Daniel Imperato – Official Website
Daniel Imperato For President 2024
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post EU Backs Controversial Dutch Plans to Shut Down Farms in Bid to Reduce Nitrogen Emissions appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post Restored Health and Vitality from Ditching My Cell Phone appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post Will Meat be Banned? appeared first on Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article …
The post Ukrainian War Crimes Reported, Zelensky Applauded in The Hague appeared first on Global Research.
It has always been our mandate to tell and spread the truth even in the midst of censorship, working continuously to reverse the psychological effects of lies and war propaganda.
Humanity is at a dangerous crossroads. truth remains a “powerful …
The post Global Research: Calling for Peace Negotiations, Seeking and Telling the Truth appeared first on Global Research.
Brandon Johnson greets people at a restaurant in Chicago on April 23, 2023. (Brian Cassella / Chicago Tribune / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
On April 4, Brandon Johnson won a stunning victory in the Chicago mayoral election. But the honeymoon period for him and his supporters will be brief. As for all pro-worker reformers and movements, a proverbial “Sword of Damocles” hangs over their heads. Stray too far from the status quo, and the interconnected institutions of the capitalist class — the banks, corporations, lobbyists, and corporate media — will descend, or at least threaten to until compliance is restored.
Already, as Kevin Young has documented in these pages, businesses and their allies are threatening the incoming Johnson administration with capital flight (moving capital out of Chicago to other locales) or a capital strike (refusing to invest in the city) if he pursues some of his more ambitious economic reforms.
Other than capitulating, Johnson’s only real choice is to strike at the heart of this reactionary resistance by asserting public control over capital. While this will be politically and technically challenging, especially for a US city like Chicago, it is not impossible. Many US cities are in the advanced stages of exploring or creating new public banks. And as several observers, including Young and Saqib Bhatti have noted, Chicago could and should join them as soon as possible. In the meantime, there are several shortcuts and temporary measures that might expedite the public-banking process and allow Chicago to deploy its own substantial financial resources to blunt the threat from private capital.
At the same time, “public” control of capital cannot just mean the city acting alone through top-down bureaucratic channels. It will require an active process of increasing accountability and fostering democratic participation from below.
Almost fifty years ago, in April 1974, a coup by left-leaning soldiers within the Portuguese armed forces overthrew the country’s fascist dictatorship and triggered a far-reaching economic, political, and social revolution. Faced with the threat of capital flight and capital strikes, unionized workers in the country’s banks seized control and demanded the replacement of governing boards hostile to this “Carnation Revolution.”
Following a failed countercoup in 1975, the government nationalized private Portuguese banks (without compensation) to break the power of the country’s small group of capitalist elites. Over the subsequent years, these public banks helped spur Portugal’s economic development and transition to a multiparty, social democratic system.
Portugal’s moves were bold, but not unprecedented. Throughout the twentieth century, radical movements in countries from Russia and Cuba to Chile and Tanzania realized that leaving capital in private hands would, at best, limit what they could achieve and, at worst, threaten their very survival. In the US Midwest, a similar dynamic — an ascendant left-wing movement grappling with private capital — led to the creation of the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the more than one-hundred-year-old public bank that serves as a model for many US public-banking campaigns.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, North Dakota was under the thumb of corporations and wealthy capitalists, particularly out-of-state railroad companies and grain monopolies backed by large private banks. These companies used their wealth and power to evade state taxes and buy off state officials. Early efforts to weaken this plutocratic stranglehold were met with warnings of capital strikes. In 1891, for instance, grain companies threatened to close their elevators rather than accept modest regulation.
Between 1916 and 1918, candidates aligned with the newly formed Nonpartisan League (NPL) won a series of elections on the promise of creating a more just economy. Upon gaining control of the North Dakota legislature and governorship, the NPL began to implement its agenda. Aware that corporate interests would use their control of capital to stymie radical policies, the NPL made public banking a cornerstone of their approach.
In July 1919, the BND opened its doors and managed to survive an early economic and legal counterattack from Wall Street banks and their local allies. It has subsequently become an engine for economic development in the state, supporting lending to farmers, providing disaster relief, making low-cost student loans, providing banking services to smaller banks and individuals, and returning tens of millions to the state general fund to support social services.
Creating a completely new public bank at the city or state level is a difficult and complex proposition. For many years, the BND was the only full-scale public bank in the United States, and only recently did a second institution join that list: the Territorial Bank of American Samoa (TBAS).
Despite mounting momentum behind public banking — especially in California, where enabling legislation was passed in 2019 — it has proven difficult to get new public banks off the ground for a variety of reasons, including opposition from private-banking interests and the requirement (in California) that new public banks receive Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance (something that neither the BND nor the TBAS needs given that deposits are guaranteed by the state or territory government).
Founding a new public bank in Chicago, and realizing its full benefits, will likely take time — time that the Johnson administration politically, and the people of Chicago economically, manifestly lack. Fortunately, there are several half steps the city could adopt to assert public control over capital and move toward a full-fledged public bank.
As a new report by the Jain Family Institute and the Berggruen Institute outlines, a potential first step would be to create or repurpose a municipal finance corporation (MFC) — similar to those already existing in several North American cities — that would make loans and investments but would not collect deposits. Such an institution, the authors contend, would be much easier to establish through traditional municipal processes and would not require FDIC approval. “The MFC structure could thus allow the city to quickly initiate lending toward its goals and social mandates in climate, housing, and financial justice,” they write.
Not only would this MFC help Chicago deliver on some of its most pressing economic, social, and environmental priorities, but it could help lessen the blow of a potential capital strike by providing funding (in the form of loans or investments) to Chicago-based businesses. Additionally, it could serve as proof that public control of capital is possible, strengthening the case for a full-scale public bank.
Another option would be to acquire an existing financial institution and convert it to a public bank. While the Jain/Berggruen plan envisions this as a second stage once an MFC is up and running, it could also be implemented separately. In the private sector, most bank expansions and new entrances occur by way of an acquisition since it is quicker and cheaper to simply purchase a bank charter than to erect an entirely new bank.
Currently, the FDIC lists thirty-one insured banks operating in Chicago (not counting branches of larger national or international banks). While not all these banks would be a viable option to buy out, one or more could be willing to sell their operations to the city at a fair market price.
The Jain/Berggruen report acknowledges some downsides to the buy-existing approach, including inheriting loans and business lines that might not be in accordance with the goals of a public bank. The report even suggests that the city might find it more difficult than a private bank to shut down these business lines.
This is a contestable presumption. Traditionally, one of public ownership’s main benefits is that it can advance whatever goals society chooses to prioritize — including ending or excluding noxious business activities. By contrast, a private bank committed to maximizing shareholder returns will likely find it exceptionally hard to mothball socially undesirable business, especially if it is lucrative.
Public banks, like all publicly owned enterprises, are not inherently good or bad. They are institutions that must be consciously designed to produce the outcomes that society desires. Over the decades many have been highly successful in their aims, from boosting employment to developing industrial policy. Others, however, have been at best overly top-down, bureaucratic, and alienating, and at worse, vehicles of clientelism, environmental degradation, and state oppression.
In recent years, an alternative known as Democratic Public Ownership (DPO) has started to emerge and proliferate around the world. At its core, DPO is about enhancing democratic decision-making structures, transparency, and accountability both within and around a publicly owned enterprise or service. This may include empowering trade unions and works councils; creating democratically elected governing assemblies; establishing multi-stakeholder boards; building autonomous community “observatories” to enhance participation and oversight; implementing participatory planning and budgeting processes; and crafting co-governance arrangements with popular membership organizations.
While relatively new as a cohesive concept, DPO has a long history anchored in left theorizing and anti-capitalist experiments. From the multi-stakeholder “Plumb Plan” promulgated by US railroad workers after World War I, to efforts to institute workers’ councils and worker self-management in Eastern Europe during the Cold War, to more direct forms of community control of public services implemented in South America in recent decades, many leftists have long identified the need to democratize publicly owned enterprises.
Fortunately, DPO principles figure prominently in the contemporary public-banking movement in the United States, and there are numerous proposals that the Johnson administration could consult: along with the recent Jain/Berggruen paper, there’s a report from the Democracy Collaborative titled “Constructing the Democratic Public Bank,” the governance proposal put forth by the East Bay Public Bank campaign, and experiments like Costa Rica’s Banco Popular, a large and highly successful public bank with an innovative democratic governance model.
Brandon Johnson will face a blizzard of challenges when he is sworn in as Chicago’s fifty-seventh mayor this month. He will need to move quickly and forcefully to attack those obstacles — including by asserting democratic, public control over capital. And even if his administration is not immediately successful, it could be responsible for creating a powerful new public bank that serves as an engine for just economic development in Chicago for generations to come.
New York City mayor Eric Adams in Manhattan on April 17, 2023. (Luiz C. Ribeiro / New York Daily News / Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
Last month, New York City mayor Eric Adams ordered almost all city agencies to cut their budgets by 3 to 4 percent for the coming fiscal year, which begins in July. His new proposed executive budget, subject to approval by city council next month, outlines hundreds of millions of cuts to libraries, schools, and social services. Meanwhile, the New York Police Department chose to acquire two robotic dogs for approximately $750,000 — making two new dogs worth a year of preschool for approximately fifty-eight three-year-olds.
The mayor’s choices are both devastating and antidemocratic. Adams has blamed the city’s fiscal woes on the recent influx of asylum seekers in the city, pitting refugees against long-term New Yorkers and giving the public the impression that there aren’t enough resources to be shared. He has dismissed criticism from a significant number of city councilmembers, recommendations from policy experts, fierce opposition from community groups, and contrary information from watchdog groups like the Independent Budget Office, which actually projects a $4.9 billion surplus for 2023.
Unfortunately, some of the mayor’s premises — that repeating the phrase “fiscally responsible” often enough will justify making any and all cuts to our safety net — are hardly unique. The mayor’s cuts embody poor budget judgment on a local level, as well as the need for budget justice and democracy in cities nationwide.
In his instructions to agency leaders, budget director Jacques Jiha stated that they “should avoid meaningfully impacting services where possible.” This is not possible. I should know: I am a scholar who specializes in the study of urban policy and governance, a parent of a child in our public schools and a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY).
Three or 4 percent cuts don’t sound like much, until these cuts are put into context. They are actually the third round of cuts in just a few months. Mayor Adams has proposed a 50 percent cut in job postings in all agencies, without attention to whether these vacancies were for expendable positions or for ones that are absolutely essential to keep New York running.
And these three rounds of cuts follow steep, seemingly indiscriminate budget cuts last year, more than $370 million for the Department of Education alone. As reported in the City, this means that Brooklyn’s Middle School 859 had to work with 15 percent, or $825,000, less than it did the previous year. So several teachers were “excessed” over the summer, and the school eliminated leadership positions for teacher professional development, planned to increase class sizes from twenty-five to thirty-three, and shrank arts, music, and enrichment offerings.
These cuts also come exactly when students direly need more resources to cope with learning and emotional losses they suffered during the pandemic. More than eighty-seven hundred children in NYC lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19; an investigation by a coalition of journalism organizations reports that “decades of underfunding mental health care left schools unprepared” to help these students.
These cuts are an act of self-sabotage. According to one Brookings Institution study, six of the country’s top ten four-year colleges for economic mobility are part of CUNY. We did not become the “People’s University” without resources.
These cuts also come exactly when students direly need more resources, to cope with learning and emotional losses they suffered during the pandemic.
At Brooklyn College, the political science department in which I teach has lost seven full-time faculty members in the past decade. None of those positions have been replaced. In the meantime, even as we increasingly rely on underpaid part-time, adjunct faculty to teach our classes, our adjunct budgets are also being slashed and our courses canceled, sometimes just days before the semester starts. Our building infrastructure is in such disrepair that, as but one example, two of the three sinks in my office’s bathroom are inoperable.
We are working to increase student enrollments for the coming year, but we cannot do so without offering the courses and facilities they need for their college education. Among CUNY’s community colleges, more than one hundred faculty who left since the start of the pandemic have not been replaced.
The budget cuts will also hurt services like food stamps, right after pandemic-related federal assistance ended. The result is, as one New York Times headline put it, a “catastrophe.” The Human Resources Agency is supposed to process food assistance applications within a thirty-day window. In fiscal year 2021, under Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Mayor’s Management Report reported an on-time rate of 92 percent. In December 2022, the on-time rate was 22.4 percent. Those eligible for housing vouchers face similarly long delays, resulting in some being evicted from their homes as they wait.
Meanwhile, Mayor Adams just announced a contract giving the city’s largest police union $5.5 billion in raises. This means that a cop with five and a half years of service could earn $131,500 a year. (By contrast, teachers with five years on the job and a master’s degree earn $72,076 a year.) Further, many cops earn as much $50,000 to $80,000 a year in overtime pay on top of their salaries; a recent recording obtained by Gothamist features police officers bragging about “milking” overtime.
The city has overspent its police overtime budget by nearly $100 million thus far this year. The new contract will make these numbers even more dramatic; the new overtime rate of $93.75 an hour is 50 percent more than the current one.
The city’s recent cuts reflect little rhyme or reason. Although New York City’s preschool programs for three-year-olds (“3-K”) were seen as a national model, the Department of Education allowed thousands of precious seats to sit empty as many families remained unaware of the programs. It could have used federal COVID-19 money on outreach but did not.
City council members must hold Mayor Adams accountable and reject any executive budget with such austerity baked in.
Early childhood education should be universal and is a bargain in the long run; it yields returns of as much as $16 for every dollar invested in the form of less crime and fewer social services needed in the future. Instead, the administration plans to significantly contract the program and pay the consulting firm Accenture $760,000 to “map out needs and future seats” in 3-K.
The city administration should roll back these wholesale budget cuts. City councilmembers must hold Mayor Adams accountable and reject any executive budget with such austerity baked in. City agencies need more time and resources to strategically plan for the medium term. New York State must pay its fair share to the city, especially for services to newly arriving asylum seekers, the Metropolitan Transit Authority, and the billions of school funds it still owes from the 2001 Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York decision.
And New Yorkers should demand a more democratic budget process — one in which everyday residents have a say in the city budget’s priorities. Dozens of community groups, including the Professional Staff Congress-CUNY union I am a member of, Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM), Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ), and the local Democratic Socialists of America are already organizing to make this demand through a coalition called the People’s Plan, which came together to forward alternative visions for the city budget and for how we could have a better budgeting process.
Public budgets are moral documents that reflect specific values and theories of government. Mayor Adams is relying on his team and allies to decide a budget for all of us, and in doing so, he’s depriving the city of so much insight from what makes New York great: New Yorkers. By opening up the process, he can get fresh ideas that help the city thrive. Everyday New Yorkers deserve a budget that gives them the resources to address their needs and the right to help shape what that means.
(Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Images)
On Tuesday, April 24, graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, walked out on a three-day strike over an unfair labor practice charge. According to Fordham grad workers, represented by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers–Communications Workers of America (FGSW-CWA), the university is refusing to bargain in good faith. Grad students voted overwhelmingly to form the union in a National Labor Relations Board election in April 2022; they are now trying to negotiate their first contract with Fordham.
Graduate workers at the university say the administration’s bad-faith bargaining tactics are particularly egregious given that many students struggle to find housing and experience food insecurity; international workers, who aren’t legally able to work outside the university, are particularly vulnerable. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler talked to Fordham grad workers about last week’s walkout, the union’s demands, and the state of bargaining.
Sara Wexler
Why did you all walk out last week?
Marshawn Brewer
We walked out because we’re in the process of bargaining our contract and we’ve been bargaining it for around seven months now. The walkout was a response to the bad-faith bargaining of the upper management of our school.
They have a lawyer who is engaging in a tactic called “surface bargaining,” which is meant to stonewall the bargaining process by rejecting any proposals, by not moving forward at all. This is meant to wear the opposition down through attrition, so the momentum of the union will slow, people will be like, “Well, nothing’s happening,” and want to give up.
Because he was using this tactic, we weren’t getting any results; there was no momentum in bargaining. We knew that the only way we could change this was to show them that we had the power to withhold our labor, and that that in turn would energize the bargaining process and make them take our requests more seriously.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
The union just started last year actually; this is our first contract. Our demands are higher wages and better health care; job assignments are very important. And there are more specific demands, things that don’t necessarily apply to everyone, but are just as important — like access to childcare, paid family leave, those sorts of things. These are the types of demands that we’ve brought to the university, and we have received basically nothing in return.
Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. It feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
When you think of good-faith bargaining, it’s hard — because they have their interests and we have our interests, but there should still be some proactive approach to this. If you’re showing up to the table for after fifty hours of bargaining, and we’re the only ones bringing ways we can change the status quo, ways for the situation to be better for all grad students all across the board, and you’re coming in with literally nothing. . . . Most of the time management doesn’t even show up with the proposals pulled up or printed. They don’t have the information that would make negotiations easier to approach. So it feels like they’re there just to waste our time.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
One good example that we’ve been discussing in several bargaining sessions now is that we would like to have it in our contract that somebody can only be dismissed under just-cause reasoning, which is what Fordham has in other contracts with other unions in the university — but management have refused to put that in. We’ve spent hours discussing definitions of legal terms, and there hasn’t been any change to this status quo. They have completely rejected every single proposal that we’ve had for protections for international students. They haven’t even considered that.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Another aspect that we’ve found very frustrating is that the administration’s approach outside of the bargaining sessions has been to completely ignore the existence of the union. That has been the case during town halls and their general approach to communicating with undergrads and alumni — they’ve just played it off as if we’re not here.
That changed with the announcement of the walkout. The response was an interesting email that was sent out by President Tania Tetlow to the whole undergrad body. It’s made its rounds on Twitter; the language in the email was just baffling. It was baffling to see them take that approach.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Obviously the union-busting language is expected, but the tone of the email was very condescending, and it was calling us entitled. They were saying that we wanted to have more benefits than others in the Fordham community, which is completely wrong. It was an email full of just plain lies and misinformation. We actually got a lot more support from certain communities after the email was sent out because of how obviously condescending and wrong the email was.
But that was the first time management actually recognized that we are a union and that we are present and trying to bargain with them. We have asked the president to meet with us several times, especially when she first got to Fordham. We sent a couple of emails, and she never tried to have a conversation with us. She’s never been at the bargaining table. All the information that she’s getting is whatever she gets from her bargaining team. Unless she comes to the table, she won’t really know what is happening in the room.
Sara Wexler
Can you say a little bit about what it’s like to be a graduate student at Fordham? I read that the stipend is about $28,000; what is the experience for graduate students trying to survive in New York on that stipend?
Marshawn Brewer
There are a multitude of survival problems that go with the $28,000 salary. One of them is that a lot of times you need a guarantor to get an apartment, and because we aren’t able to afford that on our salary, we need a cosigner. Many students don’t have people they can rely on for that. Second, if you don’t have access to those types of funds or community support, you have to find an apartment that might not be legal or you might need to find housing with four to five other people. So you can find yourself in precarious situations.
Third, the housing, the stipend, and related conditions impact international students a lot. They often don’t get paid in a timely manner when they first get here. So, as an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes. And you have to rely on people in the Fordham community, other grad students, and sometimes families back home.
As an international student, not only do you get a small stipend, but you don’t get paid for months on end sometimes.
Many international students struggle with housing because of these precarious situations. We have proposals to try to alleviate some of these things, such as having the university provide housing over the summer so that international students can transition quicker or having the option for students to be paid with their A number as opposed to a Social Security number, which would speed up payments. And the university has rejected all those proposals.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Not only is the stipend lower than $30,000 a year, but it’s also taxed, and it only covers the nine months of the academic year. We don’t get paid over the summer, which is difficult for everybody, but especially for international students because we’re legally not allowed to work outside of the university. So a lot of us do under-the-table jobs, babysitting or any other gig, basically, that will pay cash to try to get by over the summer.
Besides the housing situation, there are also a lot of people who experience food insecurity because the money is just not enough; on top of paying taxes out of the stipend, we’re also supposed to pay some fees to the university. The university doesn’t cover the full amount of the health insurance. We usually pay a little above $2,000 out of that stipend a year.
It’s impossible to survive on that stipend. At the beginning of this year, one of us had to house an international student who was able to afford just a few days in a hotel when they first arrived, but nobody provided them with any aid to find housing, and they were going to be on the street that night if nobody would take them in.
The university administration knew about the issue, which continues to be a problem. We had another international student from Ukraine who also faced difficulty finding housing when he first arrived. He was trying to find housing, and Fordham University just didn’t do anything for him.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
I remember going to the first negotiation session that I attended, and this was a topic that came up. The response from the university’s lawyer and their negotiation team was like, “Hey, you know what you’re getting into. It’s New York City baby, that’s how it is.” And I’m paraphrasing here, but what the lawyer said was, it’s a personal problem and Fordham is not going to delve into those. So [the message from] their lawyer and the president of the university is, come to New York, but we’re not paying you enough to find proper housing and we’re not paying you in a timely way so that you can even make the first payment. Were you able to find an apartment? That’s just a problem that you have to deal with on your own.
I just remember sitting in that bargaining session and hearing them say this and thinking, they don’t want us here, or they’re at least not making any effort to make us feel like we’re welcome, appreciated, and valued at the university. For me, going to class or doing any of the tasks that I had to do for the week after that . . . I was like, “Where’s the motivation here if it feels like the value that we bring to the university is completely unappreciated?”
As Gaby was saying, international students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s just crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university, and jobs within the university are very limited. Even once you can teach — I can’t teach yet, I’m a first year — that’s an avenue that, because of Fordham’s rising tuition, which they just raised 6 percent, becomes more and more unavailable. Students are unable to pay for a summer course.
International students are forced to find other ways of financing their summers. It’s crazy finding funding for three to four months out of the year when you can’t work outside of the university.
So yeah, you can just see the avenues, the ways to find funding, closing around you. The alternatives are you have savings, a rich family member, or you have another type of funding — or you have to find something under the table. And at that point, because you’re an international student, you’re under a lot of scrutiny for your visa status. You’re forced to make the wager: Am I willing to take this under-the-table job, knowing that if anything were ever to come up, then my visa’s out the window? And any prospects of getting approved to stay here afterward on a job visa are also out the window? It’s a very precarious situation.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
And of course this is always happening while we’re trying to do our best teaching our students, doing our research, and working for the university — because Fordham works because we do, right? The president says that she wants to see diverse backgrounds and diverse voices and faces in the university. But when it comes to protecting the people who bring that to the university, we don’t hear anything from them.
Sara Wexler
What’s the next step after the walkout? Do you foresee a longer strike?
Marshawn Brewer
It’s hard to make a determination on that now. Upward of 90 percent of first contracts end without a strike. So if we go by the data that we have on hand, a strike shouldn’t be what occurs. But we are going to need the capacity to strike. We’re definitely going to have to be strike-ready regardless of whether a strike is on the horizon or not. The idea is to be building momentum for the capacity to strike and to be willing to execute that. That is what we’re trying to do currently.
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
We’ve opened a strike fund because there were already people during the walkout who were hourly workers who were not going to get paid for the hours that they joined the walkout. And that’s already a few thousand dollars. That’s why we started the strike fund right now — to be able to cover their wages.
Marshawn Brewer
We’re going to see whether the walkout is going to have impact on bargaining. While we were bargaining during the walkout and the protest outside, the university definitely had a change of tone. They were definitely more demure in their responses, and our arguments started to make a lot more sense to them. It’s funny how your arguments make a lot more sense when people are outside chanting and the windows are shaking and you hear the signs and everything like that — your logic becomes much more precise.
We’re going to see what their response on just cause is. Because just cause is a staple of some of their past agreements, and the only reason they wouldn’t want to put it in our contract is because they’re bargaining in bad faith. If we offer a counter to them on just cause and they say they’ll consider it, if we get a positive indicator on that, if they agree to just cause during the next bargaining session — that might be a sign that we are moving toward good faith and that a contract could be on the horizon.
Sara Wexler
Have you faced any challenges in organizing?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
There are certain departments of students who have been hard to reach out to. There’s definitely a lot of fear. I can speak to that as an international student: there’s a lot that’s so ambiguous in terms of how are we protected, especially in terms of fears of getting your visa removed or something like that. We know in general that the United States is not a very welcoming place for immigrants.
So that fear is looming a little bit behind trying to organize in the workplace — and not only for internationals. For a lot of people, I think, there’s kind of a stigma that unions might not be the greatest. People have reservations. But, again, after the letter that the president sent out that was blatantly condescending and horrible in so many ways, a lot of people who were afraid or who had reservations were like, “Ok, I’m ready to walk out after seeing the way we’re being treated and disrespected all the time.”
Marshawn Brewer
I think there are pockets of the graduate student body who have some ideological reservations. Then there’s, like Gaby said, the fear of some international students about what could transpire if they lean in too hard into the process.
And then there’s just a sense of apathy among a few people. Once the union isn’t front and center — it was last year — there is a point at which a lot of people drop off and aren’t paying attention. So you have to reactivate them, tell them why this is important and why they have to get involved.
You also have the problem of third partying, where people who are not as involved in the union see the union as something separate from themselves. You have to get them to understand that we are all in this together, and that it’s not “us versus them” — it’s all of us together in relation to the upper administration.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Also, on a more practical level, there’s the challenge that there are students who are here for a shorter amount of time by virtue of the type of program that they’re doing. They might still be student employees, they might still be workers and part of the unit; but because some people are here only for three semesters, unless you’re a PhD student that has an investment in the institution for five, six, seven years, it’s harder to say, “This fight is worth it. This is something that I want to involve myself in.” So planting the seeds of this feeling of solidarity, of “maybe I’m not going to reap the benefits of this contract, but people after me might be able to” — it’s challenging.
We heard during our walkout, at the closing rally, from a master’s student, and you do see master’s students that are very involved. So I’m not going to say that it’s impossible to activate those sorts of parts of the unit, but it’s certainly a little more challenging. The rough part is that these are people that are still very much affected by the conditions under which we work, by the problems that affect us all. It’s just harder for them to see how “this fight is worth it for me.”
Sara Wexler
Have you been in touch with any other unions? Are there other communities that have expressed solidarity with your contract fight?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
Individually, some of us have been in touch with certain people at other unions that have recently gone on strike, for example at Temple University and the University of California, to discuss how their negotiations are going or how they go about certain things.
On our social media, the solidarity between unions is really strong. Other unions have been retweeting our strike fund. They’ve been offering their support every time that we post about a big thing that we have. For the walkout, a lot of them were supporting from afar. We got some people from other CWA units and locals come to our walkout, and they brought food to help us out and just cheer us on. They came to the closing rally at the university.
Sara Wexler
How do you think a good contract will transform graduate student life at Fordham?
M. Gaby Hurtarte Leon
It’ll transform the lives of all of us a lot. It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, “I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week, and have our brains function the way we need them to function in order to be able to teach and research and all these things.
It’s terrifying and difficult to go into class thinking, ‘I can only eat ramen noodles for the rest of the week.’
Even in terms of morale, it’ll transform the spirit of the university because graduate students teach about 30 percent of the classes at Fordham University. We’re in touch with the majority of first-year students who come into college, and we’re excited for our research and to teach them. But in our current conditions, sometimes we just can’t. We can’t be excited, or we can’t perform. We know that the Fordham community in general will be better with a good contract — not only will our personal living conditions improve, but the entirety of the ecosystem.
Alfredo Nicolás Dueñas
Aside from changing the conditions under which workers are able to teach and research and be a part of the university, the proposals that we’re making are also about the ecosystem and the university at large — demands like banning NDAs [nondisclosure agreements] in cases of harassment and discrimination. Those are about making the university a safer place. The ultimate objective of the contract is to create a safer learning environment that makes everyone involved in it better off.