Democracy and Solidarity Slate

Our E-Board Criteria of Anti-Oppression Accountability

Principles of Anti-Oppression Accountability

1. We Cannot Be Passive or Neutral On these Matters Anymore. It is not enough to say we are against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia etc. We need to act accordingly. Oppressive behaviors (both in terms of speech and actions) have serious and lasting consequences regardless of intentions. Most female faculty, LGBTQI faculty and faculty of color experience daily charged micro-agressions at the university and everywhere else. As a union, we aspire to minimize and erase those behaviors from our collective practices, so the union can become a truly democratic and liberating space. To pretend these issues do not happen, or minimize them only because it is difficult to deal with them, has a direct negative impact on our union: it perpetuates relations of oppression, it further marginalizes women, LGBTQI members and racially oppressed groups. So we need to take an active stance to fight oppression by being able to recognize damaging behaviors and address them properly. When doing so we will be guided by principles of justice and reparations and the need to build active solidarity in our union.

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2. Oppressive Behaviors Directly Affect the Union Participation of Particular Groups. We all know this, but unsanctioned oppressive behaviors are the silent killer of collective organizing spaces. You hear sexist comments and jokes, and at the next meeting almost no women will come, and the same goes with racist remarks etc. We live in a society engineered to divide us across race, gender and other lines. We know as faculty these are social constructs, and we know these identities are embedded with political hierarchies and social inequalities, so we should know that when oppression goes unchallenged we all lose as a union, and this is even more damaging if we think that when we add up all the oppressed groups… they constitute a majority of our members! So not only we should actively call out those behaviors, but our local elected leadership needs to be held at a higher standard; to have a clear and explicit commitment is the only way to win and keep the trust of members who belong to those groups.

​3. There is No Perfection in this Matter, We Live and Are Socialized in an Oppressive Society. We are not claiming that any of us is or will be free of any of those oppressive behaviors. We have all once in our life acted according to racists, sexists, homophobic and transphobic biases, consciously or unconsciously. But this cannot prevent us from actively seeking to combat these forms of prejudice. We do so in a spirit of social solidarity, eschewing both white and male fragility, and impossible standards which could work to convince people that there is no point in even trying to address these issues. To help achieve these goals, we seek gender and racial diversity in members of CFA leadership.

4. The Union Needs to Be A Space for Active Education on These Matters. The solution to all problems is not always a punitive one. Most of the micro-agressions that occur in our organizing spaces are unconscious, that is to say that they are the expression of our socialized behavior (particularly on a campus like ours where faculty tend to think that they are on the left and therefore not capable of racism by definition). This means that the union needs to see its primarily function as educational. We need to learn how to have these difficult conversations with co-workers, how to facilitate active learning about the histories of oppression, and engage critically with inherited behavior and existing institutions as well as the material privileges that perpetuate them. There are ways to do this which create an atmosphere of trust rather than oppression.

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5. Oppressing Behaviors Hurt the Union and the Credibility Needed to Defend Members. Developing an anti-oppressive and democratic culture will make our union stronger, not weaker. It is not addressing these issues that really makes us vulnerable and keeps us divided.  Management uses and will continue to use these matters to divide us. This happens in all unions, especially when a union is well organized and is fighting hard to advance the interest of members. During a powerful strike or a union campaign, we have seen management use any means to undermine the union, and sometimes they will accuse union leaders of being racist, sexist etc. The only way to prevent that, is to adhere to open and transparent codes of conduct so that nothing is hidden and all are held to the same standards. Of course, it is always possible that the language of oppression can be used instrumentally to further some personal vendetta or some destructive political agendas. In such cases, it is up to the entire executive board to collectively determine if this is the case and, if so, to come up with an appropriate response.

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6. We Need to Target the Root of Oppressive Behaviors. As a union it is not enough to be vigilant and careful with what we say and do. We also need to target the roots of all the vast array of oppressive behaviors. We need to identify existing reservoirs of white and male privilege as well as biases within and between different groups. We also need to identify the way these biases are manifested institutionally, not only in the university but in the union as well. But most importantly the work of the union begins but does not end there: we want to transform our workplace, that is our university, and society at large into spaces free of oppression. This is why the union is not indifferent but rather actively supportive of the College of Ethnic Studies, the Department of Women and Gender studies, the Experimental College and all the pedagogical and educational initiatives that seek to critically analyze and undo relations of oppression. This is why our union participates in the Women’s March, International Women’s Day, May Day in support of immigrant workers and MLK Day actions. This is why our union demands pay equity between all sets of workers and protects faculty of color and women from retaliation when they speak up against injustices. The list could go on; we believe in a social justice union that takes a stand against all forms of institutionalized oppression in our university.

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7. We Need to Recognize our Differences and Work with Them in a Way that Maximally Protects and Nurtures our Union and our Community. Although we are all Unit 3 faculty, we do not all have the same identity or status. Some of us are white and some of us are people of color. Some of us are men and some of us are women and some of us are cisgendered while some of us are transgendered. Some of us are straight and some of us are queer, some are from upper middle class and others from working class sectors, and often these categories overlap in complicated ways. Furthermore we do not all have the same employment status. Some of us are lecturers, some of us are untenured tenure track professors and some of us are tenured professors. We need to be cognizant of these differences when we present our public face, not to make it seem as if only white people or men speak for the union, for example, but also, not to make untenured faculty and lecturers have to take the brunt of a campaign if there is a risk to their careers in doing so. We need to be creative and versatile in thinking about what unites us and what makes us different and build solidarity around and through those differences.

Commitment:

Given the principles expressed in the preamble, all members of the Executive Board commit to be held accountable if issues around oppression  emerge in our collective conduct.

The Executive Board is not a tribunal of any sort;  it is an elected board whose goal is to represent members, and in this case, doing so by putting forward an active understanding of the need to combat all forms of oppression.

When a case will emerge involving an executive board member the E-Board will do one of the two following things in function of the gravity of the allegations and the corroboration of their truthfulness:

• It will investigate the allegations as an Executive-Board and find a solution with the officer following the principles above.

• Any investigation will solicit and hear all accounts of what happened and follow the basic rules of “due process.”

• It will form a confidential ad-hoc committee independent of the Executive Board (that is with no members who are affiliated or have close friendships with the E-Board) that will investigate the allegations, and report to the Executive Board, which will take action. The ad-hoc committee should be selected by another non e-board union body (Department Reps, Membership meeting etc).

Any officer in the Executive Board should be committed to participate in this process in good faith. In the case that an officer actively refuses to participate in this process, as a board we will demand their resignation.

E-Board Criteria of Division of Labor

Developing a Democratic Culture in the Union. Our platform states clearly that a key component for union democracy is to have the E-Board be accountable to its rank-and-file members, and take direction from them. Rank and file faculty are not inactive because they are selfish and passive. They are often overworked, overwhelmed, and many times they don’t have access to the information and issues that affect them. Our role is to make all the relevant information and avenues for action available for them.

This can only happen if we develop and cultivate non-E-Board spaces of collective active engagement in our local chapter, like the Department Representatives Network and some established or ad-hoc/campaign-based Committees or Working Groups (Affirmative Action/ Racial Justice, Lecturer Rights). To actively involve members in those spaces, also means granting those spaces a partial autonomy in relation to the E-Board, which means that they can propose and initiate actions and campaigns on their own, and the role of the board is both to make sure that those are largely align with our goals and principles and that they do not conflict with other campaigns; and to actively support those initiatives by showing up and allocating resources.

Clarifying and Dividing Tasks in the E-Board. To run a democratic executive board we need also to formalize as much as possible a clear division of labor and commitments based on each of our capacities and time. In the E-Board all members should be actively engaged in the decisions we make, but active union democracy goes beyond deciding or casting a ballot; it has to do with getting involved in the execution of the decisions.

Traditional unions reduce the decision making power to the President (or the top 3 officers) and staff. There are many times when they are the only ones who have a say on key matters, mainly because they take a lot of actions (mtgs, communications, agreements etc) without the involvement of the rest of the Board, not to speak of the rank and file members. This model has two correlated big problems: in practice, it is the President and their acolytes who decide of most of the union’s affairs because they are the ones in charge of executing the tasks, and while there are logical rationalization for that (“we are the ones doing all the work, so we should decide”), such a functioning is far from democratic. It also overburdens the President, who feels overworked, and either quits the positions out of despair, or is tempted to seek the position for their own advantages (special invitations to dinners and events, travels, perks, compensation etc). Furthermore, not only does this reduce the democratic nature of the executive board and hence its representative function but it also deprives the rest if the officers a chance to develop their own organizing talents and limits their contributions to and ideas for the collective.

There is another non democratic form of functioning, which often emerges as a clear reaction to the top-down bureaucratic model: everyone wants to have a say about the decisions the President makes, but almost no-one gets involved in executing them. This is a problem, because unions can only function with an active democratic participation. Often only a few people are involved in the practical work of running the union, and most of the time they do so on a voluntary basis. But in unions that discuss all their affairs openly, we can also have many officers who give opinions and make decisions about things that ultimately two or three people will be charged to carry out (even if they did not initiate the proposal). This cannot be seen as really democratic behavior either, insofar as those in charge of executing decisions--even decisions that have been collectively decided upon--will set their own priorities about how something gets done, whether it is a priority and so forth.

In short we have two opposed fake democratic functionings: the exclusive democracy of the doers and the abusive democracy of those who say but don’t do. The only solution for this is to develop a clear division of labor inside the Executive Board, with expectations and commitments set on a voluntary basis that can be reviewed and changed at any moment.

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We need to be accountable to each other. We are all workers, and over-worked ones at that, and furthermore there are work and life inequities (like the T/T-T lecturer divide, but also race, gender and disabilities dynamics) amongst us that operate as an extra burden for some. Our working conditions are designed to make it very hard for us to have time to organize for the union and win better working conditions for all of us. But if we are willing to run for the union executive board, it is because we do not accept this situation as being inevitable. The more union members get active, the more we can divide up the tasks that are required by an active union, the more we can resist these kinds of stealth undemocratic practices. As a board we can aspire to be accountable to each other on a democratic basis and give the union--and one another-- the best and most open practices that we can at any given time. This means that it is important to participate regularly in the meetings and the online decisions, as well as to follow up on the tasks we commit to doing. When we don’t do this, we demoralize those who do their share of the work. When we do our share, we motivate others to do more. So we all need to be generous and honest enough to take the responsibilities for what we can do and follow through with. We don’t all have to do exactly the same amount of work but we all should commit to doing as much as we are able in the spirit of social solidarity and mutual aid.

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We need to divide up the work in teams. The best way to undo the power-dynamics of a President-based Executive Board, and to undo the hierarchies embedded in E-Board positions, is to develop a division of labor with teams, committees or working groups. It makes no sense for one person, for example, to be in charge of big topics like “lecturers”, “faculty rights” or “membership”. We can have 2 or 3 board members that volunteer to take care of these affairs as a team, and involve other members. We also should create work-groups when new initiatives and campaigns come-up. When we create these work-groups we should not take as a primary criteria the titles we hold as elective officers, but rather look to the task at hand (who is best fitted to do it?) and our available time for this task (who has the time and energy to lead, contribute or help?). In this spirit and with these guidelines, we believe that this union will be strong and principled and a force for change in our university.