers put forth. Where is the anger over being forced to do unpaid work or the anxiety that unusual work hours and limited benefits produced in the workforce? Are we to assume that this was completely erased by workers’ devotion to Christian servanthood? Even in the earliest Wal-Mart workers this seems unlikely.

Another set of questions arises around the ideology of Christian free enterprise that occupies such an important part of Moreton’s story. As Moreton explained the formation and influence of Christian free enterprise I frequently found myself wondering what differentiated this sort of ideology from mainstream market fundamentalism. What made it “Christian” free enterprise? Moreton does show how Southwest Baptist University, the home of Students in Free Enterprise, fused Christian and business education and she clearly demonstrates that free market fundamentalists partnered with Christian fundamentalists to build a powerful movement. Still, what is missing is a careful discussion of the exchange between economic ideology and evangelical theology, without which Christian free enterprise is left looking virtually identical to other forms of free market fundamentalism.

These concerns aside, Bethany Moreton has written an extremely interesting book. Alongside Nelson Lichtenstein’s The Retail Revolution, To Serve God and Wal-Mart adds a great deal to our understanding of US history and the contemporary world. These books should put to rest any question about the relevance of Wal-Mart and the significance of political and cultural movements produced in Wal-Mart country.

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SEIU Executive President Andy Stern, right, shakes the hand of Obama supporter David Pedro on Westlake Avenue in Parma, Ohio on Saturday, Oct. 18, 2008

Kim Moody, U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition: The Failure of Reform from Above, the Promise of Revival from Below. Verso, 2007, 320 pages.

Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path Toward Social Justice. University of California Press, 2008, 324 pages.

As the global economic crisis deepens, the attack on working people escalates. In New York, as in many places in the country, unemployment is shooting up while public services are raising rates and cutting back. The statewide budget crisis has reinvigorated the gospel of austerity, which is being used by management and its political allies to pressure public employees and their unions to accept layoffs and consider wage freezes and contract concessions. At the same time Americans are being forced to pick up the tab for those who have gone bust after many years of gambling on Wall Street. Even the casual observer can see that the crisis facing American workers is extraordinary.

However, as new books by both Kim Moody and Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin demonstrate, this crisis facing working people is not new but is part of a decades-long assault on workers. Moody’s U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition and Fletcher and Gapasin’s Solidarity Divided both make it their purpose to explain the current crisis facing American workers, to analyze the response by the leaders of the American labor movement, and to offer an alternative plan to rebuild labor and restore working class power. Each of these books adds to our understanding of the American worker’s position in the current economic meltdown. Together these books can help organized labor shape an approach that will defend union members and advance the whole working class.

Both books begin by reviewing recent labor history in order to understand how American workers reached the current crisis point. According to Kim Moody, the collapse of American labor began in the mid-1970s, triggered by the repeated global economic crises of the decade. Citing the economic downturn of the 1970s as the origin of labor’s decline is hardly new. However, Moody challenges the traditional narrative that claims deindustrialization and loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States were to blame for declining union density. Instead, Moody argues that the attack on labor and the resulting disappearance of union jobs must be understood as the product of new strategies by capital to increase profitability and competitiveness in the world economy. Beginning in the mid-1970s employers began to implement strategies, such as a reorganization of production and the introduction of new technologies. This drive to reduce labor costs and increase profitability included reducing wages, increasing hours, cutting health care and pension coverage, and fighting unionization. Taken together, this new campaign was responsible for a massive “transfer of income and wealth from the working class to capital and its owners.” This employer assault, Moody contends, rather than the disappearance of American industry was the cause of labor’s decline.

If Moody is correct in his diagnosis of labor’s problems, then he is also correct that “there are strong implications for labor’s response.” The leadership of the American labor movement, the author shows, failed to respond to management’s offensive. For example, during the 1970s and 1980s employers began an extensive process of industrial restructuring, one element of which was shifting production from the industrial Northeast and Great Lakes regions to the politically conservative and mostly union-free Great Plains, southern, and southwestern states. Instead of following this geographic shift and attempting to organize these new regions, labor leaders accepted declining union density, claiming that unionized industrial jobs had been permanently lost overseas.

Failing to fight job loss was symptomatic of a larger failing of union leadership: their widespread acceptance of business unionism. This philosophy, which downplays class struggle and highlights the common interest of labor and capital, found a welcome home among labor leaders puzzling over how to respond to the movement’s decline. Moody shows that business unionism led labor to accommodate employers’ demands, granting greater and greater concessions through the 1980s. But rather than serving to placate profit-hungry capital, these givebacks only increased employers’ appetite for more concessions. And when the rank-and-file pushed against concessions and business unionism, leaders suppressed their resistance, weakening labor’s base that would have been critical to any approach other than retreat. By curbing rank-and-file militancy and by surrendering the workplace to employers, Moody argues, leaders of the American labor movement are largely responsible for the current crisis facing working people.

In Solidarity Divided, Bill Fletcher Jr. and Fernando Gapasin also argue that business unionism is a major cause of labor’s current crisis, but they come to this conclusion from a different angle. Rather than focusing on employers’ drive for increased profits and labor’s failed response, Fletcher and Gapasin review the labor movement from the perspective of the struggle between those calling for an inclusive movement and those in favor of a more exclusive movement.

Viewing twentieth-century labor history from the perspective of inclusion versus exclusion is an interesting approach that yields useful insights. In the early-1900s the chief advocate for an exclusive movement was AFL President Samuel Gompers. Believing that the labor movement existed primarily to serve the interests of skilled craft workers and that labor should limit its goals to workplace demands (to be achieved through an amicable relationship with employers), Gompers was, in the authors’ analysis, the original business unionist. Another labor leader in the same period, Eugene V. Debs, challenged Gompers’ exclusive vision for labor by calling for a more inclusive movement based on industrial unionism and ultimately for the creation of a new socialist order in the United States.

Having established Gompers and Debs as the symbols of exclusion and inclusion in the early labor movement, Fletcher and Gapasin briskly take the reader through the rest of the century. The period between the two World Wars was a time when the movement shifted in the direction of inclusion, incorporating unskilled industrial workers in the newly-formed CIO and drawing greater strength from radicals and left-wing unions. This inclusive stance was not to last, however, as the close of World War II ushered in Cold War unionism and labor leaders collaborated with both employers and anti-Communist politicians to crush the leftist unions and purge radicals from the movement. With the expulsion of the Left, the way was clear for traditionalist labor leaders once again to narrow the scope and boundaries of American unionism. Though the vision of a more inclusive and radical movement was kept alive throughout the 1960s and 1970s by black trade unionists, union reformers, and members of the radical caucus movement, American labor retained the narrow, conservative shape it took during the Cold War. While for Moody labor’s decline came when labor leaders surrendered to employers in the 1970s and 1980s, for Fletcher and Gapasin the descent began in the earlier post-World War II period when leaders purged the Left and abandoned the broader goals that had been embraced by many in the 1930s and early-1940s.

Fletcher and Gapasin and Moody agree that any successful campaign to rejuvenate the American labor movement must abandon narrow business unionism and rebuild the movement from below by empowering rank-and-file union members. A critique of labor leaders’ failure to move away from business unionism and their inability to empower the movement base is the second focus of each book.

By the late-1980s and early-1990s the declining rate of union membership was the main concern of many union leaders. The solution that emerged was the “organizing model,” a critique of past union practices that purportedly favored organizing the unorganized and mobilizing rank-and-file union members. The problem, Fletcher and Gapasin argue, was that what appeared to be a new approach was still a top-down affair. Staff-driven organizing campaigns did not lead to meaningful rank-and-file involvement, and most elements of business unionism remained, despite the apparent inclusivity of the “organizing model.” So when John Sweeney successfully challenged the Old Guard leadership for the Presidency of the AFL-CIO in 1995 and promised to rebuild the movement through organizing, he implemented this flawed system. As a result, the Sweeney administration failed to reverse the downward slide of the movement.

Fletcher and Gapasin demonstrate the Sweeney administration’s failure in a number of areas. The AFL-CIO under Sweeney could have utilized Central Labor Councils (CLCs) as a key tool to build local political and economic power. But the federation failed to harness the power of local bodies like CLCs within a larger nationwide program. In addition, national labor leaders missed numerous chances to support local movements, like that of the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project and the cause of the Charleston 5. These missed opportunities kept labor from promoting rank-and-file empowerment and encouraging stronger ties between the traditional labor movement and social movements rooted in workers’ centers and community organizations. When labor leaders obediently fell in line behind President Bush and supported his “War on Terror” following 9/11, they further weakened the movement, since unconditional support for Bush’s foreign policy meant remaining mostly silent on the economic elements of that foreign policy.

Kim Moody presents a similar critique of the Sweeney years. He agrees that bypassing rank-and-file organizers for “corporate-style campus recruitment” was one of many consequences of Sweeney’s top-down approach. And even this organizing message, lacking in so many ways, was not being carried out by most unions. In fact, the Sweeney administration never strayed far from the old business unionism that “embraced not only capitalism in general but the American system in particular: meaning the belief in persistent growth, the well-being of American business, the belief that high wages are in the interest of U.S. capital and . . . that labor and business should ‘remain partners.’” This philosophy led labor to fail once more when it effectively halted organizing in 2000 to mobilize voters in support of the Democratic Party. Although labor’s setback with the 2000 election of George W. Bush was greater than it would have been if Al Gore had been elected, Moody argues that the Democrats, like business union leaders, cannot be true supporters of working people. Because it receives funding from business and is a steadfast supporter of the capitalist system, the Democratic Party cannot deliver a political program that would effect real change for American workers. The Democrats, like business union leaders, will remain fearful of the one thing workers must turn to: class conflict and mass rank-and-file mobilization.

According to Moody, criticism of the Sweeney administration was reaching a climax by 2003. A new coalition of five unions calling itself the New Unity Partnership called for reorganizing the movement into a series of “mega-unions” that would have jurisdiction over core economic sectors. This drive for consolidation continued when in 2005 the New Unity Partnership morphed into the Change to Win Coalition, led by the country’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and its president, Andrew Stern. To address the labor movement’s dwindling numbers, SEIU and the other Change to Win (CTW) unions called for an even more sweeping program that would consolidate membership and power into fewer unions. CTW also declared that labor should seek increased “political flexibility” that aimed to remove labor as a reliable Democratic supporter and make both parties work to gain labor’s support.

Fletcher and Gapasin demonstrate that the program put forward by Change to Win was, like the plan implemented by the Sweeney team, utterly incapable of dealing with the crisis facing labor. The authors criticize CTW’s “elevating consolidation to a principle” as “inconsistent and strategically shortsighted” since such an approach obfuscates diverse balances of power and pressure points within different industries. The idea of “political flexibility” was also problematic for the movement because, by accepting the limits of the two-party system and moving labor closer to the Republican Party, this form of flexibility would further cement labor’s role as the “junior partner of capital” rather than have the liberatory outcome the CTW leadership foresaw. Despite all the fanfare surrounding Change to Win’s formation and its proposals for a new movement, Kim Moody believes CTW’s maneuvering was simply one more attempt at “reform from above” which, he argues, is the only sort of reform Andy Stern and the SEIU’s “corporate unionism” could offer.

When the SEIU led the Change to Win coalition to break with the AFL-CIO in 2005, it did so without a program that had any more hope to transform the movement than the one Sweeney had overseen. But an even greater problem with the CTW departure was that the vast majority of union members played no part in the decision to split from the AFL-CIO. Both Moody and Fletcher and Gapasin present a powerful case that rank-and-file union members were excluded from the debate that eventually produced the split, a disaster for rank-and-file members who had no input about the future of the movement. It was particularly damaging for women and people of color, who not only were outside of the high-level negotiations amongst white, male union leaders but whose particular concern with ongoing racial and gender discrimination at the workplace was completely ignored in the debate.

There is little doubt that the efforts to restore labor to power in the last decades have failed. The works of Kim Moody and Bill Fletcher and Fernando Gapasin both offer compelling evidence that the reform movements of John Sweeney and subsequently of Andy Stern and Change to Win failed to address the crisis facing American labor. Furthermore, a key reason these efforts failed was because they neglected to involve rank-and-file union members in a meaningful way. One question remains: in the wake of these failures and the ongoing crisis facing labor, what is to be done?

First, Fletcher and Gapasin argue, the labor movement must be reoriented around social justice unionism. Social justice unionism acknowledges the inevitability of class struggle, eschewing narrow business unionism that has so long limited the scope and the potential of the movement. This new social justice framework would broaden the labor movement beyond the workplace, promoting labor-community alliances like those between unions and the North Carolina Black Workers for Justice. Expanding what labor has traditionally considered a “legitimate domain of struggle” stems from the understanding that “class struggle is not restricted to the workplace” and “neither should unions be”; a labor movement (not just a trade union movement) must organize cities rather than just workplaces within cities. Social justice unionism would also prioritize antiracist and anti-sexist practices, not only because racial and gender discrimination intertwine with class oppression but also because attacking racial and gender oppression is one of the best ways to promote consistent democracy within the movement. Finally, social justice unionism would require American workers to engage in a new kind of solidarity with workers internationally, one that recognizes that “working people engaged in class struggle around the world have both strategic and tactical interests in common.”

Fletcher and Gapasin see this reorientation as an urgent project for a “conscious Left force” that would seek to build a “mandate for social justice unionism” among union members. The other implement to carry out this change, the authors argue, should be Central Labor Councils and other local workers’ bodies, without which the rank-and-file can play no significant role in their own movement.

Kim Moody’s proposals for labor’s way forward often complement and even overlap with those offered by Fletcher and Gapasin. Since workers cannot expect meaningful change from above, they must look to themselves and movements at the base for paths forward. The good news, according to Moody, is that we can always count on this resistance at the base; capital’s never-ending drive for greater profits “necessarily compels resistance and struggle in one place after another.” We saw this in the West Coast grocery workers’ strike in 2003, in the New York City Transit Workers Union strike of 2005, and in the nationwide immigrant protests, work stoppages, and student walkouts in 2006. Resistance and struggle at the base will also inevitably spring up whenever union leaders fail to defend the membership from employer attacks or when leaders attempt to exclude the rank-and-file and stifle dissent.

The movement then, needs to fashion strategies that will direct this willingness to struggle in constructive ways. Like Fletcher and Gapasin, Moody calls for a more inclusive movement that would work closely with workers’ centers and “non-majority” and “pre-majority” unions. Since, as Moody has demonstrated, a significant industrial base remains in the United States, labor must once again target industrial workplaces and no longer settle for service industries. This will require organizing the South, which will force labor to draw upon “pockets of unionism,” workers’ centers, and other resources that already exist. Furthermore, if the movement is ever able to harness the capacity of rank-and-file workers to engage in creative struggle, it cannot ignore union democracy. When unions are run by their members, they will reflect the interests of the rank-and-file. An active and empowered base is the only way labor will be capable of exercising power. The broad goal, according to Moody, should be “social movement unionism” which would require a radical reorientation of the way unions function both internally and externally.

What, then, should union members do with these insights? The answer depends on one’s position within the labor movement. Rank-and-file members should remember that without radical union democracy in which they run their own union, they will never see the change they are seeking. Union leaders need to discard business unionism, accept the inevitability of class struggle, and construct an inclusive movement that is led from the base. Both union leaders and rank-and-file members must reorient the movement around social justice unionism, seeking to bring together a mass convergence of workers’ organizations (both traditional and non-traditional.)

The way forward for working people depends on a mass mobilization at the very base of the movement. As Moody and Fletcher and Gapasin have shown, organized labor can play a crucial role in this process.

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What would happen if all graduate students, adjuncts, and other “contingent workers” at CUNY decided to withhold their labor for a week? How would CUNY continue operating if these so-called “part-timers” took a week-long work holiday? With graduate students and adjuncts teaching more than half of the classes at CUNY, business as usual would be impossible. Although a work stoppage would no doubt receive stiff resistance from the university administration, especially if we were found in violation of the Taylor Law, this much would be clear: CUNY cannot function without us.

But why bring this up now? CUNY has long been reliant on graduate student and adjunct labor, so what’s new? The answer is that the historic events of this May Day, the international workers’ day, has provided a new context in which to understand our status and struggles as workers at CUNY. On May 1, when members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) shut down all 29 West Coast ports in a labor strike against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they took a historic step for labor. And when Iraqi dockworkers joined the strike this action became even more significant. This May Day action by American and Iraqi workers provided valuable inspiration and a tremendous example for all workers including CUNY graduate student and adjunct faculty. Their one day work stoppage was an acknowledgement that all the marches, protests, meetings, phone calls and other efforts to end the war have not worked. As Jack Heyman, an officer of the ILWU said in a recent interview, this was an action aimed at “raising the level of struggle from protest to resistance.”

The ILWU strike is not the only recent May Day labor action that can inspire us. In Spring 2006, as part of the massive resistance against proposed legislation that would have made it a felony to be undocumented, immigrant workers also carried out a historic May Day action. A Day Without Immigrants (also known as The Great American Boycott) took place on May 1st, 2006 and witnessed immigrants staying away from work, closing their shops, and skipping school to demonstrate a simple but frequently ignored truth: without immigrants this country cannot function.

So what do these May Day lessons have to offer CUNY graduate students and adjuncts? After all, we’re not in such a strategically important position as the dockworkers, nor are we in a position to have a nationwide movement like immigrants. Still, these two May Day actions can lend clarity to our situation at CUNY. Like the dockworkers and immigrants, we have presented our case and repeatedly protested the injustice of our situation. Will any amount of pleading with the Chancellor result in a fair contract for adjuncts? What will it take for CUNY to realize our value? We have been working without a contract for eight months now and we went without a contract for years before the last one was settled! Perhaps we need to take a lesson from the recent May Day actions and to consider exercising the only real power we have as workers. Perhaps it is time to move from protest to resistance in our struggle for equity and fair treatment at CUNY.

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Over the past month the campaign for graduate student health insurance has grown tremendously. Graduate students are signing up for the campaign in large numbers, calling and writing letters to their representatives in the State Assembly and Senate, and insisting that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein and President Bill Kelly hear our urgent appeal: CUNY graduate students need health insurance now!

The most exciting sign of graduate student mobilization was the rally that took place in front of the Graduate Center on March 18. Scheduled to coincide with Chancellor Goldstein’s afternoon visit, the rally aimed to make sure the Chancellor understood just how serious our healthcare need really is. Thanks to the many graduate students who marched, chanted, and carried signs, and thanks especially to doctoral students Ellen Zitani and Sean Murray who gave powerful speeches at the event. Our message came through loud and clear! Indeed, according to faculty in attendance at the Chancellor’s event inside the Graduate Center, Goldstein devoted the first portion of his remarks to the rally taking place outside and acknowledged the urgent need to fix the healthcare crisis among CUNY graduate students.

Even before the March 18 rally we received welcome news that the CUNY administration was hearing us and was taking steps to address our healthcare needs. On March 13 Chancellor Goldstein and President Kelly released a letter to Assemblymember Deborah J. Glick and Senator Kenneth P. LaValle requesting support for a state-subsidized health insurance system for doctoral students employed by CUNY. This letter was an encouraging sign that CUNY graduate students and administrators are forming a united front for health insurance, particularly because this represented Chancellor Goldstein’s strongest public statement of support yet for this issue.

Graduate students should recognize that the statement by Chancellor Goldstein and President Kelly is very important, and we should be encouraged that the whole CUNY community is starting to move in the same direction on the health insurance issue. Unfortunately, however, graduate students cannot retire from the campaign now that we have a degree of administration backing, significant though it is.

Crucial issues remain unresolved and questions remain unanswered. A major concern for graduate students is the limited scope of the Chancellor and President’s appeal. If CUNY were to implement what Chancellor Goldstein and President Kelly are calling for, doctoral students who are working for CUNY would receive state-subsidized health insurance. But the master’s and doctoral students that are not working at CUNY would remain in exactly the same healthcare crisis. Can we accept a system that would leave so many CUNY graduate students uninsured or underinsured?

In addition, while we should welcome the recent statement of support by Goldstein and Kelly, we need to keep pushing for a greater commitment, particularly from the Chancellor. Now that the Chancellor has pledged his support, we need to know how and when we are going to actually have this system in place and where the money is going to come from. All graduate students should be contacting the Chancellor’s office with these crucial questions. The Chancellor can and must do far more to make health insurance for CUNY graduate students a reality.

There is reason to be hopeful. The graduate student community is mobilized, the CUNY administration has strengthened their support, the campaign is growing in Albany, and those outside CUNY are hearing of our campaign. But until all CUNY graduate students actually receive the health insurance we so desperately need, we must struggle on. We are moving in the right direction, but to keep moving we must keep pushing.

To find out how you can help win graduate student health insurance contact Carl Lindskoog at clindskoog@gc.cuny.edu or come to the next Adjunct Project meeting. Carl Lindskoog is coordinator of the Adjunct Project of the Doctoral Students’ Council.

Upcoming Meetings

• Friday, April 4: 6:30 pm, GC 5409
• Friday, May 9, 5:30 pm, GC 5414

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Don’t look now, but the movement for graduate student health insurance is rapidly gaining momentum. Graduate students are speaking publicly about our lack of health insurance and mobilizing a surprising campaign to achieve this urgent need. Here is what has been happening and what is coming up in the future.

Last semester graduate students initiated a new phase in the campaign for health insurance. Since our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), has made graduate student health insurance a core contract demand, we have been working together on this campaign. Capturing the support of graduate faculty has been a critical element. Last semester the Adjunct Project and the PSC collaborated on a letter to Graduate Center faculty informing them of our campaign and asking them to join us as allies. At the same time we began collecting graduate student and graduate faculty signatures on a petition demanding graduate student health insurance (available to sign online at www.gcadvocate.org). The response to these two initiatives has been tremendous! Many Graduate Center faculty members have pledged their support and graduate students have been enthusiastically collecting signatures on the health insurance petition. At contract negotiations in December, just a short time into our petition drive, we presented CUNY with a stack of petitions signed by more than 700 graduate students and faculty members, and the list of signatures continues to grow.

While our letter and petition campaign represented steps forward for the movement, the most exciting developments have come more recently. On Feb. 8, the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Higher Education held a public hearing examining the Higher Education Commission’s preliminary report. Recognizing that the report failed to address some of our key concerns, Graduate Center students attended the hearing to draw attention to the report’s deficiencies. We testified to the poor treatment and low wages of graduate student and adjunct faculty. We urged the Commission to recognize the need for more financial support for graduate students. But one message at the hearing stood out above all the rest: we need health insurance and we need it now!

Since the hearing we have seen promising signs that our voice is finally being heard. Deborah Glick, chairperson on the New York State Assembly Committee on Higher Education, was receptive to our call for health insurance and could be a key ally in Albany. Thanks to the energetic leadership of Sean Murray, a doctoral student in Musicology, we have also had a meeting with Assemblyman and Chair of the Ways and Means Committee, Herman D. Farrell Jr., and we have the attention of New York State Senators Schneiderman, Lavalle, and Johnson. We are hopeful that once they hear our call, New York State legislators will respond by appropriating money for a health insurance system for CUNY graduate students that will match the existing system available to SUNY graduate students (see Ellen Zitani’s editorial “CUNY Grad Students Deserve the Same Health Insurance as SUNY Grad Students” in this month’s issue of The GC Advocate [page 3]).

It will, however, take more than a sympathetic response by legislators. Success will require that we take advantage of the momentum coming out of the recent hearings and build a movement that is impossible to ignore.

Starting immediately and through the month of March the Adjunct Project and the Health Issues Committee of the Doctoral Students’ Council will be implementing a new phase in the campaign for health insurance. First, we will facilitate a letter-writing campaign and a series of call-in days to push for action by New York State legislators. Second, we will be working with Graduate Center Professor Stanley Aronowitz and other faculty members to continue to build coalitions with Graduate Center faculty. Third, we will continue to collect signatures on the health insurance petition. And finally, we will organize a series of events to protest our lack of health insurance and rally support for the campaign.

We may be on the verge of achieving graduate student health insurance, but we need a strong push to put us over the edge. Please join us to achieve this important goal. We can’t do it without you!

Upcoming adjunct project meetings

• Friday, March 14: 5:30 pm, GC 5489
• Friday, April 4: 6:30 pm, GC 5409
• Friday, May 9: 5:30 pm, GC 5414

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Who is the adjunct project?

Kate Griffiths, Anthropology Program:

I’m getting involved with the Adjunct Project and the PSC contract fight because I’ve seen that when union members take that role seriously and get involved in our unions, exciting things can happen and problems can get solved. I also particularly want to help build relationships with our undergraduate students, because that can have a big impact on a contract fight and it can be great learning opportunity for students.

When I was an undergrad, I helped out on a contract fight for clerical workers at my university. Student support helped win one of the best contracts the union had ever negotiated, despite lots of pressure from the administration. At the time I was patting myself on my back for my altruistic student activism, but by the end of the five year contract, my partner was a full-time clerical worker and union member. The raise I’d helped win ended up in my bank account! I wouldn’t mind having that happen again.

Nichole Stanford, English Program:

I had an inkling that universities’ increasing reliance on the adjunct system was unjust, so I got involved with the Adjunct Project to learn more and find out how I could help change things. Attending the Friday meetings, I learned that it was much worse than I thought: adjuncts comprise 60-65% of the teaching force at CUNY, but make less than half of the salary of full professors (salary for a full professor at CUNY ranges from $56,664-$102,235, while an adjunct teaching full time [four courses/semester] receives a starting annual income of $24,644).

Through the Adjunct Project, I had a chance to work together with a group of volunteers to undermine the adjunctification of CUNY by creating “Equity Curricula,” an in-class presentation designed to make students aware of the politics going on in their education – and we made sure Chancellor Goldstein knew we were doing it too.

I plan to continue working with the Adjunct Project to expand our resources for new adjunct teachers (who are often tossed into classrooms with no teaching experience or pedagogical background). We currently maintain a blog for new teachers at adjuntlifeline.blogspot.com, and we invite questions and topic requests.

Jesse Goldstein, Sociology Department:

Before coming to CUNY, I received an MA from a school with a really active graduate student and teaching faculty union. The experience had a significant effect on me, and made me realize how important it was, and will increasingly be, to organize against the slow and steady corporatization of the university. I joined the Adjunct Project last year, hoping that it could be a place where these issues are raised, both at the GC and in the PSC. Right now it feels like the Adjunct Project is slowly gaining momentum, with more regular meetings and a series of initiatives planned for the semester, and I’m happy to be a part of that process.

Jennifer Gaboury, Political Science Program:

I’m involved with the Adjunct Project because I believe in education and social justice. When I’ve come to CUNY to study politics and learn how to be an educator, to not get involved in the fight to improve working conditions for adjuncts and fellows doesn’t make sense to me.

The modest gains that adjuncts have had in past years, such as health insurance and tuition reimbursement for some and the paid office hour, came in large part from the hard work of adjuncts who preceded us. There is so much work to do around issues of adjunct equity that we should be in this not only for ourselves but for those who will follow us.

This spring, I’ll be helping organize an event on the Taylor Law with participants from other NYC unions. The statute, passed in 1967, makes it illegal for municipal employees and their unions to cause, instigate, encourage, or condone a strike.

The obstacles we face are the same for all city workers and this forum could be the first of many efforts to find ways to work together to overturn this unjust law.

Michael Fisher and I will be surveying adjuncts and fellows in order get a better picture of things like how many courses people are teaching, how much paid labor they perform beyond that to pay the bills, and which issues they would make priorities within the PSC and the Adjunct Project. In the absence of such data, it’s been easy for some folks to minimize the difficulties many people who are committed to teaching as an adjunct face, including outside paid work that essentially subsidizes the CUNY system.

Carl Lindskoog, History Program:

From my first semester of teaching at CUNY I began to understand the conflicting feelings that so many adjuncts have toward the work that they do. On the one hand, I found teaching to be extremely exciting! Exploring ideas with my students, I discovered, gave me great joy and satisfaction. On the other hand, it quickly became clear that I was not being fairly compensated for the immense amount of time and energy I was putting into my work.

The few benefits and little job security I received as an adjunct further increased my feelings of perplexity. As I became aware how widespread the adjunct system at CUNY was, and how egregious its abuses were (especially for the many long-serving adjuncts), my perplexity turned into frustration and anger. It was my conflicted response toward my new work experience, as well as my hope for change, that motivated my first involvement with the Adjunct Project.

I have stayed involved with the Adjunct Project, and have served as its coordinator for the last two years, because I continue to be outraged by the abuses we suffer as adjuncts at CUNY. The vast reliance on “contingent labor” at CUNY and at American colleges and universities in general, is an even greater cause for concern, since the adjunct-labor system increasingly imperils any hope we as graduate students have for future academic work that is secure and well-paying.

But outrage and frustration alone would probably not have been enough to determine a significant degree of participation on my part. Hope that we can improve the system has also been a critical element for me, and I remain hopeful that we can attain the changes we need which will allow us to do the work we so enjoy without having to experience the indignities we now endure. Without an effective effort to correct these abuses the university will never be the just and equitable place we want it to be, nor will there be much future for young academics seeking secure, tenure-track employment. Most importantly if there is no hope for improving the system for adjuncts, we can never reconcile the conflict that unfortunately accompanies the meaningful and satisfying work we do.

What is the adjunct project doing this semester?

The purpose of the Adjunct Project is to be a resource for graduate student-workers and to empower adjuncts, GAs, and fellows to achieve an equitable and just work experience at CUNY. This semester we aim to build upon earlier campaigns and adopt new initiatives toward this end.

Adjunct Week of Action

One central project for this spring will be to build upon the Campus Equity Week campaign that the Adjunct Project created last semester. Last fall, as part of the nationwide Campus Equity Week, CUNY graduate students and adjuncts implemented “equity curricula,” an innovative technique to teach our undergraduate students about our labor experience at CUNY. We received a tremendous response, which encouraged us to continue to build alliances with our students so that we can work together toward a more just and equitable university for them and for us.

This semester, in addition to continuing to teach our students about the labor system at CUNY, we will elevate the profile of the campaign by featuring coordinated teach-ins and other activities in an Adjunct Week of Action to take place in mid-April.

Contract Campaign

Of course contract negotiations continue between the Professional Staff Congress and CUNY, so another part of our work for this semester will center on the contract struggle. One item on the table that is especially important to us is the provision of a state-sponsored health insurance plan for Graduate Center students. Although we hope the new contract will deliver other sorely-needed items like a movement toward pay equity, the obtainment of health insurance for graduate students will be a key objective in our support of the contract campaign.

Organizing Drive

Through our work in the last few semesters it has become increasingly clear that we cannot achieve all we hope for without a greater degree of organization and involvement. Without an active and involved adjunct and graduate student population, CUNY will not take our key demands seriously at the bargaining table.

Likewise, without a much greater level of union membership and action among graduate students and adjuncts, union strategy and priorities will not reflect our concerns as much as we feel they should. The good news, however, is that graduate student-workers are increasing their role in the union and thus strengthening their power within the PSC as well as within CUNY. This semester we will rapidly increase this growth by mounting a semester-long organizing campaign, the goal of which will be to sign up the majority of graduate student-workers and to significantly increase the number of active members.

Taylor Law Forum

Finally, since we realize that low levels of involvement and union membership are not the only factors limiting our power within the university, we hope to initiate a process that will eventually remove some of the legal obstacles that stand in our way. The Taylor Law, a New York State law that makes it illegal for unions of public employees to engage in strikes, is a major obstacle that inhibits advancement for all faculty at CUNY, part-time and full-time alike.

With this in mind, we hope to reopen discussion about how to operate in the face of this constraint, and how to move toward repeal of this legal obstacle.

Our goal is to organize and host a public forum with a wide range of participation by public employee unions, in order to initiate this crucial process.

How can I get involved with the adjunct project?

Here are three easy steps to join your fellow graduate student-workers in the campaign for a more just and equitable university:

1. Join the Adjunct Project listserv (by sending a signup request to clindskoog@gc.cuny.edu) and sign a union card (yellow for adjuncts, green for Graduate Assistants, and Grad. Fellows.) Union cards are available for pickup and drop off at the Adjunct Project office (GC 5494.)

2. Attend an Adjunct Project meeting (semester meeting schedule below)

3. Sign up for a particular campaign or propose a new area for Adjunct Project work

Adjunct project meeting schedule for spring 2008

• Friday, Feb. 8th 5:30 pm, GC 5409
• Friday, March 14th 5:30 pm, GC 5489
• Friday, April 4th 6:30 pm, GC 5409
• Friday, May 9th 5:30 pm, GC 5414

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A Response to Barbara Bowen on the New PSC Strategy

On the evening of Oct. 30 I joined approximately one thousand fellow union members at Cooper Union for a mass meeting of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). The centerpiece of the event was a speech in which PSC President Barbara Bowen delivered the union’s new contract strategy (for the full text of Bowen’s speech, go to http://www.psc-cuny.org/BBowenOct30th07.htm).

According to Bowen, the PSC is preparing to mount a multi-contract strategy which will address what it sees as the "three major structural problems of CUNY employment": salary erosion, the adjunct system, and the teaching load. The first phase (which includes the last two PSC-CUNY contracts) accomplished much but did not address these structural problems. Therefore, Bowen argued, these must be the central issues in the upcoming second and third phases of the contract strategy.

According to this contract strategy, in the second phase (which includes the current contract negotiations) the PSC will focus on the first one-and-a-half of the big issues: restoring CUNY salaries and addressing at least two aspects of the adjunct system – job security and health insurance. The remaining structural problems including pay equity for adjuncts will be pushed to Phase III of the contract struggle, or in other words, will not be a priority in negotiations for the current contract.

As graduate students and adjuncts we must think carefully about how to respond to this proposed strategy. On the one hand, this strategy does give priority to two issues that are at the very core of our exploitation – the lack of job security and health insurance for graduate student-workers. By prioritizing these issues the PSC leadership has recognized the urgency and legitimacy of our demands and it appears to be serious in its intent to meet them. Perhaps we have finally achieved the kind of status and power within the PSC that is necessary to deliver real advances at the bargaining table. To hear Bowen proclaim that "the fight for adjuncts is everyone’s fight" and that "the adjunct issue is no longer an ‘adjunct issue’" one would think that we have finally made it, and that the tide has turned in the long struggle for equity within CUNY and within the union!

Unfortunately, there is also reason for graduate students and adjuncts to be much less optimistic when viewing the PSC strategy. Pushing pay equity back to Phase III is a major disappointment for adjuncts and graduate students. By de-prioritizing equity, Bowen told adjuncts and graduate students who have long labored for miniscule wages that it is not yet time to force CUNY to deliver equal pay for equal work. This came as a great surprise to those of us who remembered that PSC’s #1 demand included the following statement: " Inequities of salary must also be addressed so that there is movement toward pay equity for employees in part-time positions and other titles." Many adjuncts and graduate students have expressed outrage in the wake of Bowen’s speech, and understandably so.

We cannot address every big issue all at once, Bowen and the PSC leadership are telling us, and for this reason we must push pay equity to Phase III. In fact, according to Bowen, selecting seniority over pay equity simply reflects the preference of part-time workers at CUNY. However, while the Part-Timers’ Committee of the PSC did make job security one top priority, it did not intend to sacrifice pay equity which has always been another top priority.

Likewise, graduate students have repeatedly said that health insurance and pay equity both rank as equally important demands and we have not authorized the sacrifice of one to achieve the other.

So how should graduate students and adjuncts respond? Should we be grateful that some of our key issues are finally a priority and quietly accept that our other major concerns have once again been brushed aside (at least temporarily)? Now that we apparently have an elevated status within the contract campaign (as demonstrated by certain prioritized issues) does that mean we ought to keep our mouths shut about the strategy’s serious shortcomings? I believe the answer must be no. As my colleague and fellow organizer Abe Walker recently said, "in a climate of austerity, our obligation is not to tame our desires, but to strive towards the maximization of gains."

We must push the PSC to re-prioritize pay equity for this contract, and once they do we must mobilize on an unprecedented scale to force CUNY to meet each of our key demands. Barbara Bowen and the PSC leadership have chosen to prioritize certain demands because they believe that a multi-phase strategy is the most realistic way to achieve real structural change. We can let them know that we will not accept this strategy, but we must also build a contract campaign that forces CUNY to meet all of our contract demands!

If we see significant gains for adjuncts and graduate students in this contract it will be partly because the PSC leadership sincerely shares our desire to address the exploitation of CUNY "part-timers." But even more important will be the tireless self-organizing adjuncts, graduate students, and "part-timers" who continue to fight for their rights. Let’s tell the PSC leadership what we must have in this contract and work with the union to make it happen!

Come to the Meeting

Come to the next Adjunct Project Meeting! Friday, Nov. 16, 4:30 pm in GC 5409.

Food and Drinks! All are Welcome!

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In the mid-1990s something curious happened on college campuses across America. Students began to wonder where their sneakers came from. They wondered who had made their new t-shirts and under what conditions. When they purchased a baseball cap featuring their college logo, what did it mean for the person who had created it?

These students were shocked by what they discovered when they pursued these questions. The apparel found all over their campuses had been created by workers laboring in sweatshops for starvation wages. In response to this startling revelation, they began to organize. They put pressure on their universities to insist upon better wages and working conditions for the makers of the apparel they were buying. In 1998 a group of students formed United Students Against Sweatshops, an organization committed to implementing fair labor standards for the workers producing university apparel. And student solidarity movements of this sort have enjoyed many stunning successes in the last ten years.

These student-activists found the sweatshop system detestable. In addition, they realized that as consumers they were partly responsible for this system. But they also realized that as consumers they were in a powerful position to force a change at the point of production. In places like Honduras and Indonesia workers gained powerful allies when college students made the struggle against sweatshop labor their own.

As adjuncts we can learn much from this history, and we would be wise to recognize the potential power our students can offer us. What are we but grossly underpaid and overworked academic laborers? And what are our students but the consumers of the product that our undervalued labor produces? With class sizes going up, along with the number of disposable adjunct instructors to teach them, the analogy of sweatshops in the classroom does not seem far off the mark. And like the apparel industry, this is a profitable business for universities, as long as it lasts.

But how long will it last? If students were outraged to learn of their role in supporting sweatshops in other countries, they might also be outraged to learn that more than half of CUNY instructors toil for poverty wages and few benefits. After all, this isn’t taking place in some foreign country or behind some barbed-wire fence. It is happening before their very eyes. It might not, therefore, be very hard to enlist their support for our struggle. But to do so, we must let them know what it is we struggle for, and why.

One way we at the Adjunct Project are proposing to do this is by incorporating just such a campaign into our teaching as part of the nationwide Campus Equity Week taking place from Oct. 29-Nov. 2. A biennial event, Campus Equity Week features a series of loosely coordinated campaigns across the United States and Canada, all of which seek to draw attention to the role of contingent labor in the university system. Among the national events taking place this year are film screenings and speakers on adjunct labor, petition drives, parties and, at CUNY, the in-classroom campaign to enlist the support of students.

There are various ways graduate students and CUNY adjuncts can join this campaign. Some graduate student-adjuncts are crafting curricula for their particular discipline. For example, adjuncts teaching composition are having their students compose letters to the administration regarding adjunct equity. History department adjuncts are teaching about the history of academic labor within CUNY and the country. There are many ways to tailor the message of Campus Equity Week to fit your particular discipline.

The Adjunct Project will be coordinating department-specific curricula for graduate students and adjuncts. We will also be distributing a more general presentation that is applicable across disciplines. If you would like to contribute ideas for Campus Equity Week curricula, to know what is available in your discipline or department, or to receive the discipline-neutral presentation, contact Carl Lindskoog at clindskoog@gc.cuny.edu. You can also find curricula and updates on the campaign at the Adjunct Project page located at www.cunydsc.org.

This year CUNY graduate students and adjuncts are taking the struggle for equity to the classroom. By doing so we are initiating new techniques in our ongoing campaign. Let’s take the call for campus equity week to every department and college in CUNY! It’s time to enlist students as our allies in our struggle for equity! n

Don’t miss the next Adjunct Project Meeting: Friday, Oct. 26, 4:30 p.m. GC 5414. Food and Drinks! All are welcome!

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As the academic year begins, some Graduate Center students are facing a college class as teachers for the first time while others are resuming their now familiar role of adjunct teaching. Veteran and first-timer alike, we are all heading back to work. And as we do, we should take a moment to consider how we experience our workplace: the classroom.

As adjuncts, graduate assistants, and fellows at CUNY, do we have sufficient training and resources to equip us to do our jobs well? Can we say that we work under appropriate conditions, that we are offered the appropriate compensation, and that we have the kind of job security and benefits that allow us to fully focus on our teaching? If not, do we have an effective mechanism to redress our work-related grievances? In short, are we empowered workers?

The answer, according to many Graduate Center students I have spoken to, is a resounding no. Most students do not feel a sense of security or empowerment in their job. Instead, they express surprise at being thrown into a classroom with very little training and few resources. They are frustrated by trying to survive on low wages and inadequate benefits; they are bewildered by their precarious hold on a teaching position that may be here today and gone tomorrow. Still, graduate student workers do astonishingly well in these extremely difficult circumstances. We manage to survive on these limited resources, benefits, and wages, but we cannot thrive.

What is it about our work experience at CUNY that forces us to operate in survival mode rather than as truly empowered workers? One significant factor, I believe, is our isolation. Disconnected from each other, we are left on our own to survive. Real empowerment, however, lies in creating meaningful connections with other student-workers and in forming effective graduate student-worker organizations. If our weakness comes from our limited resources and power as individuals, our empowerment must come from our collective activity.

There are many ways we can start to break down the isolation we graduate student-workers experience. The Adjunct Project, as I envision it, can be a key resource to help students connect with other graduate student-workers, to share training and pedagogy resources, and to organize around our collective concerns.

Graduate students can begin to move out of isolation by attending the monthly Adjunct Project meeting where they will meet others who are struggling with the same workplace challenges. They can contact the Adjunct Project to receive information on teaching materials or they can attend the upcoming Panel on Teaching Excellence, another excellent opportunity to meet other graduate students and to receive answers to their teaching questions. Graduate students can even begin to directly work for improvements at the workplace by joining the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) campaign for a new contract. The Adjunct Project has worked hard to ensure that graduate student concerns were reflected in the current PSC contract demands. As a result, the extension of graduate student health insurance among other things is currently on the bargaining table, and graduate students can join the contract campaign to work toward these much-needed demands.

No matter how graduate students choose to participate, each level of increased involvement can lead to lasting and powerful connections with fellow graduate student-workers. True empowerment requires us to seek each other out and to build a lasting organization that will allow us to work collectively towards empowerment in the classroom.

FIRST ADJUNCT PROJECT MEETING OF THE SEMESTER

Friday, Sept. 21 – 4:30 pm – GC 5414. Food And Drinks! All Are Welcome!

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