the minnesota review n.s. 55-57 (2002)Stacy ThompsonOrganizing the CynicsHuman labor brings dead things to life.
My aim in this essay is to provide a critical overview of the graduate employee unionization movement at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to raise some questions about how the roles of cynicism and fantasy operate in the processes of organizing potential union members and staging direct actions. These concerns have emerged from my involvement in the Graduate Employees Organization (or GEO) over the past two years. I finished my doctoral work at Purdue in 2000 and began teaching as a Non-Tenure Track faculty member (or NTT) in Illinois that fall. At the same time, I joined the GEO and started working as a volunteer and sometime organizer. I will draw on my encounters with the three main constituents of the U of I unionization struggle—graduate employees, undergraduates, and administrators—in an effort to sketch out the structures of the impasses that came to light between these groups, in particular while organizing potential union members, in my classes' discussions of the GEO, and during GEO direct actions. I was particularly struck by graduate employees' and undergraduate students' cynicism and my sense that direct actions on the Illinois campus figured as an effort to traverse a prevalent fantasy in the Champaign-Urbana imaginary, a fantasy of the university as an institution free from exploitation. Uneven development characterizes graduate employee organizing at the University of Illinois: in the early 70s, a group called the Assistants Union fought briefly to improve working conditions for graduate employees; in the late 80s the Graduate Employees' Organization (or GEO) formed but became inactive after achieving a few modest goals; and in the fall of 93, the GEO reformed and has since worked steadily toward union recognition through the two major channels open to it: legal means and pressuring the administration to recognize "voluntarily" the right of graduate employees to unionize. In 95, the GEO became allied with the Illinois Federation of Teachers (the IFT) as well as the American Federation of Teachers (the AFT), which is in turn an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. In this essay, I will focus primarily on the dynamics of labor organizing and the major direct actions that the GEO has staged in the past two years, not only because of my involvement in these activities but because the union has made great progress during this period and in the last few months in particular. Over the past two years, GEO members and supporters have launched a work-in on the University of Illinois quadrangle, a work stoppage that included picketing targeted buildings, and a sit-in in the university's administration building. We also planned and publicized a second work stoppage, which was canceled when it became unnecessary. The work-in, during which we taught classes and held office hours publicly in the center of campus, was calculated as both a show of force and a morale builder for our next action: on November 28 and 29 of 2001, over three hundred and fifty graduate employees and supporters of the GEO walked off the job for a two-day work stoppage. At the conclusion of the action, the administration had not modified its position but continued to stress that graduate students in Illinois have no legal right to unionize (which is currently true) and that it would not be in the administration's or the university's best interests to negotiate voluntarily with a graduate employee union. Consequently, the GEO membership planned another work stoppage for the end of April 2002. In the meantime, to ramp up pressure on the administration to recognize the union voluntarily, roughly fifty GEO members and supporters occupied the Swanlund Administration Building this past March 13 and refused to vacate it until the administration agreed to negotiate with them. The sit-in was timed to correspond with the year's final two-day meeting between the administration and the Board of Trustees. On the evening of March 13, Provost Richard Herman, accompanied by university legal counsel, presented a proposal to the GEO members that was eventually accepted. The agreement "reversed [the administration's] long-standing policy of refusing to negotiate" (A Brief History) and "conceded to a series of ongoing meetings with GEO representatives to determine which graduate employees would be eligible to vote in a union election and [be] covered by a union contract." The GEO membership did not, however, cancel its planned second walkout but, instead, prepared to stage it from April 16 through the 18 if the negotiations did not result in "substantial progress" by April 15. On the evening of April 15, the bargaining committee reported to a GEO general membership meeting that substantial progress had been made, that, in fact, the administration had put a proposal on the table, in the eleventh hour, that would recognize the graduate student employees' right to petition the IELRB (the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board) for a unionization vote and would include roughly half of the graduate employees on campus—including almost all teaching assistants—in the potential bargaining unit. The membership voted to cancel the walkout. A vote to accept the administration's proposal followed shortly, and the ensuing agreement was made public on June 6. According to the press release, the "GEO and University have requested that the IELRB approve an agreement for consent election which contains the agreed upon bargaining unit and seeks the direction of an election" (Joint Statement). The agreement "identifies Teaching Assistants (excluding certain Teaching Assistants in specified departments for one semester) and Graduate Assistants as . . . [members of a] potential bargaining unit and excludes" Research Assistants and pre-Professional Graduate Assistants from the unit. This agreement paves the way for a vote on unionization during the 2002-2003 academic year. If the members of the potential bargaining unit vote in favor of unionization, the GEO will become the third largest graduate employee union in the nation, adding over two thousand new members to the sum of graduate union members nationwide. In short, the GEO stands poised on the threshold of a potential victory in a nine-year struggle for unionization. With the graduate students' recent gains at Illinois in mind, I want to turn to my second aim in this essay, which is to theorize reactions to graduate unionization efforts, and to the GEO in particular, that I observed while organizing potential union members, discussing the GEO in the classes I teach, and working or picketing on the quadrangle during the work-in and the walkout. There is a consistent element to these reactions that concerns me, an element that I will initially describe as "bemusement." In the fall semester of last year, on the final day that the three classes that I taught would meet before a well-publicized two-day walkout by graduate employees, I explained to my students that I would be participating in the work stoppage. I had similar discussions last semester, before the work stoppage that was cancelled. In each class, I laid out the GEO membership's general rationale for a direct action as well as my own reasons for participating in it, before opening the floor to my students' questions, comments, and complaints. Within each classroom, my students appeared interested in discussing the work stoppage and, by the end of the conversation, seemed to respect my reasons for participating in it or, rather, respected what they seemed to grasp as my commitment to the work stoppage, regardless of how they felt about the stoppage itself. Missing a class period appealed to them as well. I do not want to suggest that all of my students were suddenly or already enlightened about the legitimacy of the GEO's aims; in each class we rehearsed many of the administration's arguments about how graduate employees are students first and employees second (or not at all), how they are amply reimbursed for their labor with a "free" education, and how they know or should know what to expect when they matriculate and should not expect or desire anything more. A general atmosphere of bemusement emerged out of these discussions—a sense of "Wow, he takes this whole work stoppage thing pretty seriously, and you have to respect that." Two days later, the picket lines formed. Without the luxury of captive audiences in our classrooms or labs to whom we could explain ourselves, those of us on the picket lines encountered less respect—along with occasional hostility—as we marched in the quad, sang songs, chanted slogans, and handed out flyers. Two occurrences seem noteworthy to me, the first of which is my sense that, apart from a few "right on!'s" from like-minded sorts, most spectators seemed to regard our direct action, again, with bemusement. This reaction disturbed me, because it seemed to cut the ground from beneath our picket line more effectively than other possible reactions. Even outright hostility and aggressive opposition seemed preferable to mild amusement, because at least the former responses suggest that your audience is taking you seriously. Somewhat analogously, being ignored can be understood as a refusal to receive a message, which marks a reception of some sort—a moment in which the message was read before it was blocked. But I found curiosity mixed with gentle mocking more troubling to confront. The spectators reacted as if they were watching a picket line in quotes, something from another era, someone protesting the Vietnam Conflict or marching for civil rights, for instance. The "gaze" of people encountering the picket line as non-participants had a particular valence: "How odd that people still carry picket signs and protest their working conditions. How quaint." One of my students wrote: "I think it's silly. When I see a picket line, I start getting pictures from Sinclair's Jungle in my head and thinking 'what do these buffoons think they're doing?'" (Tubbs). More specifically, our audience seemed to be thinking, "Sure, there are lots of troubling things in the world, and maybe the exploitation of graduate employee labor is even one of them, but we all know, realistically, that there's nothing to be done about it." On the picket line as well as during direct actions, we encountered a cynical resignationism whose roots, I believe, spring from spectators' pragmatic assessments of their powerlessness under current forms of capitalism, a disempowerment resulting from their alienation from the mode and means of production. This cynicism can function as a form of protectionism, appearing as anger directed at those who refuse to be reconciled to their working conditions. A telling example appears in the GASO's (the anti-union group on Yale's campus) description of themselves as "a nonorganization of graduate students who do not carry cards and do not believe that they know what is necessarily best for anybody," to which I would add "not even themselves." This cynical stance protects groups such as GASO from the necessity of intervening in a struggle by shutting down in advance the possibility that such intervention could prove meaningful. To return to the picket line: what I am reading as bemusement is only the uppermost layer of, ironically, a firm conviction, a belief, that there is no longer any practical reason on which to found direct action, which, consequently, figures strangely on college campuses as an inexplicable, non-cynical act. My major concern is how can we best combat this tendency? Do the traditional methods and assumptions of ideological critique still apply to our current situation? And why do I feel as if I have failed with my students, with potential GEO members, and with people I encountered on the picket line, all of whom seem so well-prepared to counter my conventional efforts to disabuse them of their ideological fantasies in favor of an understanding of the material, social relations that pertain to graduate employee working conditions? How do we retool ideological critique in order to respond to our current situation? In order to bring to the surface and articulate some of its tensions, the impasse that I am describing here might be recast along psychoanalytic lines. What the union is trying to do through organizing and direct action is traverse the social fantasy of a unified university, a fantasy that supports the symbolic order, which is to say our social reality on the Illinois campus. We are probably all familiar with the current forms of the fantasy space operating at most university campuses across the U.S. that are fighting graduate employee unionization. The Illinois administration's fantasy space is not unique but presupposes warm, cooperative relations between administrators, graduate students, and faculty. The administration's "White Paper" is the best example of a support for this fantasy space as well as an attempt to patch holes in this space that the GEO's work has increasingly attenuated over the past nine years. This document, published in August of 2000 and jointly authored by the Chancellor, Provost, and Deans of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is officially entitled Excellence in Graduate Education and the Issue of an Assistants' Union. Its authors claim that "graduate assistant unionization would undermine the shared-governance practices basic to the high levels of academic excellence that distinguish the University of Illinois, replacing cooperative arrangements with adversarial relationships" (1). The "shared governance" and "cooperative arrangements" refer to the Graduate Student Advisory Council (GSAC), an extension of the Graduate College that the GEO's webpage describes as "a fine organization for hearing students concerns and transmitting them to the administration for consideration. However, it has appointed, not elected officials; it is consulted but has no power to change policy; and it does not independently represent the interests of graduate employees" (FAQ). Not surprisingly, Yale's GASO webpage has a link to Yale's cognate of the GSAC, the Graduate Student Assembly (GSA). There is an ironic twist in the administration's supposed logic here: the Chancellor, Provost, and Council of Deans were unwilling for years to negotiate with the union and risked further direct actions and openly staged conflicts, because recognizing the union would lead to or even create strife and discord where none existed—between the administration and graduate student labor. As a matter of fact, there was already discord between the administration and graduate students, and only a fantasy space that covers over that rift can grant the appearance of a unified social order. This is precisely the fantasy space that is at stake for the administration as well as graduate employees (and perhaps to a lesser degree for non-administrators and students) in refusing to join or to recognize the GEO or the material conditions—the conflict between capital and labor—from which it springs. If the "Real" of that conflict is regulative yet pre-symbolic, outside the symbolic order, then the GEO is not the university's Real per se but comes to the administrator as the "answer of the Real," as an affront to the symbolic order of the university as it is currently configured. Until very recently, the administration clung to its fantasy construct of a unified university where all graduate employees were grateful for the free educations that they were receiving, where minimal health- and childcare was more than acceptable, etc. but also buttressed that space wherever the answer of the Real threatened to poke through. The White Paper was the last serious effort to do so, but the administration could also rely on some national media support for the fantasy. In a recent article in The Chronicle, Scott Smallwood writes that "[p]erhaps the biggest difference between students who want a union and those who don't is how they feel about graduate school. The students opposed to the union drives don't feel oppressed. They feel lucky—lucky to be at a top university, saying it is a privilege to get an education without paying for it" (A14). If the GEO wins its election next year and the administration recognizes the union's right to negotiate and bargain, this act will necessarily dispel the fantasy and mark the moment where symptoms of the Real became symbolized and enter into the symbolic order as negotiated contracts and codified social relations. While the administration has cleaved to the fantasy of the unified university, the GEO has attempted to traverse that fantasy and the material relations that it veils, but in order to do so it has attempted to reverse the fantasy-construction that the administration works to maintain, the fantasy that graduate unionization is the cause of tension between capital and labor, between the administration and graduate employees, rather than the result of that conflict. A serious obstacle in effecting this reversal, and not only in Illinois, might arise from the tradeoff demanded here: organizing and direct action ask that their audiences traverse their own fantasy spaces, their structures for organizing their desires for a particular type of university whose parts interact with one another harmoniously for the betterment of all, and in return offer a site from which to change how the university machine operates. In short, as organizers and activists, we try to make people less happy in the short term by promising them a delayed but more profound happiness in the long term, a happiness grounded in reality but one that they must labor to attain. In an effort to respond to this dilemma, I want to return to my experiences with organizing and direct action. When I first started working for the GEO, I had two responses: on the one hand, I firmly and theoretically believed in the need to unionize, but on the other hand, I felt a sense of "this shop is not a shop." I experienced a similar phenomenon when I first started protesting the bombing of Kosovo in the late 90s; at that time, it seemed to me that I was taking part in a "protest," a protest in quotation marks, one that had occurred elsewhere, in an authentic context, that we neo- or pseudo-protesters had appropriated as our own. I felt as if I were participating in The 18th Brumaire of anti-war protests. In the GEO offices, some of the same sentiments struck me. There, I was introduced for the first time to the terminology of a union drive including "organizing," "sit-ins," "stewards," "stewards" council meetings," etc., and my sense was, "All this serious language must be meant ironically, because this shop is not a shop. It's not a 'real shop,' after all, like a factory or a mine." Without realizing it, I was parroting the White Paper's claim that the "model of labor union versus management imposes a priori a centralized structure for decision-making alien to the collaborative academic life of teaching, learning, and research. This structure defines workers and supervisors/managers as adversaries who by definition have conflicting interests." In other words, "this shop is not a shop." (Interestingly, the White Paper assumes that industries exist, or existed, that were, for inexplicable reasons, ready to acknowledge that capital's and labor's needs conflict with one another.) Over the past two years, I've come to see my work for GEO differently. Not only is the shop a real shop, but that "realness" extends to organizing and work stoppages as well. These terms no longer appear in mental scare quotes for me and, for that matter, neither did our anti-war protests in West Lafayette, Indiana, after the first few hours of being honked at and flipped off by people who were clearly not understanding our protest cynically. I wonder if the university administration has ever allowed itself the luxury of approaching the GEO cynically. Perhaps it is the administration's lack of cynicism that solidifies the organizer and activist as such. In the face of the administration's very real engagement with the GEO as a supposed obstacle to a smoothly running campus, there is no room in the union camp for the cynical suspicion that the administration is not taking the union drive seriously enough. I can offer two possible explanations for my early responses to anti-war protests and union work. First, there was my sense that the "era of anti-war protests" was over, having been replaced by an era of cynicism, echoing the response of some of the people I encountered. My suspicion is that mass mediation affected my understanding of my own participation in marches, rallies, pickets, etc. Although I don't want to posit some halcyon era in which authentic events occurred and were experienced transparently, free of mediation, I do wonder what effects my childhood exposure to mass media in the 70s had upon my initial understanding of direct action, because the activism that I took part in began as a representation of televisual direct action. It was me and people I knew pretending that someone was making "Eyes on the Prize" or "Berkeley in the 60s" or shooting some footage for the news. And the occasional presence of reporters and cameras served to reinforce rather than dispel that illusion. I wonder if this is how my students experience me when I discuss the GEO—or Marx and Marxism, for that matter—with them, as a representation of a dramatized, past event. The embodying of direct action outweighs my sense that I'm repeating clichéd gestures, that I'm participating in actions already in quotes, out of context. Granted, for each new mode of action, the embodiment needs to be repeated. In the past couple of years, I've shifted marches, rallies, union meetings, organizing, and picket lines from the register of mediated spectacles to my own embodied events. In short, the material investment of my labor concretized the GEO for me, shifting it from an abstract "good idea" to a movement that I filled out with my time and labor as well as the intrasubjective relations in which I became enmeshed. My organizing materialized my psychical investment for me, an investment that allowed me to move beyond my initial cynicism. But the psychical investment seems necessarily to precede the material investment. I first had to presuppose that the GEO had some form of knowledge that I lacked; I had to identify myself with the place in the symbolic network that the GEO's mandate—"join us," "you should be a GEO member"—imposed upon me. I don't have any good explanation for why I did, and this is the final question that I want to raise: how do we bring graduate employees as well as students to the point where they assume the mandate that we, explicitly or implicitly, present to them? Do we aim to interpellate them, to hail them into a particular subject position? And, if we do, then, judging from my own experience, one method might be to highlight the ways in which they are already materially invested in our struggle, which is to say the ways in which they are invested in their education and in their teaching. At the University of Illinois, that move might take this form: in 1942, 49% of the University of Illinois's budget was allotted to instruction. That percentage has steadily declined over the years, and, in 2000, 24% of the budget was allotted to instruction. Graduate employees have used this statistic in an effort to establish a material base that connects graduate employees and students. But I wonder whether there aren't other ways in which we can, retroactively as it were, construct quilting points—"nodal points" that stop the sliding of a set of "floating signifiers" and "quilt" them by fixing their meaning (Zizek 87)— that will grant particular significations to student actions that might otherwise remain unattached to our struggle. I do not know what those quilting points might be, but maybe the task is to demonstrate to graduate employees and undergraduates that they are already materially involved in the graduate employee unionization movement and to encourage them to assume ownership of that involvement. Works Cited
Stacy Thompson is an assistant professor of critical theory and film at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. |