Uncle Tupelo, "Graveyard Shift" (Track of the Week)

Due to a new writing project I have been taking a deep dive back into Uncle Tupelo. There is no other band that encapsulates the experience of being a misfit with lefty politics living in a small Midwestern town in the early 90s. I didn't discover them until their last album Anodyne, right as I was about to graduate from high school in the year of '94. That album filled me with the joy of recognition; I hadn't heard any music before that spoke so directly to my specific circumstances. 

Later on, I dug deeper into their catalog, and it still amazes me how hard they went right out of the gate. No Depression, their first album, became the name of a whole new music scene and a magazine devoted to it. "Graveyard Shift" is the first track off of that album. It sounds like The Clash if they were from Iowa. 

The first lines, "Home town same town blues/ Same walls closing in" just sums it all up. It's about the experience of working a factory job in a small Midwestern town where you grew up and feeling completely trapped by it. I spent my college summers working in local factories, including one summer on the graveyard shift. Granted, I was a college boy, so I could the light at the end of the tunnel. It also became clear to me that a lot of people work really hard for too little money. And yet, "The powers that be/ might take it all away."

The guitars and drums crunch and crash with wild abandon. It's the sound of wanting to jump out of your body trying not to look at the clock while being chained to a machine for eight hours. "There's much you've missed working on that graveyard shift." Yeah, no kidding. On the graveyard shift you literally lose the sunlight because you've got to go to bed in a morning light harsh in ways you never though possible. 

Being a lefty in the early 90s included a deep feeling of futility. You raged against the obvious shittiness of the system but did so with no expectation that anything could change. After a decade of Reagan, there was No Alternative. So you found rebellion where you could, including blasting the music of some fellow small-town Midwestern misfits. Thirty years later it still feels liberating. 

Give Us Social Care, Not Self Care

Return the gift

Today came the news that my daughters' school may not be open until January. Meanwhile, I am going in part time at my school, and my wife has to go to school every day. This, as you could imagine, creates a bit of a conundrum for us. We are relying on a combo of overpriced part-time day care and grandparent help to make this possible. Time will tell if this holds together.

We are not being given any help from our employers, our daughters' school district, or our local, state, and national government. What we are told, over and over again by those same entities, is that we need to practice "self care." "Self" as in "handle it yourself." As in "Fuck you we aren't going to help you." "Self care" is a heinous neoliberal plot to make people think that problems like not having proper child care can be solved with mindfulness meditation.

I am through with it. You can take your self care and shove it up your ass. It sure feels good when I order Chinese take-out and wash it down with some French wine, but it does absolutely nothing in regards to the underlying problems I am facing. It's less than worthless, since not only do my problems remain, I am made to feel as if it's all my fault for it getting me down.

If this moment has taught us anything, it's that the ethic of capitalist individuality does not work when the shit goes down. We don't need self care, we need social care. We need a society that takes care of its members, that offers them basic protections. If we had social care we could close down businesses and compensate workers to get the virus under control. We could avoid parents having to quit their jobs in order to take care of their kids. We could have schools refurbished to be more spacious and ventilated, and for children to be learning in them. 

Instead we have given everyone a little bag of self care magic beans, and told them to cheer up while their neighbors choke to death. To quote Gang of Four, return the gift. Fill that bag with gasoline, light it on fire, and throw it back. 

Deadspin and the Power of Quitting

Deadspin is no longer. Rather than assent to the stupid priorities of their new corporate overlords, the staff and editors quit the site en masse, effectively destroying it. The name their owners bought will still be there, but that will be meaningless because Deadspin's readers came for their writers, not the site itself.

I am sad to see Deadspin go, since it was one of the last vestiges of that great moment in internet history after universal broadband and before social media dominated it. Back then (when I first started blogging) I had my daily rotation of favorite websites and blogs and Deadspon was one of them. It still was until this week, the lone survivor of my old internet routine.

However, I am taking heart in how Deadpsin went down. American workers are under the thumbs of their greedy, stupid bosses. Just about every frontline worker has experience being good at their job and knowing back to front before some clueless higher up comes in to tell you what to do. Deadspin's new bosses said "stick to sports" without understanding that the site had distinguished itself by doing the opposite. Those of us (like myself) in education have innumerable instances of some administrator implementing a bad, asinine program so they can put it on their resume and leave for a better job before their lackluster initiative is exposed as bullshit.

Union membership is as low as it was in the dark times of the 1920s. Wages are stagnant and employers keep turning the screws to squeeze more profit from their businesses and more labor from their workers. In this hellscape American workers have only one weapon at their disposal: quitting. Like going on strike, it deprives your boss of your labor.

We have all worked in dysfunctional workplaces and dreamed of everyone quitting at once, the boss left with a problem they can't solve. When I quit being a professor two of my colleagues left that same week, and it felt like for the first time the higher ups in my department and college actually paid attention to the problems they were ignoring or actively causing.

Good on the Deadspin writers for pulling off the fantasy that so many of us have. And let that be a lesson to the rest of us that in depriving our bosses of labor we can have real power. I fervently hope workers in this country can start using that tool as a more effective weapon.

Don't Adjunct

It finally appears that there is a growing awareness in American society of the crime of adjunct labor exploitation. Today Gawker did an extended piece (in a running series) about it. I remember a time when students in classes taught by adjuncts didn't even know what adjunct professors were.

It's May, which is when the so-called "secondary" academic job market is in full swing. In this job market positions are minimally advertised, if at all. In this market departments look at their ledger of courses marked "staff" in the system and are looking for someone to fill them. Whereas regular job searches can be painstaking, the secondary market can be quite haphazard.  A lot of the folks on the secondary market are just about to get their PhDs, but have struck out in the tenure track search. I remember the May of 2006 vividly, because I was one of those people. I remember the pure, unrefined fear for my future that I was feeling, and I empathize greatly with those feeling it right now.

All of a sudden, I went from someone who was unwanted to having four job interviews for temporary gigs and three job offers, all for "visiting" positions. Not good enough to score a campus interview in the regular search, I was suddenly a hot commodity on the secondary market. (This was during a time when enrollments were shooting up and before the crash of 2008. After that even the secondary market got dicey.) It was then that I started to realize just how much of the academic labor system was kept afloat by temporary labor. (None of the institutions where I matriculated relied on it much, so I had been shielded.)

During my visiting gig I realized that I was relatively lucky. A friend of mine adjuncted, which meant he taught the same number of courses as me, but got paid a little more than half as much (without benefits), meaning that he supplemented his income with classes at another local university and a part time job. There was no reason for this disparity, other than the fact that the school I worked for wanted a ready stable of cheap, on the spot labor.  (At least he got promoted to visitor the next year. Evidently some of the same folks who adjuncted are still there today, a decade later.)  While there and at another institution I soon observed that adjuncts are paid as low as the market will bear, and can have classes taken away from them at the last moment, meaning their standard of living is always in doubt.

The Gawker article has all kinds of adjunct horror stories, and I've heard and witnessed my share myself, even if I never adjuncted. I've heard and seen enough to know that scholars leaving their grad school days behind need to hear this message: don't adjunct.

Of course this is not absolute. You gotta eat, after all. But you should only do it for as little time as possible. You should spend your time while adjuncting finding ways to get jobs that aren't adjuncting.  This is not victim blaming, because it's no one's fault that they are an adjunct, it's the fault of a corrupt system that refuses to pay people a living wage for their labor.  If you're at a school with a unionization movement, join up and fight, but if a union is not in your future, start planning your escape.

You can't pull any yahoo off of the street and ask them to teach a college course, but adjuncts are paid and treated like, well, yahoos who are just pulled off of the street.  On an hourly basis you'd make more money doing practically anything else.  I get sad when I hear stories of long-time adjuncts who die destitute, and then I get angry, but then I get frustrated. Don't do that to yourself. You are highly educated and the economy is growing again.  There are paths out. I and a lot of people I know have found jobs outside of academia that involve better pay, more respect, and security. It's not easy to make this transition, but it's a helluva lot easier than being a "freeway flier."  You might love the life of the mind, but trust me, you can pursue that in your free time, too.  (That's what I do.) You might love being part of academia, but academia won't fix your broken tooth or pay for your retirement if you're an adjunct. It will put you on the street when it needs to. Academia has no loyalty to adjuncts, so it is absurd for temporary academic laborers to feel any sense of loyalty to academia.

When all is said and done, wretched adjuncting jobs will be around as long as there is a mass of people willing to take them. Once enough people refuse to spend their time being exploited like this, things will change. Until then, it'll just keep getting worse and worse. Adjuncting work not only keeps you poor and insecure, it helps maintain a system that keeps other people poor and insecure, too.  Don't be a sucker or a cautionary tale. Don't adjunct.