My Trip to Pittsburgh, the economy, and the strike

As readers of Steve Krause's blog know well, EMU faculty are now in day 9 of our strike. I cannot begin to express how distressing this is. EMU is a fantastic place to work, and I feel confident - still - that when this is resolved it will remain a fantastic place to work. We have great faculty colleagues, a terrific new department head, a great dean (who is right now the head of the administrative negotiating team), a provost who cares... it's a great place. The problem is at the very tippy-top, and I hope the many layers between us and that layer stay in place.

But I'm just back from Pittsburgh, where I participated in a symposium sponsored by Bedford-St. Martins, publishers extraordinaire (and I mean that). I was doing a workshop on assessment that focused on identifying projects with the current national situation and the public policy issues stemming from that situation well in mind. It was a lot of fun - great conversations, smart folks. It was kind of ironic, being there and talking about all of this stuff with this strike going on.

While I was travelling, I had conversations with two Northwest flight attendants (barred by court injunction from striking; dealing with a 40% pay cut over the last few years, working for an airline that seems determined to drive its workers into the ground); a Northwest ticket agent (jobs being phased out after the holiday travel season; they will be 'replaced' by those automatic boarding-pass-issuing machines and a few outsourced workers); a cab driver whose wife worked for U.S. Air (union refused a contract with a moderate pay cut; jobs were eliminated and moved to Santo Domingo); and the driver of the shuttle to the airport parking lot where I left my car (non-unionized, working for $6.00/hour, can't leave the parking lot to eat lunch). I'm not sure where all of these conversations left me, apart from depressed. Our strike situation sucks, but I don't think we're in quite the same boat as these folks. Then again, it's the stinking Bush economy that's landed us all in this situation if you want to put it in really, really, really big picture terms. I'm trying not to be morose about all of this - and I did decide as I was getting on the plane from Pittsburgh to fly home that I just have to be very zen and trust that things will work out, short and long-term, but it's an incredibly difficult situation.

Meanwhile, I wrote an e-mail - at about 7 this morning, before I'd had any coffee - to John Fallon. Because it was so stinking early (and I was writing this in the lobby of the Pittsburgh Holiday Inn), I forgot to send myself a copy - and I was working on our webmail system, which doesn't save messages. But the gist of the thing was that as a faculty member in comp/rhet., where our jobs involve communicating with various audiences and helping students learn to do same, this situation is anethema; that our students are suffering enormously; that all the administration has to do is come back and *talk*, for goodness sake, and we could probably have this thing wrapped up. But I'm not sure they want it wrapped up. They haven't even sought a court injunction to get people back in the classroom, which is a move that I think many - maybe all - of the faculty would *love.*

Tomorrow, picketing around the EMU mansion. Of course, it's surrounded by security fences... but maybe it will make a difference. Hopefully. I hope.