MSP Summit

Today we had our annual MSP summit. Some people call it a retreat, but I'm tired of hearing about unions retreating, so I call it a summit. It was good.

Nancy Folbre gave some opening remarks to frame the discussion drawn from her new book Saving State U. Public Higher Education is getting strangled, like all other state services, because neoliberal policies and globalism have conspired to shift the financial burden onto the middle class (by reducing taxes on capital gains and forcing the University to self-fund financial aid). With the middle-class increasingly squeezed by stagnant wages and increasing costs, there's little support for the increased revenues that would be needed to fix the state's declining support for public education. It's discouraging to recognize that, writ broadly, our problems can only be solved by fixing the whole world.

Our subsequent discussions focused on more trying to identify what we could organize to try to fix. There is a lot we can do. I mentioned the several ideas that I've had for union action. In particular, the idea of a "good work" action. Since we serve a vulnerable population, there's little interest in performing any kind of action that would compromise the students we serve. It's a tough challenge.