On Tue, 17 Nov 1998, Michael Eisenscher wrote: > A transformational or empowerment model of unionism has to break with this > service concept of unionism. Stewards must perfect their skills as organizers, > educators, and facilitators of actions conceived and executed by groups of > workers around their common concerns. This is no less demanding, but is far > more rewarding for all involved. Which implies lots of steward-officer solidarity, regular contacts, etc. There's a whole cultural dimension of organizing which I think the US Left has stumbled badly on -- we have the Michael Moore thing, of a radical, resistence-filled mass culture, but not the powerful socialist traditions and subversive currents of the EU and, increasingly, East Asia. What most grad worker unions do to resolve this is to hook people up to the University culture, which provides this bubbling cauldron of issues and other things going on and allows a certain kind of social movement unionism to happen. Because we're mostly young professionals, it's not really a question of training people, because folks can generally "learn to learn" in their own way, it's this professional-class habitus which inhibits people from speaking out (the professors one has to deal with, the sizeable amount of knowledge you're trying to process while attempting to retain your sanity, the pressure of that future job market, etc.). But of course, we're being paid peanuts to teach these classes, so there's this contradiction which people have to face. We're also a very mobile workforce, with enormous regular turnover, so we're organizing constantly, all the time in fact (otherwise we wouldn't even exist). Hopefully the kind of things which grad worker unions are doing -- very savvy cultural and workplace kind of stuff, and the organizing-to-exist, as opposed to organizing-to-bureaucratize -- will someday begin to migrate to the world of the high-tech office, programmers and related Microserfs. -- Dennis
