4A - The Michigan Daily - December 2, 2004 OPINION + 420 MAYNARD STREET ANN ARBOR, MI 48109 tothedaily@michigandaily.com COLIN DALY Tuv 'iic iAwAN Dix EDITED AND MANAGED BY STUDENTS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN SINCE 1890 JORDAN SCHRADER Editor in Chief JASON Z. PESICK Editorial Page Editor Unless otherwise noted, unsigned editorials reflect the opinion of the majority of the Daily's editorial board. All other pieces do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Michigan Daily. NOTABLE QUOTABLE This is not a point in my life that I want to go back to government." - Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani after announcing on his deci- sion to start his own investment firm, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. S 4 Accident of geography ZAC PESKOWITZ TIIE LoWER FREQIUENIES For much of the past year, the primary economic debate in the United States pivoted around outsourcing. China and India with their huge populations, low wages and educated workforces, were held up as the new peril to the American worker. Labor unions and Democratic Party activists detected a wedge issue that could inflame the passions of white- collar workers who felt threatened by computer programmers in Bangalore and cell phone designers in Guangdong. Sen. John Kerry even made sure to slip the term into his discussions on foreign policy, with his oft-repeated rumina- tion that the Bush administration "outsourced the job" of catching Osama bin Laden "to Afghan warlords." Most of this was cheap posturing with a tinc- ture of jingoism that left out the uncomfortable, at least for Democratic political candidates, truth that a major chunk of outsourcing business goes to countries like Ireland, Poland and the Czech Republic. It's usually considered a bit impolitic to pummel countries that have a large number of their descendents living and voting in the United States and the Democrats, unsurprisingly, abstained. Of course, this outsourcing strategy was inef- fective. Kerry lost the presidency and in an even more portentous sign, U.S. Rep. Jim DeMint (R- S.C.) won a hotly-contested race for his state's open Senate seat. His opponent, Inez Tenenbaum, sported crass anti-trade arguments in her cam- paign literature and public appearances while DeMint championed trade even in hostile settings like South Carolina's textile regions. DeMint's triumph as an uncompromising free-trader was made all the more impressive by South Carolina's long history of protectionism, a struggling state economy that lost about 70,000 jobs in a three- year span and the dire condition of the state's tex- tile industry. The Democrats bet that exploiting trade fears would be a successful gambit, but trade failed to be a major concern for voters. These disastrous electoral results might have forced Democrats to re-evaluate the merits of this strategy. Fresh off their stumbles on Nov. 2, the party has decided to focus its efforts on the next culprit of the global economy: Wal-Mart and its relationship with Chinese manufacturers. The Center for American Progress, a quasi-think tank run by Bill Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta, has been at the forefront of these efforts. Unlike labor unions, which have spent the majority of their energy criticizing the company's domestic labor practices, CAP has a new twist on this approach that blames Wal-Mart for the United States's trade deficit with China and the loss of American jobs. On a more whimsical side, the organization is giving away a poster entitled "The World of Wal-Mart" for a mere $100 donation. The print features a map of the world with the size of the countries based on how many Wal-Mart items are manufactured in each of the countries. While Wal-Mart has been implicated in some horrendous labor practices, there is no shame in the company's reliance on China for much of its production. The economic assumptions behind the neo-pro- tectionist arguments reek of discredited mercantil- ism and can be easily refuted. But the much more worrying trend for those who still believe in the Democratic Party is the tendency for the party to fall back on the cheap appeal of economic jingoism when it runs out of substantive policy ideas. This position is made all the more ironic by the Demo- cratic Party's tradition as a party of immigrants. n 1950, Earl Browder, the secretary of the American Communist Party, and Max Shachtman, the leader of the Workers Party, had a public debate in New York City on the Soviet Union and Stalinism. Toward the conclusion of the debate, Shachtman recited a long list of party apparatchiks who had met their deaths after falling into disfavor with Josef Stalin. Then pointing at Browder, Shachtman boldly exclaimed, "There, but for an accident of geography, stands a corpse!" The central problem with the Democrats' strat- egy is that it elevates an accident of geography, the nation of a human being's birth, to an issue of exis- tential importance. If you live in America (or are lucky enough to obtain a visa to get here) we will take care of you. But if, through your own poor fortunes, you were born impoverished in another nation, well then you're on your own. Peskowitz can be reached at zpeskowi@umich.edu. 0 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Columnist evokes tyrants to inflate his own image TO THE DAILY: While Googling "Lowliness is young ambi- tion's ladder" from Jason Z. Pesick's A Thanks- giving wish (11/30/2004), and finding, by the way, some interesting results like "Lowliness Is Young Ambition's Ladder: Eighth Concu- bine Surnamed Ho" at http://www.ubcpress. ubc.ca/search/itlebook.asp?BookID =2008, I found that the quote is from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" and is about people pretending to be humble until they spring to the top of the heap, and then become scornful for everything and everybody below them. Is this the kind of role model Pesick wants to set out if indeed he "moves up a couple lines" and becomes Daily Editor in-Chief? I should hope not, but then Pesick further gloats, besides his gloating about climbing the Daily's greasy pole; we get to learn about his sibling's acceptance to the University, and then we are treated to the truly mania- cal "Just wait until I can control page 1." Has Pesick been watching "Dr. Strangelove" too much lately? Pesick's columns have descended over the past several years into increasing rancor, such as his April 15 rant End of the Vulcans against Student Voices in Action-type activists, the sort who would dare to ... boycott the mighty Daily. Ooooooh. How dare they, those dirty activists. His columns also show a repetitive obsessiveness with the wonders of globaliza- tion, including the glory of outsourcing any U.S. job to foreign countries except, apparent- ly, his own job. Is such one-track-mindedness healthy? With all that plus his desired "con- trol" of page 1 and other Daily pages, it is beginning to smell like those "114 Years of Editorial Freedom" can kiss their sweet (self) good-bye. Who knows, Pesick may ironically himself become the cause of another Daily boycott, and be forced to feel "lowly" indeed, but without pretending this time. David Boyle Alum 6 VIEWPOINT The grade for LEO contract implementation? F. 4 BY IAN ROBINSON Last year, University lecturers (and other nontenure-track faculty with other titles) negotiated our first collective agreement with the University administration. It was an arduous process. Our union - the Lec- turers' Employees Organization - fielded a bargaining team that met week after week with the University administration. We had to engage in a one-day strike to show how serious we were about our core issues: on job security and salary improvement. In the end, we compromised on each of our major demands, but we felt that the contract was a major step forward. LEO members ratified the contract by an overwhelming majority last June. We looked forward to implement- ing the agreement quickly and effectively. That was then. Three months into the implementation process, some schools, departments and programs are implement- ing the agreement in good faith. But the units that treated their lecturers worst before the contract was signed are playing the same old games. Though we expected that people who made unfair use of their power before the contract would resent and resist its con- straints, we also expected that the University administration would explain to these units that their old ways - which were never pro- fessional and should never have been accept- able - are no longer legal and must cease University administration can still overturn decisions made by the units that violated the agreement. We are calling upon the admin- istration to do just that. Today, the grievance with the most at stake will go before the Dean of the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and the University Human Resources representatives of University Provost Paul Courant. This is the third step for this grievance - the Ann Arbor English department has already reject- ed our arguments. Our contract provides that faculty who are assigned fewer courses than they wish to teach should go on a layoff list (provided they are good teachers). When a new class opens up, departments are to go first to this list to see whether any of the laid- off faculty are qualified to teach it. If there is such a faculty member, he or she must be hired. If there is more than one qualified faculty member on the list, the one with the most seniority must be hired. What English department decision-mak- ers actually did was more Byzantine. (The Oxford English Dictionary defines Byzantine as "complicated, inflexible, underhand.") Last year, they scheduled an unusually large share of the courses taught by lecturers in the fall 2003 term. This meant hiring new people that term. Then, because they had correspondingly fewer courses to offer in the winter 2004 term, they laid off 14 lec- turers. In deciding which ones to lay off, question. Was the department hiring unquali- fied people all those years? And who was hired instead of these experienced lecturers? In the fall term, about 30 graduate student instructors enrolled in programs other than English were hired. As well, 2004 graduates of the .department's doctorate and masters programs were given one year appointments, and others were given one-term jobs. For the English department's hiring deci- sions to comply .with the terms of our con- tract, the following would have to be true: Once the contract came into force, all of the new hires must have been more qualified to teach all of the courses assigned than all of those on the layoff list. If you find that claim credible, I'd like to talk to you about a bridge I own in Brooklyn! The upshot: This blatant contract violation has resulted in lecturers with many years of experience receiving fewer courses than they should have, and three of the department's most senior lecturers with no work at all in winter 2005. It is these three LEO members who brought the grievance, but many others have also been harmed by the unnecessary policy of excessive fall-term hiring. There is more at. stake here, too, than the livelihood of our English department members, vitally important though that is. If the administration accepts the English department's claims, this key element of our contract's job security provisions is rendered T.! L.R.1 ' .i.1n )rM fllr..' J 14 N.I. A.i .:: . .