I don’t want to be the proverbial woman who votes for the Jaguars Eating People’s Faces party. Which is why I told my colleagues that I will not participate in the meeting with the union people that they organized. I have learned my lesson and will never again engage with the union in any way.
And then… by pure accident, I saw a petition that the union hoodwinked my colleagues into writing. In the petition, the colleagues promise that the department chair will work in the summer for free. The administration never asked for anything of the kind. I don’t think it’s even legal. So the union manipulated the professors to volunteer months of free work, not only on behalf of the current chair but of every loser who agrees to take this position in the future.
“How did the union manage to do it?” you will ask. “Why did the professors agree?” And here comes the part that makes me ready to eat a jaguar’s face.
The union promised that, in exchange for donating months of free labor, our department will get something a lot more valuable. We will get a written statement from the administration that teaching foreign languages is important.
Seriously, that’s the exchange.
As much as I don’t want to take time out of my sabbatical and spend it on this lunacy, I will be meeting with my colleagues today to explain to them why this proposed plan is going to set a terrible precedent and make everybody else at the university hate them, thus making the elimination of the department pretty much guaranteed.
They are going to offer to work for free in summer, do all of the end-of-fiscal-year paperwork FOR FREE, in return for a sentence about the importance of foreign languages. Thereby enabling the administration to tell all of the other departments, “Well, Foreign Languages is doing it, so should you.”
This is what organized labor has become: tricking people into offering free labor. Forget about eating a jaguar’s face. I’m ready to eat the whole jaguar at this point.
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