[Englecturers] AFSCME strike on Thursday

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

Dear Colleagues,

 

Some of you may already know about this matter because you're on the
Concerned Faculty list-serve, but for those who aren't I just wanted to
direct your attention to a one-day system-wide strike by AFSCME (the service
workers' union) that will take place this Thursday, April 14, and to urge
you to support it in any way(s) you can.  I myself will be on a plane headed
for South Bend, Indiana that day so I won't be able to participate in
person, but I will certainly be there in spirit and am hoping that this
communication (and others like it) will encourage many of you to get
involved. 

 

Members of the Concerned Faculty met last Thursday with the leadership of
AFSCME (as well as the leadership of CUE [the clerical workers' union] and
UPTE [the lab and technical workers' union], all of whom are facing an
intransigent UC system that refuses to engage in good faith in collective
bargaining.  In the words of Edna Bonacich (spokesperson for the Concerned
Faculty), "We learned about worker hardships, how a fact-finding group found
in favor of a union's contentions, how some of our employees require food
stamps and to work double jobs [just for basic survival]."

 

AFSCME workers would greatly appreciate our doing one or more of the
following, to express our solidarity with their cause:

1.  Inform students about what is going on, and urge them to join the picket
line. 

2.  Invite union reps to make a brief presentation to your classes.

2.  On the day of the AFSCME strike, come to the picket line yourself.  It
will start at (gulp) 5 a.m., when the first worker shift begins.  There will
be a rally at the bell tower at noon, so that would be a good thing to
attend.  There are other events all day-you can check out their website.

3.  Send e-mails in support of the workers' demands for a living wage to
major campus administrators, including (*especially*) the chancellor.

4.  ***Boycott campus food services for that day, and urge students to do
the same.  Let's show that the entire campus is behind our employees.

 

I'd just like to add here that I believe we should take these actions not
(only) for the service workers but for ourselves as well, in a spirit not
only of worker solidarity but also of enlightened self-interest.  As we've
seen in recent months, ALL of us are having to contend with a profoundly
reactionary, corporatized administration that treats all forms of productive
labor (whether manual or intellectual) with contempt and that privileges
'the bottom line' over all educational and human considerations.  Any blow
we strike for the service (or clerical, or lab) workers is also a blow we
strike for ourselves, and for the values we regularly give lip service to
but all too often fail to act on.

 

One final afterthought:  Those of us who bring politically-progressive
approaches to our treatment of literature in the classroom (via marxist,
postcolonial, critical race and minority studies, etc.) have an opportunity
on Thursday to demonstrate to our students that there actually is (and
SHOULD be) some connection between theory and practice - which just might be
the most important lesson we can teach them.  

 

In solidarity,

 

Carole

      

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucr.edu/pipermail/englecturers/attachments/20050409/30f0ffe2/attachment.html