Currently at Toronto Pearson: 4. High today: 4. There has been snow on the ground, uninterrupted, in K-W for eight days now. K-W got a bit more sloppy snow today; Toronto's five days' growth of snow is just about finished going down the drain.
Last week I heard someone on the bus say that someone had won the $39 million in the Lotto 6/49 or whatever, and maybe someone asked "what would you do with all that money?" and I thought "what would I do with all that money?" and thought, well, first I'd give away $38 million ... only $38 million? No, maybe $38.5 million. And I thought, of course, this is why I would never play the lottery--but then I realized, maybe this is why I should play the lottery! When other people win, they usually spend the money on stupid stuff. (I guess.) But I would, I don't know, give it to Doctors Without Borders and whatever the hell. (I really don't know.) So, maybe I am actually morally required to play the lottery, in order to do my part to try to divert lottery money to something worthwhile.
Turns out I was wrong about the idea of deflation taking a long time to sink in. It was the lead headline in the Star today. Gas is below $0.80 a litre around here these days. Again I remember the Globe poll, some time after Katrina, asking whether gas would ever be less than $1/litre again. Most people said "no", of course. Most people would have said "no way in hell" a few months ago.
The price of a can of beans is up 40-60% since the summer in the local grocery store, though. For some reason the grocery price war is over; Loblaw's has been steadily jacking up its prices and just reported a large profit. This is going to be some jagged disinflation/deflation; I would guess that relatively poor people are going to continue to see steep inflation for some time, since they spend proportionally a lot on food and not much directly on energy. It has occurred to me to wonder as house prices fall whether the conditions that produce falling house prices put upward or downward pressure on rental prices. House prices are falling because people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing. If people's ability to pay for houses is decreasing, does that mean that people who would otherwise have been at the low end of the home-ownership market are forced into the rental market, increasing demand for, and thus creating upward pressure on the price of, rental units? And: does it result in a flattening of price differentials between the high end and low end of the rental market, as people are forced downward in the market, creating more demand and higher prices at the bottom of the market?
And I am still on strike. The deep, dark stupidity of it all is upsetting, but also amusing in its way. Somehow I have begun to love my enemies. Soon I'll find myself in love with the world, and the only thing left to do will be to ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Friday, November 7, 2008
Strike Two
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 14. High today: 16.
So I'm on strike, for the second time in my ten years at York. (I'm not on strike at Laurier.) The ideological stridency of the union--apparently including most of the members, a large majority of whom are grad students (a large majority of whom are in the humanities and social sciences), not just the activists and the leadership (such as it is, which isn't much, since the activists have gutted the leadership structure since the last strike)--is remarkable. I can't help but feel that some political switch has been flipped lately in North America. The resurgence of the NDP, the financial crisis, Obama, the settled feeling that Iraq and Afghanistan have both been lost ... it's hard to tell how it all fits together, but somehow it seems to. But where's it all going? The members of the union generally seem to sincerely believe that there are no legitimate interests in the university contrary to their own. They believe that they have a moral right to dictate terms, without limitation, to the university. Of course, labour generally feels that it has an unlimited moral right against management on the Marxist ground (whether particular workers or unions are fully conscious of this or not) that all value in the enterprise is produced by labour and so all value in the enterprise is owed to labour. What seems different about this union this time--and this union is always among the most militant and ideologically driven you'll find anywhere--is the more-or-less complete refusal to compromise on the absolute claim of right for pragmatic purposes. No dialogue, no dialectic, just sheer self-assertion.
What's interesting about the union as a labour union is that the basic issue no longer has anything to do with compensation for labour, though it is constantly portrayed that way in the media because no one can understand what's going on in any other terms. (The numbers quoted on wage increases are meaningless because the main monetary issues are not technically about wages.) I have a feeling that if the general public knew what the real issue was, the people who are currently calling for the TAs to be fired Reagan-style would be calling for the university to be shut down. TAs already are not paid primarily for the work they do as TAs; they're paid primarily to support them while they're (supposed to be) doing their graduate work. If the relevant market was the market for TA labour, their compensation would presumably be much lower than it currently is. TAs get as much as they do currently, and they want much more than that, because the relevant market is not the market for TA labour but the market for graduate students, and that's a market in which the student-TAs not only hold much more leverage (because while the supply of potential TA labour greatly exceeds the demand, the demand for grad students on the part of schools does not exceed the supply of potential students by much at all), but also benefit from an ethical feeling on the part of their superiors that grad students ought not to live too shabbily. (A few years back, TA negotiations at U of T were blown out of the water when the administration came up with a student-support package that made the demands for TA compensation largely irrelevant.)
What the union wants for the 25% of us in the union who teach courses on contract is a whole other kettle of fish. That's all about "job security", and it's a real concrete issue. Job security is the oppressively insistent practical issue in my life. But from a relatively disinterested point of view, considering only the good of the university or of the philosophy department, I would not want the make-up of the teaching staff to be determined in any serious way by union rules; I want departments to be free to decide their own compositions. Materially, there appears to be a lot at stake for me in this strike (because the administration appears to be proposing serious concessions on mechanisms that can turn contract jobs into permanent jobs), but I'm ethically opposed to winning it.
Similarly, the union is claiming a tactical "victory" in these negotiations for persuading the administration to withdraw a proposal to increase the number of teaching jobs allowed to doctoral students. It's a "victory" because it leaves more jobs open for people like me; it's very much in my material interests. But my job security currently might not be so desperately tenuous if I had been able to get a teaching position while doing my PhD; ethically, I can only be in favour of making more teaching positions available to doctoral students. So why doesn't the union recognize this "victory" as a defeat for the doctoral students it represents? Looks to me like some combination of these reasons:
(1) York doctoral students don't believe that they will ever have teaching jobs after they graduate (and so don't see themselves as having an interest in gaining teaching experience; some of them, when in union-rhetoric mode, actually spin having teaching jobs as opposed to TA positions as a burden, since they take up much more time and their compensation is taxable (whereas the large part of TA compensation that doesn't take the form of wages is classed as student support and therefore is mostly not taxable)).
(2) York doctoral students don't understand that the single most important thing in helping them get teaching jobs after they graduate is teaching experience (presumably due in part to their having swallowed the "publications" Koolaid, not realizing that publications=jobs only applies to students whose doctorates have prestigious brand-names).
(3) The union collectively sees its interest in keeping peace among the different constituencies of the union (and having more teaching positions available for doctoral students would more obviously and immediately damage the material interests of the current corps of contract teachers than it would advance the material interests of doctoral students) as being more important than increasing the employability of doctoral students--but this, to me, just dissolves back into (1).
I think (1) is really at the heart of everything. Everyone knows, now, that, in material terms, doing a PhD is a losing "investment" (unless you're invested in one of the prestigious brand-names), so doctoral students like those at York have stopped seeing it as any kind of investment at all. They want the material pay-off from academia now, because they don't expect to get it later.
The really stupid thing about York's situation is that it is largely a product of a strategy over the last decade to dramatically increase graduate enrolment. The strike of 2000-01 should have made it evident to everyone that graduate students at York are a box crammed full of hornets. But since then, the university administrators have crammed a whole bunch more hornets into the box and shaken it. (I don't fully understand why they've done this. There appear to be two main reasons behind it: they want to make York a more "research-intensive" university, and the provincial and/or federal governments have been putting pressure on universities to produce more PhDs to make up for the shortage of professors which is always just around the corner. The first reason has been motivated in some part by the fear that if York is classed as a "teaching" university, the province will sooner or later force it to shut down its graduate programs altogether--so, by drastically increasing graduate enrollment, we're creating facts on the ground that would make that impossible. I can't imagine that that isn't sheer paranoia. But there is also the plain prestige of being a "research" university; I think that probably has more to do with it than anything.) My guess is that they don't recognize what they're doing as shaking a box full of hornets because they, like--it seems to me--almost everyone who has made it in academia, operate under the delusion that grad students are (and feel themselves to be) on the road to being as successful as they are. Those who have made it imagine that those who have not (yet) made it would identify with them and aspire to be like them. Instead, those who have not (yet) made it almost universally resent those who have made it, more and more intensely all the time.
I wish to God the "first black president" business would blow away. When you make some symbolic move out of a long national embarrassment, is it really something to celebrate? Should your family throw a party when Daddy stops beating Mommy? Shouldn't you, with your newly gained virtue, only feel all the more embarrassed at what you've been? Isn't it embarrassing that the president's skin colour is still an issue? Move on, indeed.
And it annoys me because, though I haven't paid very close attention to the man, Obama strikes me as an exceptionally good person. I don't mean an exceptionally "moral" person; I mean someone who is both basically decent and exceptionally able to put his basic decency into action. (If I were an American and had voted for HRC as I was supposing I would have early on, I would have come to regret it and been relieved at the outcome.) You don't find many characters like this, not just in politics, but anywhere. (I'm trying to think of who strikes me as this kind of character--for some reason, Charlie Rose comes to mind, which then prompts me to think of Peter Gzowski. Howard Adelman. Chretien has probably been the closest thing to it in recent Canadian politics; Martin, who was more decent but less capable (which unfortunately seemed to lead him to surround himself with people who lacked his own decency, which unfortunately brings Rahm Emmanuel to mind), might have been in different circumstances. I feel like David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, could have been this kind of character if the deck wasn't stacked against him. Cito Gaston. Nader got lost somewhere in the neighbourhood. Preston Manning and Joe Clark were probably both separated from it mostly by their dorkiness, which, unfortunately, has a lot to do with capability.) Obama the decent, practical man of reason is something like something that some part of me might aspire to be. (Ignatieff is the sham version, the cautionary tale--pieces of it are right (Blood and Belonging) but the whole is wrong.) That this is overshadowed by the colour of his skin seems profoundly disrespectful of the man. (But would a white Obama have been a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination this time around in the first place?)
So I'm on strike, for the second time in my ten years at York. (I'm not on strike at Laurier.) The ideological stridency of the union--apparently including most of the members, a large majority of whom are grad students (a large majority of whom are in the humanities and social sciences), not just the activists and the leadership (such as it is, which isn't much, since the activists have gutted the leadership structure since the last strike)--is remarkable. I can't help but feel that some political switch has been flipped lately in North America. The resurgence of the NDP, the financial crisis, Obama, the settled feeling that Iraq and Afghanistan have both been lost ... it's hard to tell how it all fits together, but somehow it seems to. But where's it all going? The members of the union generally seem to sincerely believe that there are no legitimate interests in the university contrary to their own. They believe that they have a moral right to dictate terms, without limitation, to the university. Of course, labour generally feels that it has an unlimited moral right against management on the Marxist ground (whether particular workers or unions are fully conscious of this or not) that all value in the enterprise is produced by labour and so all value in the enterprise is owed to labour. What seems different about this union this time--and this union is always among the most militant and ideologically driven you'll find anywhere--is the more-or-less complete refusal to compromise on the absolute claim of right for pragmatic purposes. No dialogue, no dialectic, just sheer self-assertion.
What's interesting about the union as a labour union is that the basic issue no longer has anything to do with compensation for labour, though it is constantly portrayed that way in the media because no one can understand what's going on in any other terms. (The numbers quoted on wage increases are meaningless because the main monetary issues are not technically about wages.) I have a feeling that if the general public knew what the real issue was, the people who are currently calling for the TAs to be fired Reagan-style would be calling for the university to be shut down. TAs already are not paid primarily for the work they do as TAs; they're paid primarily to support them while they're (supposed to be) doing their graduate work. If the relevant market was the market for TA labour, their compensation would presumably be much lower than it currently is. TAs get as much as they do currently, and they want much more than that, because the relevant market is not the market for TA labour but the market for graduate students, and that's a market in which the student-TAs not only hold much more leverage (because while the supply of potential TA labour greatly exceeds the demand, the demand for grad students on the part of schools does not exceed the supply of potential students by much at all), but also benefit from an ethical feeling on the part of their superiors that grad students ought not to live too shabbily. (A few years back, TA negotiations at U of T were blown out of the water when the administration came up with a student-support package that made the demands for TA compensation largely irrelevant.)
What the union wants for the 25% of us in the union who teach courses on contract is a whole other kettle of fish. That's all about "job security", and it's a real concrete issue. Job security is the oppressively insistent practical issue in my life. But from a relatively disinterested point of view, considering only the good of the university or of the philosophy department, I would not want the make-up of the teaching staff to be determined in any serious way by union rules; I want departments to be free to decide their own compositions. Materially, there appears to be a lot at stake for me in this strike (because the administration appears to be proposing serious concessions on mechanisms that can turn contract jobs into permanent jobs), but I'm ethically opposed to winning it.
Similarly, the union is claiming a tactical "victory" in these negotiations for persuading the administration to withdraw a proposal to increase the number of teaching jobs allowed to doctoral students. It's a "victory" because it leaves more jobs open for people like me; it's very much in my material interests. But my job security currently might not be so desperately tenuous if I had been able to get a teaching position while doing my PhD; ethically, I can only be in favour of making more teaching positions available to doctoral students. So why doesn't the union recognize this "victory" as a defeat for the doctoral students it represents? Looks to me like some combination of these reasons:
(1) York doctoral students don't believe that they will ever have teaching jobs after they graduate (and so don't see themselves as having an interest in gaining teaching experience; some of them, when in union-rhetoric mode, actually spin having teaching jobs as opposed to TA positions as a burden, since they take up much more time and their compensation is taxable (whereas the large part of TA compensation that doesn't take the form of wages is classed as student support and therefore is mostly not taxable)).
(2) York doctoral students don't understand that the single most important thing in helping them get teaching jobs after they graduate is teaching experience (presumably due in part to their having swallowed the "publications" Koolaid, not realizing that publications=jobs only applies to students whose doctorates have prestigious brand-names).
(3) The union collectively sees its interest in keeping peace among the different constituencies of the union (and having more teaching positions available for doctoral students would more obviously and immediately damage the material interests of the current corps of contract teachers than it would advance the material interests of doctoral students) as being more important than increasing the employability of doctoral students--but this, to me, just dissolves back into (1).
I think (1) is really at the heart of everything. Everyone knows, now, that, in material terms, doing a PhD is a losing "investment" (unless you're invested in one of the prestigious brand-names), so doctoral students like those at York have stopped seeing it as any kind of investment at all. They want the material pay-off from academia now, because they don't expect to get it later.
The really stupid thing about York's situation is that it is largely a product of a strategy over the last decade to dramatically increase graduate enrolment. The strike of 2000-01 should have made it evident to everyone that graduate students at York are a box crammed full of hornets. But since then, the university administrators have crammed a whole bunch more hornets into the box and shaken it. (I don't fully understand why they've done this. There appear to be two main reasons behind it: they want to make York a more "research-intensive" university, and the provincial and/or federal governments have been putting pressure on universities to produce more PhDs to make up for the shortage of professors which is always just around the corner. The first reason has been motivated in some part by the fear that if York is classed as a "teaching" university, the province will sooner or later force it to shut down its graduate programs altogether--so, by drastically increasing graduate enrollment, we're creating facts on the ground that would make that impossible. I can't imagine that that isn't sheer paranoia. But there is also the plain prestige of being a "research" university; I think that probably has more to do with it than anything.) My guess is that they don't recognize what they're doing as shaking a box full of hornets because they, like--it seems to me--almost everyone who has made it in academia, operate under the delusion that grad students are (and feel themselves to be) on the road to being as successful as they are. Those who have made it imagine that those who have not (yet) made it would identify with them and aspire to be like them. Instead, those who have not (yet) made it almost universally resent those who have made it, more and more intensely all the time.
I wish to God the "first black president" business would blow away. When you make some symbolic move out of a long national embarrassment, is it really something to celebrate? Should your family throw a party when Daddy stops beating Mommy? Shouldn't you, with your newly gained virtue, only feel all the more embarrassed at what you've been? Isn't it embarrassing that the president's skin colour is still an issue? Move on, indeed.
And it annoys me because, though I haven't paid very close attention to the man, Obama strikes me as an exceptionally good person. I don't mean an exceptionally "moral" person; I mean someone who is both basically decent and exceptionally able to put his basic decency into action. (If I were an American and had voted for HRC as I was supposing I would have early on, I would have come to regret it and been relieved at the outcome.) You don't find many characters like this, not just in politics, but anywhere. (I'm trying to think of who strikes me as this kind of character--for some reason, Charlie Rose comes to mind, which then prompts me to think of Peter Gzowski. Howard Adelman. Chretien has probably been the closest thing to it in recent Canadian politics; Martin, who was more decent but less capable (which unfortunately seemed to lead him to surround himself with people who lacked his own decency, which unfortunately brings Rahm Emmanuel to mind), might have been in different circumstances. I feel like David Miller, the mayor of Toronto, could have been this kind of character if the deck wasn't stacked against him. Cito Gaston. Nader got lost somewhere in the neighbourhood. Preston Manning and Joe Clark were probably both separated from it mostly by their dorkiness, which, unfortunately, has a lot to do with capability.) Obama the decent, practical man of reason is something like something that some part of me might aspire to be. (Ignatieff is the sham version, the cautionary tale--pieces of it are right (Blood and Belonging) but the whole is wrong.) That this is overshadowed by the colour of his skin seems profoundly disrespectful of the man. (But would a white Obama have been a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination this time around in the first place?)
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