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Adventures of an Adjunct Professor
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I managed to finish college at age 40. By my mid-fifties, I was back to school. I was a desperate man. Thirty years of busting my hump in the labor movement, and we are weaker than when I first punched in at General Electric Co. I started work as a second shift grinder in February 1979. Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister of Great Britain in May that year, and Ronald Reagan was elected president in November. So you get the picture—my life in the labor movement has coincided precisely with the neoliberal assault. I’m looking for some help.
The master’s degree in union leadership and administration (ULA) at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) has been great. Demanding, expert teachers. Serious, fellow union students. Respect for each other regardless of union or politics—a self-defined safe space for those searching for answers. And did I mention the books?
Things took a surprising turn, though, when I was asked to teach an undergraduate class. They needed someone to fill in as an “adjunct” professor. I was seen as a “practitioner” expected to have some expertise in the field of instruction, not a regular professor. I had thought of teaching, maybe a few years down the road. This was now.
Health Care Kumbaya
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| Protest against health insurers need to have both a union and community face—like this march both against foreclosures and for the Employee Free Choice Act earlier in March in Lynn, Mass. |
The peasants are filing their pitchforks to a fine point in anticipation of an attack on the palace—and the target of their ire is not what we might have intended. At this critical moment in the health care debate, more than a few working folk are taking a suspicious look at the health care reform efforts of Senate Democrats, President Obama—and their own unions. A headline in my local newspaper, the Lynn Item, helped stir the tempest: “Obama Open to Taxing Benefits to Fund Reform.”
Vincent Panvani of the Sheet Metal Workers (SMWIA) warns:
If any of these Democratic Senators vote for this, they’ll be out in 2010, and it will be used against Obama….[Y]ou’re taxing the middle class.
Teamsters President James Hoffa calls taxing health care benefits “the poison pill that will kill reform.” The Laborers have attack ads at the ready. And Donna Smith, an organizer and legislative representative for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee (CNA/NNOC) notes that insurance companies continue discriminatory rates for older workers and ongoing rescissions of benefits—that is, targeting people with more than 1,400 medical conditions for “opposition research” investigations so their benefits can be cut off. “Ugly stuff,” she puts it. (At a health care forum in Lynn, Mass., last week, Rep. John Tierney reported that in congressional hearings he asked every insurance company if they would stop these viscous targeted rescissions—each one said “No.”)
Inauguration Day: Party with a Program
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| ‘Lynn for Obama’ volunteers get ready to knock on New Hampshire doors in October as part of the effort to elect Barack Obama president of the United States. |
At our November local union meeting, our vice president, Alex Brown, posed the question: What do you hope for from the Obama presidency? There were a dozen answers, but they boiled down to “bring the jobs back,” “health care” and “bring our soldiers home.”
If hope was results, this would already be the greatest presidency of all time. I admit it—I’ve wasted too much of my time parsing lists of possible Barack Obama appointees and pestering people in Washington I think might know something about who might get which job.
The appointments Obama is making look like the ultimate Bill Clinton comeback. I was happy to work for Clinton over Dole. But President Clinton also brought us the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the “end of welfare as we know it” and the repeal of Roosevelt’s Glass-Stegall Act, which prevented the banks from participating in some of the worst financial speculation. Clinton announced that “the era of Big Government is over.” Each of these acts was a rejection of the New Deal and an accommodation to the neo-liberal policies of free trade, privatization and deregulation. We went from Nixon’s “We’re all Keynesians” to an unspoken, “We’re all neo-liberals.” This is not what I had in mind when I spent my weekends tracking down undecided voters in New Hampshire.
Obama, Harry and Guy
Gov. Sarah Palin’s “small-town” narrative has just about run its course. Lots, maybe most, of the people I know are from a small town, or their parents or grandparents were from small towns. Of course, they may be from small towns in Italy or San Marcos or Guatemala—not sure if those places would qualify as “the real America” to Palin. My own family is from places like Oskaloosa, Iowa, New England, N.D., and Chillicothe, Mo. I love my small-town Midwestern relatives (even the Republicans, which is probably what most of them are). They are warm, generous people, and I don’t recognize them in the spiteful Palin at all.
But Palin claims the small town folks are the ones who do the hard work and fight the wars. So don’t we work here in the small city of Lynn, Mass.? And how come it seems like every other family in my local union has a kid in the 10th Mountain Division?
A Little Leaven…
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The recent investigations into several local and state SEIU leaders by their national leadership, the U.S. Department of Labor and others into financial irregularities raise questions not only for the largest and most important union in the United States, but for all of us in the labor movement. A little more than a year ago, the head of the New York City Central Labor Council was removed for similar betrayal and financial misdeeds. A Communications Workers of America (CWA) local president in New Jersey is in receivership, in part, as a result of a financial investigation. We know these problems are not the norm, and they harm the huge majority of union members whose leaders’ work is done with little personal financial reward.
According to press reports and the union’s own internal investigation, the local leaders were collecting salaries in an annual range of $200,000 and also using union funds for questionable purposes, either paying family members for doing union business or spending union funds for unacceptable personal expenses. In some cases the local leaders represented workers who make little more than minimum wage. The union is assessing methods of addressing the problem.
Memo to a Mentor: Thanks, Charlie
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| Charlie Ruiter, 1948-1999 |
Few of us became involved in the union movement completely on our own. Typically, there is a union leader who inspires and encourages new activists. The mentor is a sounding board who directs and even protects new activists as they learn the ways of the movement. Men and women like this serve as a counterculture to the leaders who hoard their knowledge and positions like personal gold reserves, an all-too-common practice.
Charlie Ruiter, a business agent from 1989 until 1995 for my local union, IUE-CWA Local 201, served that role for me and many others. He passed away suddenly nine years ago this month, way before his time. It is hard to overestimate his role in Local 201 and in my own life.
Charlie is best remembered, perhaps, as a storyteller. In one legendary performance he concluded an arbitration with AMETEK Aerospace & Defense for a hapless worker, a well-intentioned brother who was perhaps not fully capable of a productive day’s work in the plant. He compared this member to a yellow canary, sitting on a windowsill, while pleading:
Don’t slam the window shut and kill this poor canary.
Bear Sterns B.S.
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“We just lost a big chunk of our retirement,” grumbled more than one person down at the Union Hall last week, when General Electric Co. (GE) stock tumbled. “I got two houses on my street under foreclosure already,” added Pete Capano, an IUE-CWA Local 201 Executive Board member and Ward 6 city councilor in Lynn, Mass. We are entering the fear stage of the recession, where people swap stories about the trouble we’re in.
We in the United States work the longest hours of any workers in the industrialized world.
Our productivity is up by any standard—two-thirds or more in the past 10 years.
So why were 102 houses in Lynn facing foreclosure in February, more than double the 44 houses one year ago? Why did GE workers and retirees take a beating on their 401(k)s last week, when GE stock dropped $4 a share? Why have more than one hundred people stopped by my office for help in getting jobs—jobs that I don’t have to offer? Why is nearly every city and town in Massachusetts facing layoffs?
Why is the economy falling apart?
Why Not Health Care?
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Andy, an IUE-CWA Local 201 member, looked at his pension check from General Electric as he sat in my office at the union hall. The local vice president and the president of the retirees association usually respond to benefit questions like this. But they were both on vacation, and I was struggling to catch up and be of some help.
“I got the $40 raise you told us about in December” he told me. “Then in January, I lost it again, plus another $6. What good was it? What happened?”
A conference call or two later, and we both knew three things had happened. In December, his pension went up $40. In January, his health care went up $46. So when the dust settled, his pension check dropped by $6. And keep in mind that he is one of the lucky ones: The share of employees offering any group health insurance at all to their retired workers dropped from 66 percent in 1988 to 33 percent in 2007.
Confessions of a Boston (Union) Sports Fan…or, in Search of an Underdog
The Orioles fan in the next seat turned to me and said, “Good, we’re only down two runs.” I was sitting in Camden Yards, the baseball stadium in Baltimore. I thought he was joking. It was the top of the first inning, and he was glad that his team was only down two runs to the visiting Boston Red Sox. But there was no smile on his face, just visible relief. Down two after half an inning, and he was all but celebrating!
This was a moment to consider just how long I, as a union guy who has supported underdogs all my life, could continue rooting for big-market, big-spending teams that have become the new Evil Empire.
Jeb’s Parting Gift to the People of Florida Has Lessons for Everyone
Politics is full of old adages, little nuggets of truth like “all politics are local,” that have been repeated by the political class so many times that they have taken on the qualities of scientific laws like the law of gravity. I would like to add my own truism to the mix, one based on a question: What do you get when you elect politicians who profess their disdain for government and all taxes and run their campaigns by promising to eliminate both?
A poorly run, bankrupt government that does so little for the people that it negates the reason for having a government to begin with. This is surely true at the national level where George W. Bush and his cadre of cronies have presided over an administration that historians already are calling the worst in U.S. history, bungling through world affairs like a bull in a china shop, grossly mismanaging disasters like Hurricane Katrina and turning a historic budget surplus into the biggest national debt we have ever seen.
