Their revolution may be over, but they certainly still have small pockets of resistance. Just as al Qaeda continues to cower in the caves of Kashmir, labor activists continue to take cover in the shadows of universities across the nation.
La résistance reared its ugly head again in Madison last week, as the usual suspects whooped and hollered around Memorial Union in “commemoration” of its 75th anniversary. Something about anniversaries brings out the worst in these people. It’s as if every time the rest of the community wants to celebrate a building or an event, the activists realize how long they have been working on their cause with no tangible results and throw a temper tantrum in response.
It appears the usual suspects’ agenda this year is to harass the university and the Union for their abuse of limited term employees (LTEs). These LTE positions are for a transient workforce of students and others who need jobs while in Madison, but are not designed to be long-term careers. As such, LTEs don’t have a lot of the benefits full-time university employees have.
After some in-depth investigation (no doubt supported by student fees in some way, shape or form) it turns out the university will, in some cases, change an LTE’s title and keep the employee for longer periods than the original position intended.
Somehow this scenario doesn’t pull on my heartstrings the way the sweatshop labor stories do, but it does hit closer to home. Anyway, the afternoon protests at Taco Bell haven’t really slowed taco consumption at bar time, and the Workers Rights Consortium hasn’t even had a headline on www.indymedia.org in recent memory.
I quit taking these people seriously a long time ago. When you look at the names and faces of many of these labor activists, you find that they received their protest training marching up and down State Street screaming for tuition freezes and demanding their “right to higher education.”
Well, my friends, it is time to make a choice. However noble it may be to demand that Memorial Union pay higher wages and benefits to its employees, it flies straight in the face of our goal to keep tuition affordable.
Tuition isn’t the only issue either. The beer reformation that took place at the Union over the summer hits almost every student and alumni in their pocketbook at some point. The introduction of plastic pitchers to the terrace came with price inflation that makes tuition increases look tame. Are we really willing to pay $15.00 for a pitcher of beer so the bar tender can make time-and-a-half and have health insurance?
In a perfect world, we would all make a lot of money doing something we love, but in the real world, wages don’t pay themselves, and the money has to come from somewhere. Somewhere usually ends up being your wallet, either through higher state-income taxes, higher rents to cover rising property taxes, higher student fees or higher beer prices.
If Memorial Union LTE abuse is the most compelling issue the usual suspects have left to rhyme about, than the labor movement is officially dead.
Now, if you are one of the usual suspects and have read this far into my column, I am sure you are already preparing a mental list of recent labor victories to prove the movement is as alive now as it was in October 1917 in Moscow.
Sure, there has been a successful strike here, a unionized grocery there, but no one in their right mind can argue that labor unions and their causes have gained any momentum since Reagan took air-traffic controllers to task in the early 1980s. Just because a few freshman buy 60-inch posters of Che Guevara each year when they are stoned out of their minds does not mean the workers of the world are uniting.
All that’s left to do is to clean up the pieces and snuff out the pockets of resistance. We can start by finding a new tenant for the Greens’ Infoshop and UW Labor Center office in University Square.
But then again, perhaps we should let them squat on that property just a little longer. The last thing I want this column to turn into is a call to action, and anyway, the usual suspects are so damn entertaining.
A.J. Hughes ([email protected]) is a software developer and a UW graduate.
