day 30: part 1 of 2
Dienstag 6.te Dec. Strike Week Four.
Wink at Nu with my right eye, and she winks back at me with her left.
Having had to fight the last four years to stay enrolled, having been nearly dismissed for my participation in an ‘illegal’ wildcat strike in 2020, having bent over backwards for my often late and insultingly inadequate paychecks—okay, we get it, having struggled—I am quite motivated to stay on strike.
I’m aiming for at least fifteen more weeks, given the expectation for next quarter that I am to commute four to six hours per day to attend a single fifty-five minute lecture in person (the professor of the course for which I am a Teaching Assistant has told me he does not feel like recording them) (the irony when we get to King Lear! I cannot wait).
I learn at a faculty/grads Zoom meeting over the weekend that the Columbia grad workers were organizing and striking on and off for two years, with all sorts of hiccups and technicalities, with a total of over nine months of cumulative striking (news outlets will say “ten weeks”). They were successful in getting their most important demands met, in the end (higher wages), but not before they had to organize an all-out No vote and reject a full contract. I wonder how COVID impacted their strike, for ill and good. At least our weather’s better for picketing ;).
Withholding our labor only matters to the university in the event that we prevent them from printing off their academic records / selling grade sheets to their students (i.e., after this term’s final exams). The fact that classes have been canceled for weeks and meeting and learning has stopped is not an issue for them the way grades are; the pressure (threats and retaliation in form of letters to undergrads and faculty, encouraging them to be afraid and strike-break) has begun to build as we near the date grades are due, December 14. (Say a little prayer for us.)
Literature department faculty told us in a Zoom meeting that the university has been sending them emails suggesting that they will have their pay docked in the event that their classes do not receive final grades this quarter, suggesting that the faculty pick up the struck labor from their grad workers. They are protected legally from having to pick up any struck labor (regardless of whether they are tenure-track).
Think of J’s wages at the fancy restaurant where he’s a server (roughly three times my net pay as a graduate student worker). J has a Taurus moon. Security matters. My moon is in the second house (ruled by Taurus) and I, too, always seem to end up fine. Having a stellium (in an earth sign, even) in the eighth house indicates that money plays a significant part in my life—and since the 8th is the house of Scorpio, it’s what old astrologers termed “other people’s money,” in contrast with the Taurean polarity of mine.
Scorpio rules sex, death, and taxes: creation, transformation, decay; investment, paying dues. Money comes to the eighth-house person in roundabout ways. Say she wins a lottery and gets a three-year fellowship. Or she rakes in unexpected unemployment checks while she’s homeless (thanks, UC) during a pandemic, and puts away a chunk of change that way. Perhaps a labor strike.
(Part 2 of this post tomorrow!) (Ed: read Part 2 here.)
image: the screen for printing our Santa Cruz 2020 Wildcat logo showed up at the Berkeley picket line last week. Seeing it again was triggering (I almost got expelled), inspiring (the fight is still on!), and dreadful (should the Cal workers, paid as much more as they are, really be printing and wearing cute shirts and bags adorned with the symbol of Santa Cruz’s homegrown, fierce, dangerous movement? It gave me pause[paws][claws]).