Monthly Archives: March 2006

My colleague Michael Fischl forwarded me a statement “signed by a rapidly growing number of faculty and students in response to the ‘Statement Regarding Possible Strike’ distributed to the University community via email.” He writes that people wanting to sign it are should send a message to that effect to worker_justice_um@yahoo.com.

Here’s the text of the statement:

Continue reading →

In the UM Strike FAQ provided by the administration, they say the following:

Q: Will picket lines be established around campus perimeters or in front of University of Miami buildings?

A: No. Any potential picket lines should be confined to the pre-designated entrance to the Coral Gablescampus reserved for UNICCO employees. This reserved entrance has been established pursuant to NLRB rulings that seek to avoid enmeshing individuals who are not parties to the dispute. UNICCO, UNICCO employees, and union organizers are aware of the designated location, which will be clearly indicated with appropriate signage. The designated location is at the parking lot entrance just south of the Alumni House between Brescia Avenueand Red Road.

Q: Will faculty, staff, students, vendors, or visitors be required to cross or pass a picket line in order to gain access to campus parking lots or buildings?

A: No. Any potential picket lines should be confined to the pre-designated entrance to the Coral Gables campus reserved for UNICCO employees. This reserved entrance has been established pursuant to NLRB rulings that seek to avoid enmeshing individuals who are not parties to the dispute. UNICCO, UNICCO employees, and union organizers are aware of the designated location, which will be clearly indicated with appropriate signage. The designated location is at the parking lot entrance just south of the Alumni House between Brescia Avenue and Red Road.

In other words, no roving pickets, no strike roulette.

But if there’s one legal and symbolic picket location (in a corner of the campus where most students never go, I might add), then we have no choice but to treat the entire campus as covered by a picket line, do we?

Is the really bad national publicity worth this sort of hardball?

I’m glad I took a big load of books and papers home last Monday. Now I just don’t know whether to hope that faculty meetings will or will not be held on campus….

The Orlando Sentinel has a better story on the UM strike than any I’ve seen in the Herald, although the Herald does report that the limited strike starts today.

Perhaps because the University is not actually the party against whom the union is striking, the consensus seems to be that if there’s no actual picket line at your building, it’s OK to go in (and, I hope, to leave it if the strikers turn up later?). As there are only 450 or so workers in the would-be bargaining unit, and we have three large campuses, they can’t be everywhere. So it’s sort of strike roulette. I do find this odd: I know that at Yale we considered the campus off limits whether or not picketers happened to be in a particular place. Perhaps there’s some subtlety about secondary boycott law I’m missing here.

Or maybe it’s just the times: shortly before I left Miami, a colleague told me an awful story. He opened class on Monday with some remarks about how he would deal with the strike, and after a while some students put up their hands and said, in effect, “what strike?”. They had heard nothing about it. Then another student put up a hand and asked what this “picket line” thing was that he was talking about. It emerged that the student had never seen or heard of a picket line in his entire life. Not in the news, movies nor books. The labor movement is indeed in trouble.