the guy by the door …

After rally at Harvard’s Holyoke Center announcing tentative settlement.

At a brief rally¹ in front of Harvard’s Holyoke Center, negotiators from S.E.I.U. local 615 announced a tentative settlement with Allied-Barton, the company which increasingly supplies contract security guards to Harvard. No details were provided pending ratification of the membership. Union members will now vote in shifts and sometime next week, we’ll know.

¹So brief that I only caught the aftermath what with lunch and Tealuxe and all.

The “historic” talks between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and Iranian Ambassador Hassan Kazemi Qomi, the first in 27 years, concluded at 2:30 P.M. Baghdad time [6:30 AM EST] after only four hours with no conclusions reached. Accounts differ about plans for follow-up talks. According to the AP, Ambassador Kazemi expects talks to continue within a month while Ambassador Crocker denies any timetable. As the talks were winding down, a car bomb exploded in the Sinak market area just across the Tigris River from the Green Zone where the talks were held. Tweny one people were killed.

The notion of having diplomatic talks with Iran while holding large military excercises off the Iranian coast reminds me of scenes from gangster movies. Two guys enter a store to talk to the owner about “fire insurance.” The well dressed guy does the talking. The big guy says nothing as he lights matches. The difference in the current circumstance appears to be that any offers made COULD be refused.

Mainstream media are hailing the talks as “historic”. I suppose it’s good to accentuate the positive. But do these talks represent a substantial change in the direction of the winds? Probably not. There are more winds blowing toward war than I knew. John Tirman of AlterNet¹ points to a report by ABC news that Bush has authorized the CIA to “destablize” the Iranian government. The main focus of the article is the use/abuse of Iranian American Middle East scholar Haleh Esfandiari², jailed in Iran, as a geopolitical pawn, because The Right Wing Itches to Strike Iran.

Do the talks mean anything? If Steven C. Clemons is right, it depends on which parts of the government answer to “W” and which parts answer to “Shooter” Cheney³. Whether or not Clemons is right, it ultimately depnds on which parts of the government answer to the American people.

¹Those who view internet publications as suspect might be placated by noting that Professor Tirman is also the Executive Director of the MIT’s Center for International Studies.

²Tirman is refreshingly candid about the intellectual world’s focus on itself.

³Cheney’s shooting career goes back before his assault on his long time friend Harry Whittington, to at least Sept. 11, 2001 when he issued the “shoot down” order for aircraft believed to be a threat to the nation’s capitol. It remains a question whether that order was carried out.

The Congressional Wind

The determination of the Executive Branch to “stay the course” of the Project for a New American Century is anything but news. There was some hope with Election 2006 the Congress might nudge the steersman a bit. Earlier today the House cast doubt on that and a few minutes ago, the Senate dashed those hopes on the rocks. Discouraging as that is, there is more to the story. Bear in mind that there are almost as many “contract security agents” or more properly, mercenary soldiers, as uniformed military in Iraq. In all the discussion about supporting the troops, very little was said about how many billion$ will actually go to private contractors like Blackwater USA and Kellogg, Brown, and Root who are paid much more per capita than uniform military and are almost as numerous. And what accountability do these contractors have?

The Judicial Wind

Yesterday Team Juan/Amy had a report from Jeremy Scahill [author of “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army] about a further erosion of the rule of law. In defending itself against a lawsuit by the families of four brutally slain employees, Blackwater is claiming immunity of the U.S. Government i.e. sovereign immunity. As I read the Wikipedia entry, it seems to me that the Tucker Act specifically excludes such a claim. In any case, should this defense succeed, and it already has in part, Blackwater will have the immunity of the U.S. Military without any of the accountability of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The Judiciary has joined the winds of war.

Hot air and Sabre Rattling

Blowing through the Straits of Hormuz: a Horde of Hardware

You cannot simultaneously prepare for war and prevent war. -Albert Einstein.

The military build up in the Persian Gulf has been going on for a while and is well documented. Steven C. Clemons reports on his blog The Washington Note that Veep Dick Cheney is actively planning to give the President and Secretary of State the end run - go directly to war with Iran. [Do not pass Congress. Do not collect public support.] Does this fall within his advertised need to work “on the dark side, if you will?”

“We call on you and the President to relent from this reckless path, and begin to restore respect for the rule of law we all learned to love many years ago.”

I don’t see the Decider Commander Guy or Torture Alum relenting on much of anything. So the question comes, is this ad a real response or is it a bunch of Harvard trained lawyers who had only one course in ethics as 3L’s dealing out the minimum possible dose of ersatz Veritas? Somebody should ask them.

¹McKey and James are the children of Allen Berkman. I’m unclear on their relationship, if any,^a, with Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman who gave Harvard $5.4 Million to “grow” and rename the Law School’s Institute for Internet and Society.

^aIf you are a Christian Fundamentalist, there is guaranteed to be a relationship at the root at least. I, however, think evolution to be a more robust description, but I do not know how to compute the root set of the human genome. I would guess it unlikely that McKey and James are descended from chlorophyl based life, with Jack and Lillian descended from hydrogen sulfide metabolizing organisms.

To the Honorable City Councils of Cambridge and Boston,

• Report of Public Officials and Other [Boston]
• Consent Communication [Cambridge]
• Online at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/fensterm/
• 2007/05/17/inclusive-organizing-vs-exclusive-organizing/
• or Google “the guy by the door”

The Spring 2001 occupation of Mass Hall by the students of the Progressive Student Labor Movement[PSLM] brought some improvement to the lives of some of Harvard’s lowest paid workers. Included in the settlement that ended the occupation was a temporary and limited respite from the steady trend over the last 35 years to outsource and deunionize labor at Harvard.¹ The group had a number of significant assets and some luck. They had been steadily at work for four years - greater than average continuity for student political groups. They were members from Law, the Kennedy School, Medicine, and Public Health, as well as graduate and undergraduate students from Arts and Sciences.² A student doing “worker outreach” spoke to me at the guard desk of the Lamont Library. They had a fairly vibrant organization with fairly broad recognition on campus, when they had some luck.

President Neil Rudinstine announced his retirement in the spring of 2000. Going into the fifth year of PSLM, I was invited to a meeting in the Parlor Room of Phillips Brooks House. It was full about 50 people; surprisingly close to the number that went into the occupation. There was a steady stream of events involving a coalition of three groups of low wage workers.

• Cooks - some “direct” Harvard employees represented by Hotel Entertainment and Restaurant Employees and some working in “cash ops”. It was an explicit goal of the campaign that these contract workers should be “direct employees”.
• Custodial workers, some “direct” Harvard employees represented by Service Employees Internation Union Local 615 and some employees of cleaning firms under contract to Harvard. It was an explicit goal of the campaign that contract workers should be “direct employees”.
• Members of the Harvard University Security Parking and Museum Guards’ Union. Administration was replacing them with guards from Security Systems International. [now Allied-Barton]

Then there was the occupation. For twenty one days close to fifty people inside Mass Hall and anywhere from 300 to 1000 outside. Radical groups and mainstream politicians came in support.³ It was an inclusive effort. Nonetheless, as I’ve said, it did not achieve all of it’s goals, but they did achieve measurable success. There were, I’m sure many things went on behind the scenes that would have made me wince had I known. Still, I think there is only one thing I would criticize. They did so many things well that they made it look easy. Incoming students never quite got it.

In defense of the newer students [SLAM], the Class of ‘01 did not completely create their own circumstances. A long tenured President concerned about his legacy has vulnerabilities a sitting President does not have.⁴

There was among the newer students a desire to outdo their predessors. They wanted to acquire the assets of PSLM, but “rebrand’ the organization to a more explicitly radical mold. And the leadership was largely First Years and the group undergraduate. It made a difference. They were very late to learn that in the abscence of the ‘guaranteed’ secular apolcalypse a successful radical action involves a lot of boring non-radical work. The result was an effort smaller and less significance than the effort they were determined to outdo. This has left one significant downside for Harvard Labor. The contract Security Guards, with community support, will probably get a reasonable contract with Allied-Barton. But the Student Labor Action Movement has left the door wide open for Harvard adminsitration, at the end of that contract, to simply go to another, lower bidding, non-unionized vendor. This may be good for SEIU in the long term, but the particular guards at Harvard now will have their lives disrupted. Further, the guards in HUSPMGU and my library guards are probably more vulnerable to outsourcing than before.

I urge the community to support S.E.I.U. 615 in it’s efforts to get a livable contract with Allied-Barton, but I also urge the community to condemn Harvard’s continuing policy of outsourcing and deunionization of Harvard labor. We must “insource” jobs at Harvard.⁵

This is admittedly a rearguard action, a genuinely progressive program for labor has yet to emerge.⁶ But secular apocalypse is so notoriously unpredictable that in the current historical circumstance the misestimation of its imminence is creating a lot of disjoint pockets of heat and not a lot of light.

¹Coworkers who were at Harvard before me say that the painters were all “let go” in the early ’70’s. That’s just about the time that the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers [AFSCME local 3650] was formed.

²At the sit-in proper there were people from the Business School, but I don’t know when they entered the picture. There was even a string theorist

³I would like to have heard the discussion when the HUPD officer explained to Senator Kennedy that he was not allowed in to see the students. I was rather proud of the Senator’s performance.

⁴The Late Larry Summers had no legacy to protect when he shuffled off this mortal coil. As I’ve mentioned previously, there are cases where mortality and departure from Harvard are the same. There do, hovever, appear to be backdoor attempts by the Fellows to partially resurrect him. The legacy of a second time President who, despite a background in labor, presided over the beginnings of union busting at Harvard is harder to calculate. It is doubtful that SLAM is able to do, let alone take advantage of, such a calculation.

⁵This is actually easy to do. Harvard could negostiate a rent-to-own agreement with Allied-Barton. SEIU is constrained by law against such a demand, but the community at large is not and the students in particular could raise this with impunity. I once heard the argument advanced that Harvard Human Resources couuld not find guards at the then going rate of $11.50/hour which required using S.S.I. who could find guards at the then going rate of $9.00/hour. Administration clearly didn’t check with Harvard economics on that one.

⁶There are some encouraging movements on the scene e.g. Participatory Economics and the Free Software Movement. Participatory Ecomomics seeks to be general, but has limited “mindshare’ at the moment. Free Software is restricted in the activities it covers, but it has achieved significant “marketshare”. Micro$oft may dominate the personal computer, but Apache software has dominated the webserver space for years. Both movements explore how to spread advanced modes of production beyond the privileged few. And they are not locked in to a specific prediction of a secular apocalyptic event. They are achieving results now!

The SLAM fast for contract security guards has moved into the post action phase. This is the phase where people try to figure out how to get Havard to actually do what it agreed to do to end the fast. I’ll have a lot to say about this, but there is a more pressing issue.

Another fast for a different cause is, as far as I can tell, still going on:

Photo: Chelsea Collonge, No Nukes Hunger Strike Blog

Students on several campuses of the University of California are fasting to end nuclear weapons research at the University. The Harvard Inititative for Peace and Justice posted an appeal for support on their list. The fasters have a blog with pictures and a suggested letter to the UC Regents.

Most of the Arts First events are over, but the photo exhibit by Stefan Zebrowski-Rubin¹ will be open M-F 9-5 on the 4th floor of Boyleston Hall through May 18. Stefan has heightened my sense of buyer’s remorse in spending a ton of money on a Canon Digital Rebel XT. The eye of the photographer in finding the good shot can make a 5MP point-and-shot do just as well most of the time.²

¹Stefan assures me that if he marries a hyphenated woman, they’ll do something with more panache than triple hyphenation.

²For the benefit of Ryan et. al. in Economics, I’ll just point out that free market fundamentalists pretend that barriers to entry don’t exist, while stock market analysts rely heavily upon it. And for Gustavo, a single person cannot sell anything. He can offer something for sale. It takes a buyer to make a sale. At least one flavor of Harvard’s would be Trotskyites are a little fuzzy on their capitalism. And most have bigger ruling class pensions than I do.

Their placards say “Support Harvard Workers” and “Stand for Security”. This action specifically supports employees of Allied-Barton¹stationed at Harvard. To the administration, they are not Harvard employees. Outsourcing is the major tool in Harvard’s 30 year long program to deunionize the Harvard’s low wage labor force.²

From 1995 to 2001 the Harvard Living Wage Campaign sought to address this issue, culminating in the sit-in in May of 2001. That group included “direct employees” as well as employees of contract workers. In H.E.R.E., Harvard has both. Sadly, the current crop of students doesn’t care about “direct” employees.

Nonetheless, after taking the above picture and officer of HUPD admonished me to get prior approval from University Spokesperson Joe Wrinn. Here’s the thing, one time photographer and union activist has put down his camera lets administration determine what he writes. I’m going the other way.

To Wit, Wherefore, Hut Sut, and So Forth

Robert W. Iuliano, Esq. you are hereby admonished to cease and desist from prior restraint of the free press and interference with a duly elected Union official engaged in concerted labor activity.

That said, I would like to apologize to the officer involved in the event that he be the same as the officer who admonished me to not walk through a hard hat area.

¹The first phase of Bob’s outsourcing of security at Harvard was to hire Malden based Security Systems International. They were bought by Allied which then merged with Barton.

²The late Polly Price, ‘director of human resources’ made much ado about Harvard being a good place to work. It depends. Marxian analysis though incomplete is useful. Bob was the Assistant General Counsel. He lost - big time.

Former U.S. Representative Elizabeth Hottzman [Wikipedia]

Radcliffe and Harvard Law School Alum1 Elizabeth Holtzman2 has an article in the Los Angeles Times, Alberto Gonzales’ safety net. In June of 2005, the Nation published her article Torture and Accountability, in which she describes Gonzales’ role in helping Bush evade the War Crimes Act of 1996. The Wikipedia account goes on to observe, “The adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, by rewriting the War Crimes Act, appears to immunize the Bush administration and others against possible legal challenges regarding war crimes,3“

In Pushing Back on Detainee Act, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Michael Ratner, describes the devastating experience of he and his colleagues lobbying against the death of Habeas Corpus. He is confident that it will be overturned in the courts - in perhaps a year.

For those who missed it, the Military Commissions Act was signed the day after Michael Chertoff visited his alma mater, Havard Law School. I wonder what our Law faculty told him to pass along to the prez. I wonder who, if anyone, from Harvard Law went with Michael Ratner to Congress. Much as I like the color orange, they also serve who take names and ask questions in class. And if they hide behind big furniture, try outside.

¹I miss the mild pedantry of knowing no Latin except genger inflection and the odd plural. For readers of an earler edition, genger infliction is when I ask a woman for a date.

²She really is from Brooklyn. Dean Elena went to Hunter College High School which is in Manhattan. If I got it wrong I’m blaming the Alumni Office for failing to correct me.

³Two references are provided:

• Micheal Ratner, Pushing Back on Detainee Act, The Nation, October 4, 2006 (web only). He also co-hosts Law and Disorder Radio.
• Michael C. Dorf, Why The Military Commissions Act is No Moderate Compromise, Findlaw an open-source-alike website.