[Marxism] Anthropologists and the SF labor struggle

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For more information, please visit the "AAA UNITE" blog:
http://aaaunite.blogspot.com/

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Labor Strife at San Francisco Hotels
Prompts Anthropologists to Tentatively Move Annual Meeting
By DAVID GLENN
Chronicle of Higher Education

Leaders of the American Anthropological Association have tentatively decided to
relocate and reschedule the organization's annual meeting, which had been
expected to draw nearly 6,000 scholars to San Francisco in mid-November.

The 11th-hour move, made late last week, was sparked by a bitter labor dispute
at San Francisco's major hotels, including the San Francisco Hilton, where the
conference was to have been held. In response to an internal poll of the group,
hundreds of anthropologists indicated that they were unwilling to cross picket
lines to attend the conference, and some threatened to resign from the
association if the meeting went forward as scheduled. The conference will
instead be held in Atlanta from December 15 to 19.

The relocation has not quite been set in stone. On Sunday, Mayor Gavin Newsom
of San Francisco called for a 90-day cooling-off period in the labor conflict.
He has given the disputing parties until late Tuesday to accept or reject his
proposal. On Monday afternoon, the anthropology association sent an e-mail
message urging its members not to book tickets to Atlanta just yet.

The tentative decision to relocate came at the end of a painful week of
marathon conference calls. "We wanted to abide by our members' deep moral
feelings about this," said Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, the association's president,
in an interview on Monday. "What emerged from the poll we sent out was that a
large group of our membership were strongly opposed to crossing picket lines --
had never crossed picket lines and weren't about to cross picket lines."

The Middle East Studies Association, which is also scheduled to meet in San
Francisco in November, is now embroiled in debates about whether to make a
similar move.

Unionized hotel employees in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.,
are working without contracts, and they have authorized strikes in all three
cities. The hotel workers' union, known as Unite Here after a recent merger,
conducted a two-week strike at four San Francisco hotels in late September and
early October. The city's hotel association replied by locking out workers at
those hotels and 10 others, replacing them with temporary nonunion workers.

The decision to relocate has not been universally popular among
anthropologists. In various online bulletin boards, many scholars have
expressed anger about the disruption of job interviews that had been scheduled
for the San Francisco conference. Others have complained that they are stuck
with nonrefundable airplane tickets or hotel deposits. And some anthropologists
have suggested that the association's new Atlanta contract, which was the
product of an elaborate negotiation with the Hilton Hotels Corporation,
represents a betrayal of the interests of the locked-out hotel workers in San
Francisco.

When the threat of a strike or lockout emerged, in September, the association
considered canceling the meeting entirely or moving it 40 miles south, to a
patchwork of small hotels in San Jose. The association's leaders feared,
however, that such moves would leave it vulnerable to at least $1.2-million in
liability claims from the San Francisco Hilton, according to Ms. Brumfiel, who
is also a professor of anthropology at Northwestern University.

The solution that arose last week, Ms. Brumfiel said, was a "contract swap."
The anthropology association had already arranged to meet at a Hilton hotel in
Atlanta in 2006. The Hilton Hotels Corporation offered on Thursday to absolve
the association of any financial liability if it would agree to meet in Atlanta
this year but return to San Francisco in 2006.

In some skeptics' eyes, that solution still would put too much money in
Hilton's pockets at a time when the company is locking out workers. Late
Monday, more than 500 scholars had signed an online petition that declares that
the association's Atlanta arrangement "attempts to circumvent the underlying
ethical issues" and "effectively violates the spirit and intent of the strike
in San Francisco." The petition was drafted by Vanessa deKoninck, a Ph.D.
candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Davis.

Ms. Brumfiel said she agrees that the association's solution was far from
perfect. She said that critics should bear in mind, however, that if the
association had tried to break its contract with Hilton, it probably would have
eventually had to pay the corporation hundreds of thousands of dollars in a
legal settlement.

"It seemed that the triple A would end up paying the Hilton $1.2-million," she
said. "That just seemed kind of illogical to me. ... I didn't like the idea of
transferring these funds."

A staff member at the union said in an interview on Monday that he had mixed
feelings about the association's new arrangement.

"First and foremost, we're pleased that they made a decision not to cross the
lockout line," said Neal Kwatra, a coordinator in Unite Here's
strategic-affairs department. "We applaud the association's members and
activists for bringing this to the leadership's attention and ensuring that
they didn't hold a convention in San Francisco."

However, Mr. Kwatra continued: "We are disappointed that they're rewarding
Hilton for its atrocious behavior in the context of the labor dispute in San
Francisco by transferring the convention to a Hilton facility. ... We would
have liked to have seen another outcome."

Kamala Visweswaran, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of
Texas at Austin, said in an interview on Monday that the association should
have recognized that it actually had a great deal of leverage in its
negotiations with Hilton, and probably could have escaped its San Francisco
contract with a penalty far smaller than $1.2-million, perhaps on the order of
$100,000. Even in the worst scenario, she said, the association probably would
have faced a sympathetic jury in San Francisco, a pro-labor town.

Not everyone agrees. In an e-mail message that was circulated to association
activists on Monday afternoon, Daniel A. Segal, a professor of anthropology and
history at Pitzer College, disputed such arguments. The association's contract
with Hilton specified arbitration, not a jury trial, Mr. Segal wrote. He also
emphasized that the association's 2006 contract with Hilton had been signed
years ago, so the Atlanta conference should not be perceived as "new decisions
to give Hilton our business."

Many activists hope that the association will negotiate different terms in its
future meeting contracts, so that it will no longer be vulnerable to situations
like this. Robert T. O'Brien, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Temple
University who maintains a Weblog about the meeting dispute, said in an
interview on Monday that he would bring several resolutions to the Atlanta
meeting. They would require the association to purchase insurance and negotiate
opt-out clauses that would give it more leverage during similar disputes in the
future.

Mr. O'Brien said that he was personally disappointed with the Atlanta
arrangement, but he urged his fellow activists to have sympathy for members of
the association's executive board. "They operated under a timeline, thinking
about real issues, like whether we're going to be liable for $1.5-million," he
said. "It's a question of picking one's battles. If we bankrupt the
organization, then we won't be around to push the Hilton or the U.N. Commission
on Human Rights or anyone else in the future."

Meanwhile, the Middle East Studies Association's leaders have strongly
suggested that their San Francisco conference will go ahead as scheduled. Afra
Al-Mussawir, a graduate student at Texas, said in an interview on Monday that
she sympathized with that decision. "A lot of attendees come from outside the
country," she said, "and they go through a lot to get their visas. It's not
easy to change your plans."

Ms. Al-Mussawir said, however, that she herself would not attend the meeting if
the lockout continues. "I've never in my life crossed a picket line," she said,
"and this is despite the fact that I've had not such great personal experiences
with the unions that I've been a member of. But still, I think it would make me
sick to my stomach to cross a picket line."


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