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Feature
Story (continued) |
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Conversation
with
Richard Moser
National
Organizer, American
Association of University Professors |
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| Free
to Speak ... Assemble ... Organize |
I’ve been concentrating on organizing
adjunct faculty. It’s incredibly challenging, as all
contingent-worker organizing is. The adjunct faculty have no
rights at all — and they now represent half the faculty
at universities in this country.
When students and the public find out that
professors are making $2000 a course, don’t have health
care, and have no rights, they’re shocked. I work with
people all the time who make $18,000 a year and have no health
care. They work at three different places, they don’t have
an office, they can be fired at the drop of a hat — it’s
incredible. They’ve turned professors into these low-wage
workers.
I’m an American historian and a scholar of
citizenship. So I find the approaches in this paper very
intriguing and promising.
LATENT POWER
Citizenship values [such as the right to free
speech and to assemble] are already established in the
American consciousness. Activists today need to enter into
these old traditions. They are full of latent power. We can’t
succeed if we don’t.
Among our own members, this kind of thinking
resonates because we already have a tradition of workplace
democracy in universities. The faculty are supposed to be
involved in determining the direction of the university and
have due process rights. That tradition is now being
threatened by the corporatization of the university.
When the Bill of Rights was created, the
average citizen — and that would not include slaves,
women, or poor whites — saw the Bill of Rights as a
protection from the tyranny of government, a defense of their
property. But since then a huge transfer of property has
occurred — from individuals to corporations. Now they
have the property, so they get the rights.
DEMOCRACY — OR
NOT?
Another thing that’s changed is that today,
you can no longer clearly separate the public and private
sphere. Just try to find a private industry that isn’t
tapped into the public sphere, that doesn’t get some kind of
public money.
What that means is that the door is now open
between those two spheres. And so we can say, Why don’t
protections we have in the public sphere [like the Bill of
Rights] extend to the so-called private sphere? We need to
push open that door — to extend to the private realm,
the workplace, the protections we now have in the public
sector.
I think that at this stage, either we will
have democracy in both spheres, or we will have it in neither.
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Jerry Fishbein
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