The Art of Letter Writing

One of the more invisible fronts in the media work being done for and against the strike is the use of email and websites. The U administration has been particularly active in mailing out mass emails spinning their own position regarding the strike. See here for a recent letter from the U's head of HR. We wanted to take this opportunity to provide a critical reading of this letter. Thanks to Nate

Dear Ms. Carrier,

My name is Nate Holdren. I am a graduate instructor in the Department
of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the U. I'm writing
in response to your recent message. To be blunt, your email strikes me
as a piece of misinformation designed to weaken support for the
strikers by depicting them as irrationally failing to accept the
university's supposedly reasonable offer. I would like to know, has
the university hired an outside consultant to help coordinate its
response to the strike?

Your claim that the university's offer is competitive in the
marketplace is disingenuous on two counts. First, what market do you
see the university competing in? As I understand matters, the
university is one of the largest employers in the state and as such
the university determines the market for service workers as much as it
is subject to this market. Second, the university is a public
nonprofit institution. You imply that the university should operate
otherwise - that is, that the university should operate as a market
institution - without providing an argument and without recognizing
that this is a tremendously contentious proposition.

Your reference to the market is also revealing. The private sector has
a significantly lower rate of unionization than the public sector, in
large part because of aggressive union busting by private sector
employers. The university appears to be behaving like a private sector
employer in this case, which is to say, the university appears to be
deliberately undermining the AFSCME locals.

That larger numbers of AFSCME members are still working does not
indicate that those AFSCME members are happy with the way the
university is treating them. I've spoken with about 30 strikers and my
students have spoken with about another 25. All of these strikers find
it very difficult financially to be on strike and almost all of them
have expressed worry about how long they can stay on strike. That is,
some people don't strike or stop striking because they can't afford
it. They can't afford it because the university pays low wages to
service workers.

Finally, for future reference, if you want your claim to value
employees to be taken seriously, you might consider sending impersonal
mass emails from an address the university employees can reply to.
Sending an email from "bulk-nr@umn.edu ", where "nr" means "no reply"
sends a message that you do not care about employees, that you only
want to lecture us. In order to reply to you, I had to do a google
search and I'm not entirely sure this is the correct address. For this
reason, I request that you acknowledge this message.

Yours sincerely,
Nate Holdren