Strike Reflection Committee 

November 7, 2007

Dear co-workers and friends,

This email is to request your participation in an initiative organized by the Strike Reflections Committee. SRC is a small group of students and faculty members who are interested in being an ongoing part of the struggle that began on our University of Minnesota campus with the AFSCME strike of September 2007. Our initiative is guided by two beliefs: First, in order to sustain a long-term people’s movement, solidarity work must be tightly interwoven with critical reflections (including vigorous and healthy self-critique) at individual and collective levels. Second, it is essential for any movement for social justice to own the memory of its struggle, so that it can inform the struggles to come. We hope that by collecting information, stories, and documents related to and from the strike, we can help to create, make public, and learn from this event. Therefore, we invite all those who were involved in the 2007 AFSCME strike to share reflections that can provide guidance for students, teachers, future workers, union members, and union leaders.

If you participated in the 2007 AFSCME Strike as a striking worker, a member of the picket line, a web designer, a support committee member, a faculty member, a graduate/undergraduate student, a labor journalist, or in any other capacity, we invite you to share your experiences and critical reflections with us. We are inviting written submissions that could include stories about your experiences before, during, or after the strike; your observations of events; your analysis or opinions related to the strike; or other information that you feel would help us and others interested in labor issues understand this strike. You can focus and organize these reflections in any way that you wish.

At the same time, it would be helpful if you can address at least some of the following key questions in your narrative. It is important that you address questions (b) and (f):

  1. How did you become involved in the strike?
  2. In what roles/capacities did you participate in the strike?
  3. In what ways do you see yourself as continuing to participate in this labor struggle?
  4. What are the most important lessons you have learned from the strike that you think we all need to pay attention to for organizing future labor struggles on this campus?
  5. In what ways would you like to learn from others who participated in the 2007 AFSCME strike?
  6. Do you have any advice for us with respect to the ways in which your reflections (and others’ reflections) should be collected and made available for future use? Would you like to remain anonymous? Do you have any concerns about risks or issues of confidentiality? If so, can you please share these?

Our group is already committed to archiving public documents and using some of the stories that we collect for a People’s Report to present to the Legislature. Once we have a sense of all the information and stories that are out there, we hope to find other appropriate venues to help make this struggle visible and serve as a resource for a continued movement.

We would like to receive your reflections by January 10, 2008. Once we have all the narratives and have carefully gone through them, we will be in touch with you about where our initiative is headed. Please rest assured that your reflection will be used in accordance with your wishes.

All submissions can be sent to: strike.reflection@gmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you,

Sincerely,

Richa Nagar (Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies)
Ronald Greene (Communication Studies)
Isaac Kamola (Political Science)
Eli Meyerhoff (Political Science)
Amy Pason (Communication Studies)
Sofi Shank (Global Studies)