Everywhere we go
people want to know
who we are
so we tell them
we are the union
mighty, mighty union….

It’s a time of intense learning about human behavior.

By late Wednesday afternoon, you might have thought the helicopters were about to begin evacuations from the embassy roof. Signs posted on every wall and door of my workplace called on students to come to a 6 p.m. Student Union meeting TO DISCUSS A POSSIBLE ADJUNCT STRIKE! A writing student who also works in an administrative office had informed our advanced fiction class that the university would post strike information on the New School web site by 6 p.m., no later. A queue, more like a clot, formed outside my office, blocking the hall as dreadlocked whitekids slouched towards their 4 p.m. classes. It was a line of my importunate colleagues, desperate for information.

What’s the latest? Any news? Any progress? Any hope?

A rumor spread that the Monday, October 31 strike deadline had been postponed.

Not true, I told them. We’ll be bargaining all weekend. ACT-UAW will be on strike starting on Monday if we haven’t achieved a fair contract by then. That means the part-time faculty won’t be teaching–not on or off campus, and not on line, either.

I felt like a midwife reporting on a long and dangerous labor while it was still underway.

Except that the shared birth pains were also my own in this strange collective travail called Getting a Good First Contract.

We’ve been organizing this union since 2002. The New School administration tried every trick in the union busting playbook (white collar division) to keep us out. Now we’ve been bargaining for a full calendar years and management is face to face with the inevitable: make basic improvements in the work lives of the 90% of your faculty who work for you part-time (and who have been functioning all these years as second-class citizens of the academic world). Or have picket lines (not to mention enormous inflatable rats) show up on West 12th Street, wrecking the fall semester and marring the effects of President Kerrey’s pricey “rebranding” effort.

My full-time colleagues, cordial enough, seemed subliminally aggrieved. While their general demeanor was supportive and they’d made up their minds to teach off-site (if at all) in the event of an actual walkout—that being the union “ask” of faculty not in our bargaining unit–this was clearly more uncertainty than they felt they’d signed up for.

When I’d given my spiel (stay tuned, keep fingers crossed), they got down to the real business of begging indulgences.

In the event of a strike, would the Union please establish an hour or even half an hour every day when faculty members could enter the building and go to their offices to retrieve books or check their e-mail? (Look, I said, what are we going do to someone who crosses the picket line saying, I’ve gotta go to my office, don’t worry, I’m not teaching, I’ll be back in half an hour…. “Oh, but I would never cross a picket line unless the union authorized it.”)

Solidarity forever. So long as I’m not inconvenienced.

What about the fall theater production? That’s not a class, after all. Can’t it hold regular rehearsals? A strike is one thing, but it would be a tragedy if the fall production became collateral damage.

If Lysistrata materialized in Washington Square Park and decreed that nobody’s fucking until we have world peace, colleagues like this would besiege her in droves: “Couldn’t I just have a little blow job once or twice a week? Of course I hate war, but….”

We are the mighty, mighty…etc.

Notwithstanding which, a few of my esteemed part-time co-workers, hitherto seemingly stalwart, are finding rationalizations for…not striking.

I phrase it like that on purpose. What with everything that’s going on, I haven’t had much time to figure out my position on the “S” word.

Will I, if it comes to it, yell “scab” at strike-breakers? I don’t like name-calling. It seems to me inherently coercive, the verbal equivalent of fisticuffs when reasoning has failed. Yet I’m seeing how, when it comes to a showdown, one might seize any weapon. Maybe I could restrict myself to the use of “scab” as a verb? At least that doesn’t presuppose an eternal, essential state of the accused, but quite correctly targets a disgusting activity.

Unfortunately, no label can accurately characterize the basic, underlying difficulty: the crying lack of democratic structures, assumptions, and habits at the New School. (These deficits are, of course, entirely reflective of deficient structures, assumptions, and habits throughout U.S. society as a whole.) A massive collective failure to raise our voices in defense of our right to have a say (a big, big say) in the conditions of our daily lives underwrites the incredible combination of passivity and blatant self-interest that crawls out from under the rocks turned over by a strike threat. A worker who crosses a picket line to break a strike may be accurately if indelicately labeled a scab, but what about the worker who won’t devote a single hour to helping organize her colleagues—in many cases can’t even be bothered to attend an informational meeting—yet preaches loudly about what “the union” should be doing? What about the worker who besieges union activists with complaints about his victimization at the hands of management, yet recoils in horror when asked to give a confidential Labor Board affidavit that would support an Unfair Labor Practices charge? What about the worker who rudely refuses to have a brief telephone conversation about the union, treating her hapless (volunteer) colleague like a self-interested salesperson for an irrelevant product?

Most of these freeloaders and underminers will be glad enough to receive the benefits of enhanced compensation and improved job security that our eventual contract—whether or not achieved with the assistance of a strike—is certain to provide. Not a few of them will be at the head of the line to get the union’s help in resolving their grievances the minute we have a Grievance and Arbitration clause in force.

Earlier this week I heard Representative John Conyers on the radio, commenting on the life of Rosa Parks. He recalled that she wasn’t an emotional person when it came to her activism. She didn’t get angry in public. Instead, she was “resolute.”

Over the coming weekend of intensive bargaining, right up to the Monday strike deadline and after, this adjective expresses my strongest wish for myself and my “fellow-workers”: may we be resolute.