Vol. 27, No.3                                                      December 22, 2005

BATTLIN' BARB'S EXPRESS TRAIN TO NOWHERE:

"One of the strongest things we can do to support our own contract fight . . . is support the TWU."

Here at The Patriot Returns, we admit that we thought that we had heard it all from the PSC's indefatigable Battlin' Barb Bowen.

To get a contract, the Dear Leader has told CUNY professors:

• they needed to protest in front of the Chancellor's house
• or that they needed to cause a ruckus at Board of Trustees meetings (way to go, Bill Crain!)
• or that they needed to join " Radical Ros " and serve as "picket captains"
• or that they needed to postpone their scholarship and spend an hour a week less on grading
• or that they needed to vote for Norman Siegel for Public Advocate
• or that they needed to oppose the Chancellor's higher education compact (certainly don't want a guarantee of more funds to be coming into CUNY, do we?)

But now, having gone more than three years without a contract, the Dear Leader tells us that to get a good contract, we need to man the barricades with a union that's earned denunciations from the editorial board of all four NYC dailies and even from normally pro-labor pols like Carl McCall and Bill Thompson, since the "TWU is helping to change the political climate in which all collective bargaining for public employees in New York takes place."

It sure is---to the tune of $1 million in daily fines, coupled with scathing attacks from the very city and state politicians whose support CUNY needs to finalize our contract. In an unprecedented act, even its national union has repudiated the TWU local. Just the kind of crew to which CUNY professors should tie their fate!

Battlin' Barb reports that "several PSC members and staffers have already joined TWU strikers on the picket lines," and the PSC is "organizing a contingent of members to walk the picket line with TWU . . . every day the strike lasts." (Be sure to wear your PSC cap, so we can alienate as much of the public as possible!) It's nice to see that PSC staff members are out on the picket line---on our time, and on our dime, The Patriot presumes? Imagine: paid faculty union staff supporting a strike that keeps our poor and working class students and staff from finishing out finals week!

Here's how those anti-labor types at the New York Times describe Mr. Toussaint:

• head of "an organization wrestling with considerable discord";
• suffering "mounting public criticism . . . and escalating attacks by the city and state's top political leaders";
• beset by internal union rivalries that "have been amplified by [his] personality";
• "not someone who tends to brook a lot of dissent within the union";
• a figure who "has shed an awful lot of his allies from early on."

Does that sound like any PSC president we've come to know and love?

The Patriot Returns has nothing but admiration for the transit workers; those with a keen eye might even spot us from time to time on the Q-train to Manhattan. But with all due respect, the skills, training, and challenges faced by transit workers are very different than those faced by CUNY professors. So when the Dear Leader claims about the transit workers that "in the most material sense, their fight is our fight," she needs to take off the sunglasses and see the world as it really is.

The Dear Leader and Jolly Roger Toussaint in happier times, doing what they do best: protesting

Battlin' Barb, Foggy London, the Queen of Released Time and all their cronies have spent the last three years play-acting as radical union activists, trotting from one protest march or picket line to another, all with the benefit of the total released time from teaching that the contract provides to the PSC bosses. The fate of Roger Toussaint, their ideological and tactical hero, shows just how bankrupt that strategy is.

Sharad Karkhanis, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus

Forthcoming issues of The Patriot may be accessed at http://www.patriotreturns.com/.
Archived editions are available at http://www.patriotreturns.com/archive.htm.