Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >
> Said like a business unionist! Me, I still believe in social and industrial
> unionism, but I'm a dinosaur.
I doubt it on this issue. It's the advocates of current modes of unionizing who are probably the dinosaurs (though, as Gould would say, we are probably insulting the dinosaurs). I don't have the slightest idea what the new "model" that must come will look like, but I suspect your phrase "social unionism," though a blank check at this time, might point in the right direction.
Some years (decades) ago an SEIU organizer was staying overnight with us and we got to talking about the possibility of organizing fast food restaurants. He suggested that one possible model was the hiring hall (as practiced in the seamen's unions). That model of course was subject to extreme corruption (as in many Laborers locals), but probably any form of organization is so subject, and such a model might become one of the elements in the "social unionism" of the future.
I would like to see university faculty opt for an organizing model that included civil service, technical workers, temporary faculty -- and perhaps even a new category of university employees that doesn't have a name: one could speak of "pseudo administrators," all those "administrators" that have been added in the last few decades and have no real reason for existing. Mostly they help justify extravagant salaries for their superiors.
Carrol