CFA roadshow revelations about collective bargaining

I've had a long day. I've had a long week. I've had a long month, and it's only getting longer. Luckily, being February, it can only get so long.

Today was the CFA roadshow visit to our campus. The roadshow initiated, I believe, in the 2001 contract bargaining, when the union and management reached an impasse. CFA decided urgent organizing was needed, and before long they were able to hold public protests of 800-1000 faculty members outside a venue in San Francisco where the CSU Chancellor, Charles Reed (salary: $362,000 per year, plus car allowance, plus housing allowance) was speaking.

A lot of faculty look at the world in such a narrow and logically coherent way that they can only see their being underpaid and overworked as the result of somebody (i.e. their union) not informing management of this fact. When they are told how irrationally and bizarrely the CSU negotiators behave, they can't understand it. They also don't understand how it would help if a handful of faculty writing about their working conditions and showing up at a meeting with the campus President to inform him of it, and asking the President to bring their descriptions of their working conditions to Long Beach to present to the Chancellor.

The thing is, going to the President is an exertion of moral pressure. Sure, he can ignore it, but the physical presence of 20 or so faces of faculty in his office - faces he has seen before and will see again - makes it uncomfortable for him to deny their request. And the President could be resisted by the Chancellor, sure, but the Chancellor will have to talk to the President again someday - this is how moral pressure works.

And moral pressure is a biulding block for creating conditions that allow us to morally shame. The demonstration in 2001 in San Francisco involved puppets, pickets, chants, songs, marching - a display calculated to embarrass Reed, a prominent man, a man not used to this kind of treatment. Without the step of creating the moral pressure (and the organizing), the chance to morally shame wouldn't exist.

From that point, political pressure, or maybe I should call it moral insistence, is the next step. Say the Chancellor isn't that easy to embarrass, or finds in himself the ability to dismiss faculty complaints as unimportant, or as a bunch of whining. (We could imagine a scenario, for instance, in which Reed would say, "Bunch a babies! So we've cut more than 200 tenure track positions, increased enrollment, and hired 40% more administrators in ten years - so what? If they were professionals, they'd do their jobs!") Go to the legislature, and show them how Reed and the CSU administrators have essentially failed to negotiate in good faith, and have stonewalled. They pay the bills; they'll put some pressure on. This is insisiting you have a legitimate complaint.

That builds legitimacy for the next steps: collective action, civil disobedience, and direct action. Unless you've built the case all along, step by step, from moral pressure on up, and organizing all along the way, your collective actions won't be successful.

I frankly didn't get this until today. I understood why moral pressure was important to apply - especially as a legitimating narrative so you could go back later and call people jerks. From the other standpoint, I understood why it would be potentially uncomfortable to flat-out deny someone's claims about their working conditions. Collective bargaining seemed to me to be a game of Blackjack - either you have the cards or you don't. (In our collective bargaining situation, if we can't reach agreement, we go to impasse and fact-finding, but ultimately the CSU can impose working terms on us - so on this level, bargaining seems like it always puts labor in a distressingly, desperately weak position.) But today, in that room full of faculty, I started to see the moral reasoning at work in labor organizing, and how bargaining happens. It's not entirely a question of whether you have the cards, whether you have the legal authority to do what you like. Power is not the same thing as legal authority, and comes from many sources.

One of the key sources, it turns out, are those baby steps that we take when we do what seems to have nothing to do with bargaining power - for instance, meeting the President and asking him to listen to us.