Super Bon!

The other night I attempted to order a pizza over the phone in French. I got through the “small pizza with green pepper” delivered to my address part, but when I asked for some garlic bread (pain a l’ail), the woman’s response was “we don’t have any diet Sprite.” Ummmmm.

Right.

That’s interesting, since “pain a l’ail” sounds nothing like any conceivable configuration of words that would come close to meaning “diet Sprite” in French. Eventually they put on the guy who knows English and it was sorted out.

I’m told the phone is the hardest part.

Here’s a letter from faculty to the president that’s making the rounds.

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Dear colleagues,

Teaching assistants at NYU conducted a union drive in 1999-2000, won an election, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers (in a local that also includes other educational professionals in NYC such as Museum of Modern Art and New York Historical Society employees). The NYU administration fought hard against the union but was ultimately forced to recognize and negotiate with it by the National Labor Relations Board. There followed a 3-year contract that brought the teaching assistants health benefits and a stipend increase. During this time the university ran quite smoothly.

In the summer of 2005, released from the obligation to negotiate by a new Bush-appointed NLRB, the NYU administration un-recognized the union and has been refusing to negotiate with it. Given this extreme provocation, the union had virtually no alternative but to strike.

They began striking on Nov. 9 and several hundred professors have been teaching off-campus so as not to cross the picket line. The administration–really, President John Sexton–steadily refuses to deal with the union. He has ignored a compromise proposal by a former dean. At one point several administrators infiltrated course websites (using the program “Blackboard”) so as to be able to determine which faculty and teaching assistants were supporting the strike; this resulted in widespread faculty outrage and the deans quickly withdrew from that effort.

Now President Sexton has again thrown a bombshell: he has threatened that any TAs who do not return to work by Dec. 5 will be deprived of an entire semester’s stipend and those who dare to return to a strike in the next semester will lose an entire year’s funding.

Such an action would be unprecedented. Graduate student employees have struck at many other universities, including those in the Ivy League and those just as anti-union as the NYU administration, but nowhere have such draconian reprisals ever been taken. Moreover, to date American workers retain a right to strike. While employers may well withhold wages during a strike, punishing strikers for a semester or a year afterward is illegal. The basic disagreement between the students and President Sexton is whether they are workers or not, and his point of view must be reckoned with, but surely the action of assistants who believe that they are workers cannot be criminalized because one disagrees.

If this threatened punishment is allowed to happen it will set a disastrous example for democratic debate at universities throughout the country. It would also cause irreparable harm to the reputation of NYU. We believe it will make it much for difficult for the university to recruit and retain the best faculty and graduate students.

Hundreds of faculty have formed a group, Faculty Democracy, to protest President Sexton’s policy and to push for greater administration consultation with faculty on important decisions–a consultation which, if undertaken seriously, might have prevented this whole debacle.

We urge scholars and intellectuals throughout the country to urge President Sexton to drop his threats and agree to negotiate with the union. He can be reached at 70 Washington Square, NY, NY 10012 and by email at john.sexton@nyu.edu

Please send a copy of your communication to any sender of this letter.

Thank you,

Linda Gordon, History

Andrew Ross, American Studies

Alan Sokal, Physics

Mary-Louise Pratt, Spanish

writing for the group Faculty Democracy, numbering approximately 250

Wow. I don’t know how I missed it before, but there are serious goings-on at New York University. As you may know, the Labor Relations Board did an about-face and basically said that because NYU is private, it does not have to recognize a TA union. Thus, when it came time to negotiate a new contract, NYU let the old one expire. The grads are now on strike and it’s the old familiar thing: the university is threatening to take away stipends for the rest of the year for striking students, which effectively means deportation for international students. It’s a power grab, pure and simple. Even NYU’s own PR makes it sound that way with the standard “they’re students, not employees” argument.

Here’s the union’s version. You can find NYU’s version quite easily, if you want to.

“Owning music is so last century.”

I’ve read versions of this quote at least three times in the last week. It sounds all hip and progressive, like our options now are so much better than owning CDs. Take the followup from a SF Chronicle Article quoted by my friend Steven Rubio:

They’re overpriced, ugly and don’t even make good rearview mirror ornaments. Now that we know they are also potentially poisonous to personal computers, thanks to Sony BMG’s rogue copy-protection technology, there’s really no reason to buy another compact disc ever again.

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Let’s begin by untangling the premises:

1. “CDs are overpriced.” Yes they are! But by that measure, so are mp3s and other commercially available compressed files. One either pays a monthly fee to “lease” something one could previously own outright, or one pays a dollar a song (1), which is actually more than the cost of an overpriced CD for a format of compressed audio that is crippled with digital rights management. Once again, you’ve stepped from commodity law to contract law, which means you have fewer rights over how you use the music. Now, if it was the case you couldn’t rip compressed audio off a legally-bought CD, they’d have a point.

2. Which brings me to the unethical and illegal practice of Sony and others. I’d originally thought this was just typical corporate bullying of consumers but in fact it has a whole other dimension, which is to make CDs a less attractive commodity to own. I have no idea if this is intentional, but it’s a great move on the part of the recording industry if the goal is to sour people on owning content.

3. Environmental damage. Yes, CDs are bad for the environment, but unlike a portable mp3 player, they don’t get thrown out and replaced every few years. Um, a little perspective please? (oh, that was in another piece, sorry).

But really, the most insulting argument is the main one: owning music used to be cool, but now it’s not. You know, I’m not particularly partial to the culture of ownership, but you don’t hear record companies going around saying they also want to stop owning music. It’s asymmetrical and hugely advantageous to media industries. If you think music is overpriced now, try paying a monthly fee just to maintain access to recordings for which you already paid — with no alternative. Sound coercive yet? I’ll give up my already meager ownership rights over music when the recording industry does the same. Until that day, I will pick the favorable tenets of commodity law over the relatively unfavorable arrangements of contract law.

But you can expect to hear more technorati bashing CDs to get you “beyond” owning music over the next few months. It’s like the republicans adopting the whole “teach the conflicts” argument for creationism. Some PR agency figured out how to twist an appeal from napster and other file-sharing outfits for the purpose of increasing recording industry profits. It sounds so radical to get “beyond” ownership of music. Yeah, right.

At the heart of this debate is whether music is a thing or a social process. This debate has a long intellectual history that morphs depending on which social field you’re talking about, but I think we are at a major turning point in the history of definitions of music. The recording industry, probably by virtue of its coupling with other media industries in large conglomerates, is figuring out that going forward, it is more effective to treat music as a commoditized service rather than a more “old-fashioned” kind of commodity. The implications for consumers will be mixed as I’ve tried to suggest here. Sure, you’ll feel more free, but you’ll wind up paying more and more often. The implications for musicians are even more unfavorable arrangements with major labels.

Stay tuned.

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1. I’m talking about legal purchase here. Of course sites of dubious legality, like allofmp3.com, charge much less and are actually a good deal. By that measure, though, peer-to-peer networks are an even better “deal.” And come to think of it, that media levy in Canada for the time being means that it is legal for me to download via peer-to-peer. At least until they pass C-60.