Skip to main content

Day of Labor

My university holds classes on Labor Day. I used to raise a fuss---quietly ignoring Labor Day despite it being a federal holiday was a passive denigration---but backed away when others took up the torch. COVID took away the momentum and we are back to quietly ignoring the date. Now that I am faculty ombudsperson I try not to raise this kind of fuss to avoid alienating potential visitors. 

I think a good deal of my support of unions comes, childishly enough, from really disliking the people that oppose them. They tend to be rich, greedy, and without compassion for the folk that work for them, quite willing to use the levers of power to suppress them legally and in the media. It's hard not to root for a movement with those kinds of challenges.

I've never been a member of a union and I'm 60 so there's that. My father was proud of his work in his union, never hesitating about where his loyalties were, and I absorbed a good deal of that in trying to emulate him.

Sadly, it's hard to see how things get better until we have at least some campaign finance reform. The wealthy are able to buy laws quite easily now. Mitch McConnell dedicated much of his career to the notion that money is speech, and SCOTUS has bought into the consistency of that approach if not its lack of merit.

So, happy Labor Day. The struggle continues.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Holiday Break

I have been teaching for 37 years now, and I go through many of the same things at the end of the Fall semester each year. There is relief at the completion of a significant task (teaching each of my classes) but there is a good deal of physical and mental weariness and aches. I could sleep for several days straight if not for my sleep disorder. By and large my mind is not very sharp and as an introvert I try to be pleasant with loved ones but am not outgoing at all. With age the feeling of being drained deepens in more and more ways. Of course this is when we have, almost every year, taken a road trip to visit birth families in the Northeast, a full day of driving each way, often involving winter weather far worse than what we are accustomed to in NC. I love my birth family members as well but as with my created family I am weary and not very outgoing. The conversation is rarely about me and my day-to-day life but rather about younger family members and family friends that I do not kn...
Post a Comment
Read more

Collective

Something good happened this week; I was informed of it yesterday when a colleague forwarded an email to me announcing it.  The announcement had to do with our university administration committing resources to something that needed doing; the fact that it had not been done had threatened the safety and work environment of dozens of my colleagues. I was clueless about it until in my job as ombudsperson I heard about it from multiple individuals. 95% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is focused on the individuals who come to me, brainstorming about their options and weighing the advantages and disadvantages of each. I've been around my university for over 36 years so I've picked up some knowledge of our system and as a mathematician I have a lot of training and experience in problem-solving. I'm not bad at counseling stressed individuals; professional development at ombuds meetings has helped me a lot with that. 5% of my job as ombudsperson (roughly) is managing upward. The...
Post a Comment
Read more