Third negotiation session: sidebars mean capitulating to the enemy! )
Negotiations of 2024-09-30 and 2024-10-01
Sidebars
It seems to us that the simplest rule of warfare is to never give your enemy what they want. The faculty union (UNAC) struggles to learn this.
During the negotiations of 2024-09-30, UNAC and the University revealed they had engaged in “sidebars” (private, off the record discussions between the two parties). The University requested this. UNAC capitulated – at least initially.
UNAC’s justified their acquiescence by saying faculty need a new contract, and quick. We disagree. Not only that, we think that in pursuing this wrong end, UNAC also uses wrong means.
We reject the end of signing a new contract as soon as possible. Better a “fair” contract in 6 or 8 months than a bad contract now. It does not matter how long faculty work under the “expired” contract. Faculty can demand and get retroactive raises (as happened last time).
More important, the longer negotiations drag on, the clearer it will become that the UA workforce and their Molochian bosses have nothing in common. This can only benefit the workers!
So, no rush!
We also reject the means of private meetings. Private meetings rob the UA workforce of even the small sense of taking part in the negotiations. To think, to learn, to draw our conclusions. This diminishes our capacity for collective action. And that is our only strength.
When the University requests sidebars, they knowingly restrict the fight to just a few leaders. The rest of the workforce is reduced to something even less than passive spectatorship.
That UNAC would go along with sidebars means depriving the UA workforce of any chance of growth, however tiny. And it is precisely growth that the workers of UA need.
Historical parallel – against leader-tactics
We are hesitant to draw a parallel between the bygone days of revolutionary upheaval and, well, today. However, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote, for the working class “historical experience is its only school mistress.”
In 1917 the Bolsheviks toppled a decaying feudalism and an immature capitalism. They did this with relative ease. This led the Russian comrades to underestimate the strength of capitalism in the west. And that led to an error in tactics. They felt strong leadership could guide a mass of underdeveloped followers through a series of temporary alliances and expedients to quickly defeat capitalism. Against this, the communist left argued that in the advanced capitalist countries, the proletariat would fight alone against a titanic, unified capitalist class. It would be a brutal fight with no shortcuts. As such, every worker had to learn to fight. Not out of a puerile reverence for majorities, but rather as a simple matter of fact.
As Herman Gorter put it in his Open Letter to Comrade Lenin:
… you must do everything for yourselves – you cannot win unless you do so for two, five, or ten years; unless you train yourself to it man by man, group after group, from town to town, from province to province, and finally in the entire land, as a party, a union; as industrial councils, as a mass, and as a class. You cannot win unless finally, through incessant training and fighting, and through defeat, you advance to that stage, the great majority among you, where you can do all this, and where, at last, after all this schooling, you constitute one united mass.
Or as his comrade Anton Pannekoek put it in World Revolution and Communist Tactics:
The revolution demands that the great questions of social construction be taken in hand, that difficult decisions shall be made, that the entire proletariat be roused to one creative impulse; and this is only possible if first the advance guard, and then an ever greater mass takes things in hand – a mass that is conscious of its responsibilities, that searches, propagates, fights, strives, reflects, considers, dares, and carries out. All this is, however, hard work: so as long as the proletariat thinks there is an easier way, letting others act for it by carrying out agitation from a high platform, by taking decisions, by giving signals for action, by making laws, it will hesitate, and the old ways of thinking and the old weaknesses will keep them pacified.
We are nowhere near the situation that these comrades wrote in. We are talking about at best wildcat strikes against one employer, not insurrections against the whole capitalist class and its state. Still, the principle remains true: if the working class wants to win at anything, ever more workers have to learn how to fight!
The good news
During the 2024-10-01 negotiations, UNAC defended the importance of open negotiations on Zoom. They said in their summary of the day’s discussion:
As you all may recall, when we were agreeing to ground rules, management’s team was ardently opposed to open bargaining. UNAC thus compromised by agreeing to only allow our bargaining unit members to observe. Even this compromise has led UA’s team to remark that it’s hard to have discussions with an audience. Rest assured, UNAC fully supports our bargaining unit members’ rights to observe our negotiations, which both teams agreed to in our ground rules.
This is good, but advocating for open negotiations is the very limit of what UNAC can do. No matter how militant its members may be, they are restricted by a legal framework. They have to “bargain” in “good faith” on behalf of a small number of “bargaining unit members.” They cannot lead – cannot even tolerate – an active struggle of the whole UA workforce. And that’s exactly what we need!