The contradictions in Duquesne's position on this issue--first demanding NLRB play a role then reneging on their contract due to a sudden burst of "catholicism"--proves that they are allowing their agenda to be set not by the church but by self-proclaimed union-busting lawyers. That should tell us all we need to know. Adjuncts have a right to the same fair labor conditions as other unionized employees and their tenure track counterparts. In order to find new sources of profit, capitalists always manufacture peons of what kind or another--here it's adjuncts. From wikipedia: "Labor was in great need to support the expanding agriculture, mining, industrial, and public-work jobs that arose from conquerors settling in the Americas. To account for these jobs a system came about where creditors forced debtors to work for them. This system of involuntary servitude was called peonage." The adjunct's debt = student loans, cost of living, cost of supporting families. The adjunct's servitude = helping students learn to think critically about their world and devoting precious time to developing nuanced course materials for poverty wages and no health care.
The amazing thing is that adjunct faculty are actually the university's best asset: the front line with undergraduates, especially first-year students, so adjuncts have everything to do with the retention of undergraduates and the financial health of the university. Adjuncts essentially love teaching and scholarship and creative work so much that they do it for nothing. Undergraduates and their parents would be shocked to learn how poorly paid their best teachers--about whose classes evaluations regularly say "best class I ever had"--are. Those who help students learn to think critically about their world cannot even afford to go to the hospital if sick and frequently receive food stamps. --Robin Clarke, Wilkinsburg
What money came from the ad campaign in Braddock is not SUSTAINABLE income for Braddock residents...it is sustainable income for LEVI'S, who will use Braddock images to sell jeans made in sweatshops for a long, long time. Levi's has grabbed on to the civil rights movement and vague ideas about workers--not ECONOMIC or POLITICAL RIGHTS but rather emotional virtue, like the pathos in a puppy about to be slaughtered. Levi's has done this because in our current capitalist moment, companies have to pretend to an ethical vision in order to sell more stuff. See: Starbucks, Tom's shoes, and so on. Let's look at this for a moment: Levi giving money to Braddock actors in a commercial is touted as a remarkable, noble thing. Actually, payment is what any employer is obligated to do. It's called, payment for work. The opposite would be theft. Yet, because it is a poor community, actually paying the actors or the "owners" of property being used (I.e. Fetterman, whose family has tons of money and who as mayor got money from Levi's for buildings he already owns in order to restore them) for the use of their bodies or land is considered remarkable? Give me a break. Neither John Fetterman nor the we citizens should regard that as anythign but a system of exchange, in which the corporation always gets the lion's share of profit.
Finally, all reference to the "frontier" is deeply offensive. If anything, the mom valley is what's left when the conquerors of the frontier get bored and leave for another "frontier."
Yes, a jean factory (where workers are paid respectably) in the mon valley, not a check, is what is needed. To support sweat-shop LEVI and any corporate branding system is to support the structures that allow large corporations like the steel mills and UPMC to abandon the communities that once built their profits.
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Finally, all reference to the "frontier" is deeply offensive. If anything, the mom valley is what's left when the conquerors of the frontier get bored and leave for another "frontier."
Yes, a jean factory (where workers are paid respectably) in the mon valley, not a check, is what is needed. To support sweat-shop LEVI and any corporate branding system is to support the structures that allow large corporations like the steel mills and UPMC to abandon the communities that once built their profits.