 Notes
1. The views I express here are entirely my own; I do not speak for the New Caucus of the PSC/CUNY or for the PSC/CUNY itself. My title expresses a debt to David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York: Cambridge UP, 1987).
2. The leadership of the Professional Staff Congress has since 1973 been in the hands of a single caucus, the City University Union Caucus (renamed during our electoral challenge the City University Unity Caucus); the union president since 1976 has been Irwin Polishook.
3. Jane Gallop, remarks at panel: "Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique: A Roundtable." Modern Language Association Convention, 30 December 1996, Toronto.
4. I thank Tony O'Brien for allowing me to quote him.
5. For one example of the emphasis on defending the university, see my colleague Bart Meyers in an article on the history of defenses of CUNY; he concludes with the hope that if the New Caucus wins union-wide leadership "it will have established an institutionalized base for writing a new chapter in the defense of CUNY" ("The CUNY Wars," Social Text 51 [1997]: 128). The founding document of the New Caucus, adopted by the membership on 2 December 1995, calls for "organization and resources to defend our livelihoods and profession, to protect the education of our students, and the dreams of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers for a better future." It also criticizes the current union leadership as a "closed elite that monopolizes virtually all decision-making, that removes the membership from policy debates . . . , and that equates loyalty to itself with loyalty to the union."
6. Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (London:Verso, 1988), quoted in Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland: The Hormel Strike and the Future of the Labor Movement (Boston: South End, 1993), 24.
7. Peter Rachleff, Hard-Pressed in the Heartland, 3.
8. Kim Moody, An Injury to All, quoted in Rachleff, 25.
9. James C. McKelly, "The Naked and the Dead: Dispatches from the Tenure Wars" in Profession 1997 (New York, Modern Language Association, 1997), 213.
10. Vincent Tirelli, "Adjuncts and More Adjuncts: Labor Segmentation and the Transformation of Higher Education" (Social Text 51: 79). |