James Baldwin On The Non-Existence Of The American Worker
In The Fire Next Time (Vintage International, New York, 1993(1962), p. 88), James Baldwin writes: People are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal…but they love the idea of being superior. And...
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Demonizing Organized Labor And The Road To Fascism
The word ‘union’ occurs five times in Jedediah Purdy‘s Jacobin essay ‘How Trump Won.’ On the first two occasions, Purdy invokes unions as part of an analysis of the demographics of Trump voters:...
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The Right Body Language For A Court Appearance
On Wednesday morning, I reported to the New York City Criminal Court to be arraigned on charges of disorderly conduct stemming from my arrest during a civil disobedience protest staged outside the...
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On Voting ‘Yes’ On The CUNY Strike Authorization Vote
Yesterday, like many of my colleagues at the City University of New York I voted ‘Yes’ on our union’s strike authorization vote. (The voting period ends May 11th; at that time, the PSC-CUNY will be...
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A Day In Gaol: Protesting Andrew Cuomo’s Attack On CUNY
Yesterday I, along with many other members of the City University of New York’s faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) participated in a civil disobedience action outside...
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I’m Scared, Therefore I Work
A few weeks ago, I got into an argument–offline, not online–about those two horsemen of the apocalypse that are destroying the American nation, rendering it financially insolvent, and turning the...
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Ending the NCAA’s Plantation Racket
In Kevin Smith‘s Chasing Amy, Banky tries to talk Holden out of his crush on Amy: Banky Edwards: Alright, now see this? This is a four-way road, okay? And dead in the center is a crisp, new, hundred...
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American Workers to Bosses: You’re Always Right
Rebecca Schuman recently noted the case of an academic job applicant who lost out on a job offer because she dared negotiate: [A] job candidate identified as “W” recently received an offer for a...
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Ogling the Antics of the Rich and the Stockholm Syndrome
The New York Times’ Room For Debate features the following question today: Several Academy Award contenders like “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “American Hustle” glorify white-collar criminals and...
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A Tiny Pleasure: Heading Home On Time
Yesterday evening, I took the train to my wife’s place of work at Brooklyn’s MetroTech Center. I was going to drop off my baby daughter at her mother’s office, and then head to the gym to workout. It...
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Procreating in a World With an Uncertain Future
A few days ago, Aaron Bady asked on Twitter: Do people think about climate change when they think about whether or not to have kids? I m genuinely curious. As might have been expected, this sparked an...
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Reflections on a Teaching-Free Semester
I started teaching at Brooklyn College eleven years ago, in Fall 2002. Since then, I have taught a varying course-load per semester, ranging from an onerous three to a manageable two and once, a...
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The ‘Adversarial’ Nature of Unions
One of the strangest objections to the presence of unions in the workplace is that unions make the workplace adversarial, that they introduce conflict into the relationship between the worker and the...
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With Trustees Like These, Who Needs Enemies? Part One
The City University of New York is a public university. Presumably, its Board of Trustees is staffed by those who have the interests of their constituency–students and teachers–first and foremost. Not...
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The Glamorous Life: Waiting Tables on the Upper West Side
In the summer of 1994, broke and increasingly desperate, I roamed New York City, or rather, just Manhattan, looking for work as a bartender. I had worked as one before, in Newark, and hoped that I...
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Michelle Rhee Shoulda Gotten An Education
Late last night, I stumbled across an ‘interview’ with Michelle Rhee (linked to by John Protevi on Facebook). (‘Michelle Rhee Gets an Education,’ New York Times Magazine, 2 February 2013). The comments...
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Narrowing the American Dream to Exclude the American Worker
My sister-in-law works as a labor organizer for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). I’m proud of the work she does and remain resolutely convinced that her...
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Bosses Call For Mass Harakiri In Event of Obama Victory
In what some election observers are terming an ‘extreme, possibly misguided–and certainly un-American in its excessive Japaneseness–response’ to the US Supreme Court’s Citizens’ United decision freeing...
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Camden Can’t Afford Its Police and Its Union Any More
Today’s blog post has little ‘analysis’; all I need do is point. Perfect storms should be ‘admired’ from a distance. When I’m done, let the chants of ‘USA! USA! USA!’ ring out, loud and proud. So, let...
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The CTU Strike: Facile Reliance on Evaluation Won’t Work
Reading responses to the CTU strike has dismayed me: that there is so much hostility directed at teachers and their unions in a country where the path to middle-class success used to be understood as a...
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