“We are prepared to do whatever it will take to save our program.”

This article comes to us from Caroline Kovesi by way of the Halifax Media Co-op.

Note: Since this article was published on February 8, the Women’s and Gender Studies steering committee has received confirmation from Mount Allison’s administration that the “WGST program will receive a 12-month McCain Postdoctoral Fellowship to sustain the program through the 2016/17 academic year.” Also, the university has promised to discuss the program’s “long term sustainability” in the coming year.


SACKVILLE, NEW BRUNSWICK — I met my first “real feminists” in my first year at Mount Allison. I soon came to the conclusion that if two of the professors I admired most were feminists and I was not, maybe I was missing out on something important. I audited my first Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) class in the summer after first year because I knew I would be unable to take this course at Mount Allison due to the limitations of my particular degree. By the end of the summer I not only realized that I had long held feminist values, but that I was proud of this aspect of my identity. I became comfortable presenting myself to the world as a “real feminist” too.

It was in my WGST course where I first learned why there is no such thing as reverse racism. Why asking women to take self-defence classes is not an appropriate response to pervasive rape culture. How hegemonic masculinity relates to the military industrial complex. How police do not make everyone feel safer. Afraid to show my ignorance in sociology classes back home, I found a safe space in my WGST class to ask questions about opinions I was embarrassed to hold. I continue to employ concepts I was introduced to then in my sociology classes today.

Last Monday, Mount Allison’s WGST Acting Director Dr Lisa Dawn Hamilton e-mailed minors registered in the program following a meeting with the Dean of Arts, Dr Hans vanderLeest. Dr Hamilton had been informed that there was no budget allocated to the program for next year, and that consequently, none of the four core WGST courses would be offered either. Since then, students and faculty have mobilized and expressed collective outrage about the decision.

An online petition has garnered 6800 supporters, the WGST Student Society organized a letter writing campaign, started the hashtag #WGSTcuts on social media, and protested a meeting of the Board of Regents with the participation of over 50 students. The program’s Steering Committee has developed a website dedicated to the cause, faculty and librarians of Mount Allison have published an open letter to the administration, letters of support have poured in from universities across Canada, and the story has been picked up by CBC, CTV,Huffington Post, The Coast, Buzzfeed, and the New Wark Times.

In response to the media coverage and community members’ vocal dissent, Dean vanderLeest has since conceded to funding two core WGST courses next year through two part-time stipends. The Director of Marketing and Communications, Robert Hiscock, and Dean Hans vanderLeest have issued statements and compiled a Frequently Asked Questions page in an attempt at damage control, insisting that the program cannot be cut without due process – which has not yet been undertaken – and that no budget has been set at present.

However, neither students nor faculty have been fooled. Both assert there is a hidden agenda that intends to starve the program of funding in order to drop its enrolment – which has tripled in the past two years. This would then provide the administration with “evidence” that could be used to justify the formal elimination of the program. Dr Hamilton has made it clear that two stipends will not suffice – neither making the program sustainable nor exposing WGST students to enough feminist theory to accurately represent a WGST minor.

This administrative move comes at a time when issues relating to gender, sex, and sexuality are increasingly coming to the fore. Neither the Dalhousie dentistry scandal nor Saint Mary’s University’s orientation rape chants have become any less concerning or faded from our memory.

Last year, CBC reported that, “Mount Allison University has the second highest rate of sexual assault reports among Canadian universities and colleges over a five-year period”. Though this may be indicative of students feeling empowered to report these cases, an anonymous Google form set up to collect students’ and faculty’s anonymous testimonies of sexual assault, harassment, misogyny, and gender or sexual identity-based discrimination on Mount Allison’s campus suggest otherwise.

Professors discuss experiences of “sexual harassment and homophobia coming from high-level administrators, often in public venues, in front of other colleagues and staff,” the campus bar is described as “a terrifying place to be a woman at Mount Allison,” more than one student reports institutionalized trans-phobia, and students assert they have been discouraged from pursuing recourse following cases of sexual assault.

It is clear that there is a very real and immediate need to offer WGST courses in order to help students understand these situations and their root causes. There is also an unmistakable connection between a campus that enables (and arguably at times engenders) such a culture, and the devaluation of the WGST program.

The institutionalization of sexism in higher education has been well documented. As a young woman who intends to make a career in academia, I am well aware that the odds are stacked against me. I am more likely than my male counterparts to find myself stuck in a vicious cycle of precarious contract positions, as well as to be perceived as less capable and intelligent than them when competing for the same positions.

Upper level administrators like Deans and University Presidents who make decisions about tenure, university policy, and university governance are statistically more likely to be male. Feminists use the term “patriarchy” to describe these systems that create, reinforce, and replicate male privilege and power. Mount Allison’s President, all three of our Deans(although one is currently being replaced by a female faculty member), our Vice-President,Finance and Administration, and fifteen of twenty-four Board of Regent members are male.

In other words, it is primarily men who have decided that we no longer have funding available for our WGST program. While our president receives an annual salary between $305 000 to 329 999 – comparatively, the Prime Minister of Canada earns $327 000 – we are told that the budget does not have room for our WGST program, despite its core courses having been taught by a full-time faculty member for 14 of the past 16 years the program has been in existence.

This, on top of the fact that there are currently 192 students enrolled in WGST classes, is suspicious.

Not only does a move like gutting – and then likely eliminating – a WGST program contribute to the replication of power relations both within and outside of a higher education setting, it also symbolizes the kyriarchical priorities of the university. It is clear that the university places little value on the voices, histories, experiences, criticisms, and challenges of women and other marginalized groups.

It is difficult to imagine a discipline in the Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math (STEM) field would ever be placed in a similar situation or be expected to run a program with half its courses paid for by two stipends.

Students are also currently advocating for an Indigenous Studies Minor at Mount Allison. If the university appears to have no qualms about cutting a well-established and burgeoning program, it is unlikely it will be open to new programs that teach alternative knowledge systems and are needed just as urgently as WGST.

Mount Allison University brands itself as a progressive, small liberal arts college. It was the first university in the British Empire to award a woman a university degree. Their decision to cut – or at least place in an extremely precarious position – the WGST program represents a major leap backwards in its progress and commitment to service, also calling into question their commitment to fostering social justice.

As a woman, when the university announces such a decision and then deliberately misdirects and miscommunicates to students about it, I hear that I am less valued than other members of our community. I hear that a predominantly male administration can undo the work of a woman with an unwavering vision in a single move just two months after her death.

I hear that having the tools to identify intersectional inequalities and inequities in society isn’t seen as necessary to our education. But thankfully I also hear a call to fight, and if the past week bears any indication, I see that many others have heard the same.

We are prepared to do whatever it will take to save our program, fight institutionalized sexism and patriarchy, and show the world that we have an arsenal full of lessons taught by programs like WGST ready to employ. On the first day of my WGST class three years ago, my professor had us listen to Ani DiFranco’s “Alla This.”

I leave you with the following lyrics from her song:

“I will look at everything around me/And I will vow to bear in mind/That all of this was just someone’s idea/It could just as well be mine”


Caroline Kovesi is a fourth year student at Mount Allison working towards an honours in sociology and minor in philosophy. She is a mental health advocate, and dedicates much time to organizing and participating in events and campaigns on campus that have a social-justice and anti-stigma focus. She also recently began a blog to explore ideas and experiences related to mental health and illness, accessibility, higher education, disability, feminism, and activism called “for the love of a bear.”

 

Thinking About Education Workers’ Struggles and University Education after Capitalism

In October 2015, the Toronto General Membership Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World hosted the Working for Each Other, Working for Ourselves organizing summit, which brought together revolutionary public service worker-organizers from across Canada and the United States.

The Summit’s opening plenary, “Public Service Workers’ Struggles and Public Services After Capitalism” attempted to begin conversations about what public service work—including education—would look like if capitalism was defeated and a system of social and economic organization that prioritized people’s needs was implemented. Here’s how the panel was introduced:

“This summit is about us all struggling for a better world. We hope it serves as a contribution to the development of a fighting, revolutionary movement of working people that might be capable of overthrowing capitalism and systemic oppression once and for all.

It is easy to articulate what we are against. We are against the violence of the system in which we live – and the environmental destruction, poverty, misery, and humiliation it produces. In the words of the preamble to the IWW’s constitution, ‘There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of the working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.’

The preamble to the constitution also asserts: ‘It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for everyday struggle with capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.’

The focus of this summit will be on developing the skills necessary to build a movement capable of ‘doing away with capitalism.’ However, we also want to take some time to consider what, exactly, it is we are fighting for.

We, a small group of revolutionaries, members of a small revolutionary union, could take this time to explain our grand vision of a world in which capitalism has been defeated. Unfortunately for us – and maybe fortunately for you – we don’t know exactly what that future society that we might call the collective commonwealth, or socialism, or what-have-you, will look like. What we do know concretely, is what our own lives and work are like under capitalism, and what we aspire for our lives and work to be in a just society.

So, we have prepared a few short testimonies which explain what it is that we do for a living and why, what some of our issues and grievances are, how we think our jobs would be different if we were part of a larger and stronger movement and what our jobs might be like if we won.“

We’ve decided to post the remarks of one of the panel’s participants, an IWW member involved in the 620 IOC, which publishes ClassRoom.


What is your job?

I’m a teaching assistant at a Toronto university. I’ve taught politics, social science research methods and labour studies courses for 5 years.

What is the point of your job?

I help students develop reading, writing and critical thinking skills. In theory a liberal arts education will expose them to lots of new ideas literature that will help them cultivate themselves as free, creative individuals. Unfortunately, in actual practice, I basically help give my students the skills to get entry-level jobs. There’s not much levelling involved. ­The students who are good at school generally do well and the ones that aren’t don’t. Many of my students are the first generation in their family to get a university education. Most will end up working in jobs that have no relation to what they studied in school.

What are the major grievances/issues?

I really like my job and if it wasn’t for this job I wouldn’t be able to afford grad school. That said, the wages are low. And the neoliberalization of the university means that more and more people like me are going to continue on in academia in low paying and precarious academic teaching jobs.

How would your job be different if you had a fighting union at work and were part of a fighting labour movement?

I have a good trade union. However, it has its limits. If my union was a part of a bigger, broader, fighting labour movement we could conceivably win free tuition. This would be a significant amount of money saved for people like me who pay to go to school and work. It would also mean my students would get to spend more time focusing on school and less time juggling work schedules.

What would your job be like if we won and there was no capitalism?

As a PhD student I study prison labour. I hope that if we win, I would have to find something else to study. My students would be more diverse if certain populations weren’t systematically excluded from university education. But moreover, grading, one of the things I hate the most about my job would be unnecessary. I would get to teach students who are going to school because they want to learn, rather than any other reason—like improving their general chances of getting a job. Instead of being a short 4 year period in some people’s’ lives, university could be something many people do throughout their lives, pursuing education related to the things that interest them regardless of what they do for a living.

How ‘Friedrichs’ Could Actually Unleash Unions from Decades of Free Speech Restrictions

The article below, originally published by In These Times, comes to us from Shaun Richman, a former organizing director with the American Federation of Teachers.


As the spring semester starts up at the City University of New York, union activists continue the painstaking work of preparing for a strike authorization vote. Faculty and staff at CUNY have been working without a contract for over five years. While Governor Cuomo disinvests in the primary college system for working class New Yorkers, management proposes salary increases that amount to decreases after inflation.

The parallels between the struggle to save CUNY and the struggle over the future of Chicago Public Schools are obvious, with one major exception: it is totally illegal for teachers to strike in New York. The last major union to violate the draconian Taylor Law, TWU Local 100, was fined $2.5 million for waging a 60-hour strike that shut down the city’s subway and bus system in 2005. On top of that, the union’s ability to collect dues money was suspended for a year, its president jailed for 10 days and each individual striker was fined two days pay for each one day on strike.

But in an interesting twist, the anti-union Friedrichs v. CTA case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court could actually lay the ground work for making public employee strikes in New York and elsewhere constitutionally protected free speech.

A long history of carving unions out of the 1st Amendment

One could understandably be confused about how a collective protest that involves refusing to work could even be illegal in a country that prides itself on its supposed pursuit of life, liberty and whatnot. How is a strike and picket line not a constitutionally protected exercise of free speech and free assembly? And how is prohibiting workers from striking not a violation of the 13th Amendment’s protection from involuntary servitude?

Early on in our nation’s history, conservative courts treated unions as criminal conspiracies and strikes as interfering with employers’ property and contract rights and with Congress’ responsibility to regulate interstate commerce. Rooted in imported English common law and beginning as early as 1806, these instances of what early unionists derided as “judge-made law,” should be regarded as a betrayal of the American Revolution.

As detailed in William Forbath’s Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement, unions’ legislative agenda during the 19th and early 20th century was basically to get the government and courts out of labor disputes. Unions sought to have labor legally defined as “not a commodity” and to restrain judges from issuing injunctions against pickets and boycotts, with mixed results.

By the time the National Labor Relations Act was passed to encourage and regulate collective bargaining, its framers recognized that if they rooted the Act’s authority in the 1st Amendment, it would not be found constitutional by the conservative Supreme Court. And so labor rights in this country are rooted in the Interstate Commerce Clause, which is why they’re so wonky.

Public sector unions, whose ability to function is immediately at stake in the Friedrichs case, are not covered by the federal labor act. Instead, many states passed laws that are modeled on the NLRA. But with a crucial difference: when bosses get to pass laws that apply to their employees (which, if you think about it, is exactly what public sector labor law represents), they’re guaranteed to make it even more unfavorable than private sector rules.

Unsurprisingly, many states make strikes by public sector employees like the CUNY faculty and staff totally illegal, or else severely restrict them. Many states also make many union demands illegal, either by statute or by judicial decisions. TheFriedrichs case, by inserting public employees’ 1st Amendment rights into collective bargaining could give unions a very useful tool for reversing many anti-union measures that are on the books.

If collective bargaining becomes political speech…

Public employees have actually enjoyed a degree of free speech protections at work for some time, making them the only workers in America who do. Remember, the 1st Amendment only prevents the government from restricting a citizen’s rights of free speech and assembly. Since public employees work for the government, their employer is constitutionally forbidden from restricting or coercing their political speech.

Historically, this has been limited to actual political speech (supporting a candidate, wearing a political button, speaking in the press and the like). Unions have carefully kept their political funds and activity separate from the agency fees that they collect from the public employees they are required to represent by law. Right-wing efforts to fight the ability of unions to collect dues and fees by arguing that the political activity of public employee unions is compelled political activity have been decisively rejected since 1978.

So, in order to overturn this long-settled precedent the parties behind Friedrichs—egged on by Justice Alito—are lodging a wildly expansive argument that every interaction that a union has with its government employer is inherently political. Bargaining demands, grievances, labor-management committees, job actions: all of it, goes the Friedrichs argument, is political, thereby making the collection of agency fees compelled political speech.

Let’s think about some of the implications of this argument. For starters, the Taylor law that tells CUNY faculty and staff that they will be fined and their leaders imprisoned if they strike seems clearly to be a coercive restriction on their chosen method of political speech. If the Professional Staff Congress is hit with any penalties for either planning or going through with a job action, one hopes they can time their appeals to reach higher level courts after the Friedrichs decision comes down in June.

Across the river in New Jersey, another state with strong unions and shitty labor law, the scope of items that unions are evenallowed to raise at the table is restricted by statute and a number of horrible court decisions.

One area of restriction is a strong prohibition on pattern bargaining (i.e. one bargaining unit aligning its demands with another bargaining unit’s settlement). The most farcical example of this is Rutgers University, where management habitually creates new job titles that they argue fall outside the bounds of the existing faculty bargaining unit.

When the union organizes these new groups (adjuncts, post-docs, summer and winter instructors), management threatens legal hellfire and judicial damnation when the union seeks the same rights and benefits for all their members. The union could, however, propose one contract, comprehensive of all of the job titles it represents, in the next round of bargaining and tell the state university to go ahead and take them to court when they stick to their guns.

More galling: teachers unions in NJ are prohibited from even raising demands around class size and staffing levels. I can think of few issues that teachers have more of a burning desire to talk about! But they can’t, at least at the bargaining table.

However, once those bargaining sessions between unions reps and their government employers are redefined by the Supreme Court to be political speech, any law restricting what can be said, what items can be raised, seems to be a restriction by the government on those union members’ free speech rights. Perhaps the New Jerseya Education Association and American Federation of Teachers New Jersey locals should celebrate their new rights with a coordinated campaign to lower class sizes across the state?

Perhaps most deliciously, the right-wing Friedrichs effort is in direct opposition to Gov. Scott Walker’s offensive agenda in Wisconsin. Walker’s anti-union Act 10 did a lot of nasty things to public employees, some of which will continue to stand. It took away payroll deduction and forced unions to annually recertify as the collective bargaining agents for their members.

But what mostly caused union membership to plummet in the state was that certified unions were prohibited from bargaining over anything of substance; not just raises that exceed inflation, but duties, hours and work schedules and every other everyday issue that workers want to have a voice at work about.

If Justice Alito gets his way, then Scott Walker is suddenly massively violating the free speech rights of Wisconsin public employees. I humbly suggest that every union still certified demand to bargain the day after the decision. They could throw their old contracts on the table and sue every school board and state agency that refuses to discuss those items. I’d also suggest that they begin drawing up some new picket signs.

Labor needs a Plan B

The hubris and general stupidity of Justice Alito—who tried and failed to get this ruling in last year’s Harris v. Quinn—and the vast right-wing conspiracy of union-busters who raced this case through the courts in less than a year perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. They just want to kill the unions, and they’re used to getting their way.

But, in their narrow-minded pursuit of denying unions in the public sector agency fee, they are mindlessly trying to just hand to us free speech rights that conservative jurists and politicians have studiously avoided granting to union efforts for over two centuries.

Unions’ and their allies’ public messaging against the Friedrichs assault has focused on how it is an assassination on the labor movements, a nakedly partisan attempt to weaken a field operation that helps turn out votes against the GOP and how it will deprive many thousands of working people—particularly women and workers of color—from a pathway to a better life. And all of that is true. And unions have put together a very robust defense against Friedrichs, with an impressive array of supporting briefs, that is right on the facts, right on the legal precedents and right on the politics.

But labor also needs more people engaging in a debate about what, in theory, could come the day after an adverse Friedrichsdecision. That shouldn’t be limited to toying with the legal implications of the Court’s logic, but also what kind of mobilizations, boycotts and—dare we dream?—strikes could be launched in the days and weeks after.

Outlets like In These Times are great for offering alternative perspectives that contribute to a broadening debate. But I sure as hell hope that the unions that have the most to lose from a “bad” Friedrichs decision, and who have done most of the heavy lifting on winning in court, are also putting together alternative war rooms to figure out Plan B.

The more that we visibly and loudly plan and prepare our response, and calculate the potential upsides of a “bad” decision and maybe (some of us) even get a bit excited about the chaos we can create post-Friedrichs, the more likely that five members of the Court might realize that Alito is pushing for them to make a very big mistake. But if the Supreme Court goes ahead and tears up the current labor law regime in a nakedly partisan act in the middle of a presidential election, then we had better be prepared to create the chaos that the Court is inviting.