The Signs Make it Real
We’re on strike. Here’s what I’ve learned.
Striking, the act of refusing to work except on your union’s terms, goes hand in hand with picketing, the act of keeping anyone else from working except on your union’s terms. In industries where workers from one area can easily pick up their jobs in another, or where strikebreakers can quickly be brought up to speed, the picket is essential, and it has become an enduring symbol of the strike for this reason among others. We have one. We march around, we chant, we wave signs, we turn away delivery trucks. It’s great.
However, in our case, it’s not so necessary as it might be at, say, an auto plant, because it’s next to impossible to find grad student scabs. The academic system is so rigidly tied to the semester timetable, and, at our level, to four-to-six-year graduate appointments, that the UC won’t be able to bring in strikebreakers without first waiting until at least January and then actively firing a bunch of the striking workers. That’s highly illegal, and the UC administration knows it, so it’s not going to happen. If we don’t work, no work gets done.
The result is a strike that is, as much as anything, about ostentationsly sitting around doing nothing at all. Ours is the first picket I’ve heard of to have time blocked out for yoga. We show up in casual clothes, we play Dua Lipa in between more traditional union songs, and we chant “My neck, my back, we want a fair contract.” I’ve heard the intended tone of the strike described as “joyous resistance,” and in my experience that’s pretty spot on. In general, I’m in favor of this attitude: it helps with morale, it breaks up the monotony of chanting and marching, and it means that we have the energy to really go for it at the end-of-shift rallies. That said, it does occasionally make the strike feel a little bit, for want of a better word, fake.
Feeling fake is nothing new to most graduate students (or, if one of our better chants is to be believed, UC President Dr. Michael Drake). The students we teach are often only a few years younger than we are. We are still learning concepts that our supervisors have been working with for years. Most of all, we are the junior members of a system designed to allow the senior members to look extremely smart all the time. In most industries, a resume is one page, two at the most, and is meant to be a compressed summary. In academia, a CV (curriculum vitae – but of course you speak Latin, don’t you?) lists everything you’ve ever published, every course you’ve ever taught, every grant you’ve ever brought in, every committee you’ve ever served on. A senior professor’s CV can have page counts in the double digits. That’s the essential threat of academia: cross me and I’ll make you look dumb. I’ll make you look like you’ve got nothing to offer. I’ll make you look fake.
The ultimate in academic fakeness is crankery. A crank is someone who publishes incorrect, usually incoherent, research independently, without the backing of a respected institution. (A medical quack is similar, but is usually peddling some form of intentional fraud, while a crank acts with nothing but the best intentions.) They are the butt of innummerable jokes, but, as with all the best hate figures, anyone listening closely to the laughter can detect an edge of fear. After all, the only difference between a crank and a genius is that the genius has caught slightly more of their mistakes. On our own, it would be very easy to cross the line from one to the other.
Luckily, we are not on our own. The massive structure of academia, from advisers to peer-reviewers to publishers, exists in large part to provide safety nets for potential cranks. Bad ideas are, in the best case, caught early, before they take over your life. This is why cranks are always independent: an institutionalized academic who produces crankish work has not suffered a personal failure but a failure of the system. Every so often, studies are done showing how easy it is to sneak false results into prestigious journals. These are always written up in a condemnatory tone. The onus is on the journals to gatekeep, not on the academics to self-filter.
I wound up feeling the exact same way about the strike. We have, as I previously mentioned, signs. They’re made of unfinished wood, with white plasticky placards at the top: “UAW On Strike.” What they don’t say is “Grad Students On Strike” or “Researchers On Strike.” We’ve chalked that on the sidewalk, sure, but we’ve agreed that the single most important thing to publicize, the thing that people need to be able to see just by glancing at us, is that we are UAW. We aren’t just a bunch of people making demands for fun; we’re a union.
Because we’re a union, our strike is automatically real. Strangely, this gives us much more freedom in the end: we can have picket line yoga and casual dress without losing any legitimacy precisely because we don’t need to constantly push to conform to Hollywood’s image of what a strike looks like. Our strike captains have been trained in methods sanctioned by UAW, and that’s enough. A union, exactly like a research institution, gives its members enough checks and balances that they’re automatically taken seriously. To extend the comparison even further, both research institutions and unions allow for collaborations not open to private individuals: it’s hard for a crank to get professionals to read their papers, and I can’t imagine a single dissatisfied non-union worker could get whole Teamsters locals to stand up for them. Put a bunch of angry people in a corner of campus, and you’ve got a random protest. Give them UAW signs, and you’ve got a strike that makes national news. Put a bunch of smart people in a building, and you’ve got a book club. Give them university banners, and people will make joining that group their life’s ambition. In the physics lab or on the picket line, the signs are what make it real.
And yes, ours are union made.