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Notes From
the Editors
The Politics of
Capitalism
by Ellen Meiksins
Wood
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It is worth the trip to Syracuse University
just to see Ben Shahn's sixty-by-twelve-foot outdoor mural, “The Passion
of Sacco and Vanzetti.” Unveiled in 1967, the mosaic tile mural tells the
story of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, executed in 1927 for a crime
which they probably did not commit. Witnesses placed them miles from the crime
scene when the murder of a paymaster occurred at a shoe factory in Braintree,
Massachusetts.
After fleeing to Mexico in 1917 to avoid the draft, both Italian immigrants
returned to the United States at the end of the First World War. At the time of
their arrest in 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were under surveillance for their
involvement in strike activities, and their radical beliefs were used against
them during their trial. Despite demonstrations and petition-signings in many
countries, Alvin Fuller, the Governor of Massachusetts, sent Sacco and Vanzetti
to the electric chair, based on the findings of a commission that included the
presidents of Harvard and MIT.1
Shahn's mural consists of three connected panels. In the first, a group of
protesters symbolize the tumult that both led to and followed the arrest of
Sacco and Vanzetti. In the second, Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed to one
another, tower in symbolic representation of their moral stature. Their shadows
slant accusingly towards a courthouse. Standing behind them, a diminutive
Governor Fuller, casting no shadow, reads his verdict. In the third, members of
the committee, in top hats and academic garb, hold flowers over coffins
containing the bodies of Sacco and Vanzetti.
Shahn wanted to create, as he put it, “works of art in which powerful
compassion is innate, or which ... will serve ultimately to dignify that
society in which it exists.”2 On either side of Shahn's mural are famous words
from a Vanzetti letter which conform more to the grammar of the heart than of
the schoolmaster. “If it had not been for these thing, I might have live
out my life talking at street corners to scorning men,” wrote Vanzetti to
his son from prison, “I might have die, unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now
we are not a failure. Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for
tolerance, for joostice, for man's onderstanding of man as now we do by
accident. Our words—our lives!—our pains nothing! The take of our
lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler—all! That
last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph.”
The powerful compassion emanating from Shahn's mural could serve equally to
define the SU experience in the aftermath of the unusual September 1998 strike.
In the belief that current labor unrest and the erosion of the humanities at
universities spring from a common cause, I visited SU for five days in
September in order to research the strike and its origins.
During the summer prior to the strike, 750 unionized dining service workers,
groundskeepers, janitors, and library employees at SU had found themselves
without a contract. Negotiations between the SU administration and the union,
Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 200A, had foundered over the
abuse of temporary workers, pay equity for library workers, the use of
unskilled labor, and above all, subcontracting.
Claiming that “modern institutions need flexibility,” the
administration had demanded the right to subcontract any department with less
than twenty-five employees—in effect, virtually all SU dining halls and
residences—in return for higher wage increases. It claimed, furthermore,
that no union employees had lost their jobs as a result of subcontracting. The
union disagreed, maintaining that one hundred union jobs had been lost to
subcontracting within the last seven years.
Over the summer, SU Chancellor Kenneth Shaw told a group of concerned
professors that while outsourcing was undesirable, SU did not want a contract
that restricted it. According to physics professor Rafael Sorkin, who attended
the meeting, the administration “wanted the flexibility to do the things
they didn't want to do because they might want to do them at some point.”
Another concern was the abuse of temporary workers who were contractually
permitted to work a maximum of twenty hours a week for eighty days at a single
job. The workers were being shuttled between short-term jobs at different
dining centers to get around the contractual limitation.
The union also wanted to halt the substitution of unskilled for skilled
labor, which threatened the status and safety of workers. Union representative
Coert Bonthius maintained that an unskilled maintenance worker who tried to fix
a boiler was almost killed when it blew up. The incident recalls the era of
James Roscoe Day, SU chancellor from 1894 to 1922. Upton Sinclair, in The
Goose-Step (a 1923 romp through the nightmare of higher education) described
him this way: “The chancellor even carries his hatred of labor unions to
the point of crippling the university. Workingmen have been changed two or
three times in one week; the chancellor set the maximum price that a workingmen
is worth at twenty-eight cents an hour, and as a result, the boilers of the
heating plant were ruined, and the cost was four thousand dollars.”3
Additionally, the union proposed to increase the low pay of library workers
in order to attain gender equity. SU ranked ninety-fifth out of 109 university
libraries surveyed by the Association of Research Libraries in 1996-1997 for
average salary of professional library staff. Women held 70 percent of library
jobs at SU, but received 20 to 25 percent less pay than men in comparable
jobs.4 One
serials cataloguer, who had worked at SU for twenty-three years, was making
around twenty thousand dollars a year. In his June 1997 annual report, Head
Librarian David Stam called for higher salaries for library workers, noting
that “for some it is less than a living wage ... and is a particularly
demoralizing factor when combined with higher expectations of productivity,
more work with fewer people, and often the requirement to attain new
technological skills within the old classification framework.”5
On July 28, against the wishes of a federal mediator, SU negotiators
presented a final offer (which would have strengthened the administration's
ability to outsource SU jobs) to the union. On August 16, union members voted,
for the first time in twenty-four years, to strike. After the vote, Shaw
refused to meet again with the faculty he had seen earlier that summer.
Sensing the distance between SU's rhetoric and reality, some professors
urged Shaw to negotiate in good faith with the union. “As a teacher who
ponders a great deal over the implicit social values I am responsible for
communicating to my students, I cannot take lightly the situation in which I am
asked to convey the university's self-proclaimed values of mutual respect,
fairness, and equity in a context where these basic principles are not honored
by the university itself in its dealings with all its members,” wrote
English professor Gregg Lambert to Shaw.
Ironically, in late July, weeks after the expiration of the contract, SU
completed its four million dollar purchase of the Marshall Square Mall, a
commercial retail establishment near the university. A SU public relations
official described the investment as “a real good opportunity to invest in
the community and university.” Students were concerned that the
acquisition of the mall, which contains the only local competitor to SU's
bookstore, might make them captive consumers.6 Employees
wondered why SU had money to acquire real estate but not to pay them a living
wage.
Shortly before the strike, a memo which apparently originated in the office
of the director of student activities stated that union representatives were
not allowed to distribute information on campus and that students could not do
so as individuals, but only through recognized student organizations that
supported the union as a whole. The memo reminded graduate students that they
held teaching assistantships and fellowships as university beneficiaries. Some
wags noted that SU, which prided itself on being the “number one
student-centered university,” had become the “number one student-
censored university.” The SU administration later issued a clarification
stating that the memo had been based on the second-hand report of a
conversation. Free speech, however, would remain an issue during the strike.
As classes began at SU, about 630 physical plant, food service and library
workers formed picket lines at fifteen locations on campus. Only 10 to 15
percent of union employees reported for work. Some professors decided not to
cross the picket lines and held classes instead at churches, a performing arts
center, the Westcott cinema, or at home.
The administration brought in temporary workers to replace the strikers.
Recruiters set up booths in student dormitories. “Need a job?,”
inquired an advertisement for dining services in the Daily Orange.7 The
administration maintained that students were being hired not as replacement
workers, but for the College Work Study Program.8
On September 1, fifty faculty members organized a picket line and held a
press conference in front of Bird Library. When Public Safety informed them
that they could not hold strike signs on campus, the professors sat down for an
hour and a half, courting arrest.9 At a forum that evening, student dissatisfaction
grew when Neil Strodel, SU's associate vice president for human resources,
dodged questions about SU policy on free speech and the recent purchase of the
Marshall Square Mall.10
The next day, three hundred students, including members of the Cornell
Organization for Labor Action, gathered for a teach-in on the quad where they
heard poems, speeches, and live music. That day, one thousand people marched in
protest to the residence of Chancellor Shaw. Students demonstrated the
following afternoon in front of the administration building, chanting for Shaw
to be hired part-time. Approximately a dozen students broke off from the main
group and blockaded the building's two entrances by lying or sitting in front
of them until closing time.
With momentum building, 96 percent of the employees voted to continue the
strike. As news of the strike spread, parents logged on to SU's “Q & A
Strike Information For Parents” webpage which reassured them that this
union did “not have a propensity toward violence.”
The administration's stance toward the union recalled Chancellor Day's iron
hand. “The strike is a conspiracy and nothing less,” thundered Day in
his 1920 classic of oligarchic kitsch, My Neighbor The Working Man.
“We deal promptly and effectively with conspiracies against property
and persons in other matters. What delusion has closed our eyes to the true
character of the labor strike which is one of the most glaring forms of
conspiracy the world has known?”11 Day goes on to explain, in his hymn to big
business, how disorder is inherent in strikes: “The character of a strike
is seen in destruction of property, assaults and murders. The call for soldiers
and an extra police guard tells the story. The strike stands for everything
which America opposes. It is violence. It is riot. It opposes liberty. It is
dangerous to life by exciting men to unrestrained and dangerous
passions.”12 While passions were high during the 1998 SU
strike, only one minor strike-related injury occurred, as a supervisor hit an
employee while driving through a picket line at high speed.
The administration accused union officers of acting against the interests of
SU employees. “It is important to note that none of the University's
offers have been voted on by the union membership,” wrote Shaw in an
August 28 message to the SU community. “Paid agents of SEIU and designated
union officers have consistently refused to allow the membership to ratify or
reject the proposed contract.” In response, the parent of a SU student
wrote to Shaw: “I assume that by `designated union officers' you mean
`elected union officers.' Why not say so and admit that the SEIU has a
democratic structure. Unions are generally more democratic than universities.
When was the last time that the workers, students and faculty got to elect you
or the governing board.” Union members found Shaw's accusation ludicrous,
since three of them had been elected to serve on the bargaining committee along
with the union officers. Vanessa Dismuke, union steward for the library
workers, said that the members had asked the bargaining committee not to bring
back an unacceptable offer.
After a week-long strike, union members overwhelmingly ratified a new
contract granting significant wage increases for library workers and modest
increases for other union workers. It included protections against
subcontracting and limited temporary workers to twenty hours a week and one
thousand hours a year.
Both sides pledged not to take reprisals. The union agreed not to fine those
who crossed the picket line while the administration agreed not to withhold
tuition benefits from strikers. Some workers complained, nonetheless, that they
were not being allowed to take breaks. Joan Hart, a picket captain, was written
up three times within three days and demoted a pay grade for, among other
things, wearing a union cap to work. SU's Office of Human Resources
investigated the allegations of reprisals, and determined that supervisors had
simply taken routine disciplinary actions.13
In his September 23, 1998, address to the faculty, Shaw asked professors who
had refused to cross the picket lines “to voluntarily inform their deans
of the time missed so that their paychecks can be adjusted accordingly,”
and reassured them that he was “motivated not by a desire to punish, but
to ensure that the lesson of civil disobedience is not lost on our
students.” That lesson, according to Shaw, was that “passionately
held beliefs are worth sacrifice.”
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NOTES
- Martin H. Bush, Ben Shahn: The Passion of Sacco and
Vanzetti (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1968).
- Stan Pinkwas, “Ben Shahn: Portrait of the Artist,”
Daily Orange, March 4, 1968.
- Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step, (Pasadena, CA,
1923), p. 285.
- Unity News (SEIU Newsletter at SU), April 1998, p.
1.
- David H. Stam, “Annual Report. Syracuse University
Library. July 1996 to June 1997,” June 20, 1998, p. 7-8.
- Joy Davia, “SU Moves Into M-Street With Mall
Purchase,” Daily Orange, August 31, 1998, p. 12.
- Advertisement, Daily Orange, August 31, 1998, p.
6.
- “The Myth of the `Memo,'” Negotiation
News, September 3, 1998, p. 1.
- Sapna Kollali, “SU Faculty Hold Sit-In,” Daily
Orange, September 2, 1998,p. 1, 3.
- Dave Levinthal, “Strike Forum Features SU, Local
200A,” Daily Orange, September 2, 1998, p. 7.
- James Roscoe Day, My Neighbor The Working Man (New
York: The Abingdon Press, 1920), p. 101.
- Ibid, p. 372.
- “Memo Underscores SU's Commitment To Fairness,
Healing,” Negotiation News, Sept. 25, 1998, p. 2.
- Robert L. Smith, “Cutbacks Target SU Administration
Along With Academics,” Post- Standard, December 17, 1991,p. A4.
- Kenneth Shaw, “SU Aims To Cut With Finesse, Not
Brutality,” Syracuse Herald American, February 16, 1992, p. B7.
- “Searching for Words,” Syracuse New
Times, February 16-26, 1992.
- Frank Herron, “Downsizing SU,” Syracuse
Herald- Journal, February 18, 1992.
- Shaw, “SU Aims To Cut,” p. B7.
- Kenneth Shaw, “Building On Strength: Values For The
Future,” Syracuse Record, November 18, 1991, p. 9.
- Kenneth Shaw, “What Is Quality?” Syracuse
Record, September 23, 1996.
- Bill Readings, The University In Ruins
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), p. 10-11.
- Adriel Bettelheim, ”SU Chancellor Says Private,
Public Sectors Must Cooperate,” Syracuse Herald Journal, June 2,
1988.
- “Revolutionary Robotics,” Syracuse
University Magazine, Fall 1998, p. 5.
- Bruce Wilshire, The Moral Collapse of the
University (Albany: SUNY Albany Press, 1990), p. 11-12.
- Shaw, “Building On Strength,” p. 7.
- Sapna Kollali, “Faculty Leads Chapel
Protest,” Daily Orange, September 3, 1998, p. 1, 3.
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