What A Comfort To The Widow, A Light To The Child

This is a photograph of students from Rufus King High School, a Milwaukee Public School of which I am a proud alum, protesting today at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, of which I am a proud alum and current staff member.

This is Part Two of a screed. Part One is here.

I am not currently a member of a union. I was once, as academic staff at another institution in another state, and I wasn't entirely happy with it. I was uncertain, at that time, of the value I received in return for my dues and disappointed with the lack of transparency and member-focused service in that particular organization. I have never been opposed to unionization, and I have multiple Billy Bragg and Pete Seeger records that prove it, but neither was I eager to be a member of one. You can insert in here that one line that Woody Allen paraphrases from Groucho Marx in Annie Hall.

But here's what I am: I am a big fan of rights. I just love the things. I try to collect all the rights I possibly can, even if I'm not sure I'm going to use them. The right to say things I want to say, that's a good one, and the right to assemble peaceably is fun to enact at parties. I'm even a fan of the right to bear arms, except in cases where those arms are plastic swords in the hands of my four-year-old boys. Miranda rights really liven up TV cop shows. And I'm particularly enamored of the rights of the employee to have some say in the conditions of their employment. I think that one's just the bomb-a-lomb-diggity.

In the previous post, I mentioned how it makes absolute logical sense for the state to abuse its employees to the extent its laws and ethics will allow. To counter that, then, it should also make sense that those employees attempt to curtail that abuse to whatever degree they are able. A good way to do that, history has shown, is to band together as a group, such that an abuse against the one is an abuse against the many. And the individual can rest easy with the protection of the many.

Sometimes this right has been hard to establish. It might take a fire in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, or it might take weathering a few murders by Pinkerton thugs. Some employers aren't keen to give up their ability to abuse folks. It's a right that is often what you call "hard won."

The folk-singer and labor agitator Utah Phillips once suggested that work essentially meant leasing your brain to an employer for eight hours a day on the presumption that at the end of the day it would be returned to you in an unmutilated condition. What I have loved most about university work is that there seems to be a root understanding of this, that many people are interested in returning your brain in a state that, one hopes, in a better condition than when you left it. That is the purpose of the university, really: to improve your brain. That, and be midwife to low-interest government loans so that you can pay for the privilege.

Many public employees rely upon their union and their collective bargaining rights to make their jobs fair, equitable, and unmutilating. I -- and all other academic staff and faculty at Wisconsin universities -- earned the right to collective bargaining only very recently, with the passage of the 2010-2011 budget. I hadn't done much with that right. If it were an action figure, it would be Mint-In-Box, waiting in the closet either to be played with or to be sold to the highest bidder on eBay. But I very much like having that right, now that I do, and don't particularly want to give it up because our Governor (and who knows how mutilated that brain is?) feels it would save him some money if I gave it back to him. Thanks, but it is mine, the precious, it is mine.

More seriously at risk, though, are all those who absolutely depend on collective bargaining to remain unmutilated. Graduate students who work as researchers or teaching assistants, for example, collectively bargain. This assures that, despite low salaries of around $7000 per year, they aren't burdened with more classroom responsibilities than they can handle, that they are guaranteed work, and that the state -- in recompense for their duties and the bit of rent money they provide -- allows them a break on tuition costs. Custodians can assure, aside from their salaries, that they have reasonable work hours and aren't asked to do more than what is safe or reasonable for them to do. These are rights beyond dollars, and they are worthwhile. Our Governor, in his Budget Repair Bill, intends to strip all of these rights (but for the one that allows workers to ask for more money, and the bill even institutes limitations there). One suspects that he wants to strip these rights because he has a greater interest in abuse than one would want to see in a state leader.

Note also that the legislators who are asked to answer these very real and very significant questions about conditions of labor reply by redirecting to issues of pension and healthcare costs, as if this were all a bunch of "melodrama," as one state legislator called it, about a couple of dollars in lost wages.

There are those, friends of the private sector or the party of the teabag, who need protections more than we do, and we'd be wrong to assume that they are just as protected as we. This is a core component of the job of teaching -- to try to assure that no harm is done -- and so therefore it is to my mind right and fitting that a public school teacher might seek to advocate on her own behalf, if not that of her colleagues and charges, even at the expense of a day or a week of school.

That is why we fight. That's why we're marching. That's why they call it the blues.

One last note. As I was writing the previous post, my son Sam asked me what I was doing. I did my best to explain all of the above in terms he might understand, basically substituting the language of cartoon superheroes. Of our Governor, Sam asked: "Is he a bad-guy?" He may well be, I said, but what makes you think so? "Bad-guys steal money," Sam said, "and they hurt people."