Rolling the Union On at Dartmouth

Whatever the workplace, “the fundamentals are the same”

This article first appeared at InDepthNH on April 22, 2024. 

HANOVER, NH —Although the Dartmouth College administration has publicly refused to negotiate with its highest profile union, labor movement activity, including a possible strike by graduate students, continues to intensify on the Hanover campus.

After months of bargaining, GOLD-UE, the union representing graduate student employees, has reached tentative agreements with the administration in several areas, including grievance procedures, discipline and discharge, and non-discrimination. But other provisions remain contested and last week GOLD-UE members voted to authorize a strike if their demands are not met.

The administration says, “Dartmouth is working hard to bargain a fair contract,” and has offered a 17.5% pay raise with guaranteed annual increases to keep up with inflation. However, the union and the administration are not yet on the same page. After the latest negotiation session, April 18, the union informed its members, “Despite encouraging progress on compensation, medical funds, and immigration fee coverage, Dartmouth continues to entirely reject many core benefits: dental, vision, retirement, childcare, and more.”

GOLD-UE member signs strike pledge at March 27 rally.

“Dartmouth has one more opportunity at the April 25th bargaining session to address the outstanding core issues,” the union statement said. “Following this session, we will hold a general body meeting on April 29th to collectively determine if their offer is sufficient or if we should escalate in response.”

“Dartmouth is continuing to bargain in good faith,” states a 6-page document, “FAQs About Graduate Student Unionization,” posted by the college’s provost. “Given the progress made at the bargaining table so far, the generous proposals Dartmouth has made, and the fact that Dartmouth graduate students already receive a comprehensive package of stipend, health benefits, and tuition remission, we believe we should be able to reach a fair contract agreement via the bargaining process. As such, a strike is entirely unwarranted,” the statement said.

The administration statement says faculty members should not interfere with strike activities, initiate discussions about a strike, or ask their teaching assistants if they plan to walk out. It states that faculty are part of management and says, “A graduate-student strike does not change a faculty member’s obligation to perform their duties, including submitting grades or conducting class.”

“Faculty can hire temporary workers to cover the staffing gap created by a strike,” it adds.

Negotiations are also underway between Dartmouth and Local 560 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has two longstanding contracts covering hundreds of campus workers such as security personnel, custodians, groundskeepers, and cooks. Contract talks are going on, as well, with Dartmouth librarians, who last year voted to join the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees.

But Dartmouth has stubbornly refused to negotiate with its basketball team, which voted in March to join Local 560. The New England office of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled the players qualify as employees and are eligible to engage in collective bargaining. But in a statement issued in March the administration said it would refuse to bargain. “This will likely result in SEIU Local 560 filing an unfair labor practice charge with the NLRB, which we would appeal,” they said in an emailed statement.

Dartmouth’s president, Sian Beilock, followed up with a Wall Street Journal op-ed on April 12 in which she said the college will fight the basketball union “all the way to the Supreme Court if that’s what it takes to prevent this misguided development from taking hold.”

“Our resistance to the decision isn’t because we oppose labor unions,” she wrote. “Dartmouth has more than 1,500 union employees across five unions—including campus services employees, library workers, and teaching and research assistants—all of whom we are proud to work with through collective bargaining.”

“It’s time for President Beilock to stop repeating that her administration ‘doesn’t oppose unions,’” responded Chris Peck, a Dartmouth painter who heads Local 560. “Dartmouth is currently in violation of federal labor law by refusing to bargain with a certified bargaining unit. That is a policy shift and is a clear sign to all of the unions on campus of what this administration is capable of.”

“Even more troubling,” Peck said, “this administration has also allowed a small group of disgruntled donors to directly threaten the players by denying them access to jobs and internships. While we recognize that the vast majority of alumni do not countenance such tactics, such a campaign is entirely incompatible with Dartmouth’s community standards and President Beilock’s professed commitment to dialogue and ‘safe spaces.’”

For Jackson Monroe, a player and member of the Dartmouth class of 2026, the issue is not about wages or whether the players should be considered “professionals” as President Beilock charges. It’s about student rights and access to health care. “If I were to hurt myself playing basketball for the school, and I have to go get an MRI or something, that comes out of my own pocket, the school doesn’t cover that,” he said.

He also wants to challenge Ivy League rules that restrict the amount of time players can practice. “We love our game, we love our sport, we want to practice it a ton,” he said. “We’re not doing this because we want to practice less.”

Mike McCann (l), who teaches Sports Law at UNH Law School appeared with Tony Clark (r) of the Major League Baseball Players Association at a Dartmouth forum on April 15.

The question of whether basketball players should be considered workers with the right to unionize has attracted national attention and has also attracted at least one high-profile visitor to the Hanover campus. Tony Clark, a former big league baseball player who now serves as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, was on campus April 14 and 15 to meet Dartmouth athletes and speak at a forum sponsored by the SEIU and several academic departments. For him, unions at their essence are about giving people a voice in the workplace, whether it’s a mine, an office, or a baseball field. And whenever people step forward to shake things up, according to Clark, defenders of the status quo respond like Chicken Little that the sky is falling.

For the baseball players union, he said, “at each moment we sat down to negotiate a new collective bargaining, or each moment where there was a strike, where there was a lockout, the sky was always falling. It was always falling, and it was going to collapse, and the foundation was going to break in the end, and the sun and the moon, and all of those things were going to happen because of what the union was asking for.”

But each time, they worked it out and union members returned to playing ball.

“At its core,” he said, unions are about “protecting and advancing the rights and interests of our members. You may not like it. You may not agree with it. But I’ll never apologize for us fighting for the things that we believe are right in protection of our workplace environment, rules and regulations that determine and dictate the course of our work on any given day.”

In 2022, the baseball players union joined the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation. Regardless of the workplace, Clark said, “the fundamentals are the same.”

 Bethany Moreton, a Dartmouth history professor who hosted the forum with Clark, sees the progress of unionization at Dartmouth and in other workplaces as a democracy movement. “To watch people insist that they get to have some say over their workplace is heartening to see,” she said, “especially from the students but from others as well.” For Moreton, the new campus union drives are tied to critiques of the gig economy and conflicting views of who is a worker. Over decades of workplace struggles, she said, the labor movement has “managed to make the category of employee a container of certain kinds of enforceable rights.” By identifying themselves as workers, the basketball players and the grad students are saying they are entitled to those rights, too.

Dartmouth faculty are not unionized, but they do have a chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) which has issued statements in support of the undergrad and graduate student employee unions. A separate statement, signed by 250 faculty members last October 29, tied the college’s problems attracting new staff to “the Upper Valley’s exploding housing, childcare, and eldercare costs,” very much like issues raised by GOLD-UE.

Pamela Voekel, also a history professor, said she was surprised how easy it was to gather the 250 signatures. “The faculty is very supportive of what the graduate students are doing,” she said.

Ian Scott and Hoaena Tilahun are members of the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth.

Before Tony Clark spoke at the forum, Hosaena Tilahun, a Dartmouth junior, announced the latest union drive on campus. A majority of the school’s 110 undergraduate assistants (resident advisors) have submitted a petition to the NLRB to join the Student Worker Collective at Dartmouth, a union which has already won impressive wage gains for student dining hall workers. The NLRB has not yet scheduled an election.

Trash Talking: Coors Light Wins Emmty Prize for Litterature

Bud Light Toppled from Top of the Heap

This article was first published April 15 at https://indepthnh.org/2024/04/15/trash-talking-coors-light-wins-emmty-prize-for-litterature/.

Yessir, Yessir, Three Bags Full!

CANTERBURY—Perhaps due to last year’s right-wing boycott, Bud Light has fallen from its multi-year position at the top of the trash heap, replaced by Coors Light. Counting all its brands, Anheuser Busch InBev still dominates beer-based litter, but the relative scarcity of Bud Light cans along my local roadside was quickly apparent in this year’s survey.

Other brands that performed strongly in the aluminum can division were Natty Daddy and a newcomer, White Claw Hard Seltzer. As it has in previous years, Twisted Tea remains popular with the local litterati.

If you’re not familiar with this trashy survey, it’s one I conduct in conjunction with Canterbury’s annual spring roadside cleanup. My current assignment is the 0.6 mile stretch of Shaker Road from Baptist Road to the Loudon town line. By classifying and counting the trash I find each year, I can analyze the drinking habits of litterers. Or maybe it’s the littering habits of drinkers. Whatever. I’ve been doing it off and on since 2013, and in that time, Bud Light has always been the King of Trash. It’s reign may be over.

Last year’s roadside cleanup took place about the time that social conservatives launched a Bud Light boycott to protest the brand’s attempt to sell more beer to the LGBTQ community. I’m struck by the increasing frequency of conservative and Republican attacks on capitalist enterprises for trying to sell more of their services or products. In this case, the Bud Light boycott appears to have had an impact. According to the Harvard Business Review, “Comparing purchase behavior post-controversy to the same time period in 2022, we estimated that in the three months immediately succeeding the boycott, 15% of previously loyal Bud Light customers shifted their primary spending to other brands as part of the boycott.” In response to the boycott, joining a phenomenon now termed a “buycott,” my friend Bob started drinking Bud Light. But Bob will have to step up his consumption if he wants to affect the statistics.

Other reports said that Bud Light was surpassed in popularity last year by Modelo Especial. The NY Times reported, “The switch occurred at the start of June, after Bud Light had held the No. 1 spot for about 20 years. In the four-week period that ended July 8, Modelo made up 8.7 percent of retail beer sales in the United States, compared with Bud Light’s 6.8 percent.” Perhaps Modelo drinkers are less inclined to littering; I found no Modelo cans in the gravel and brush alongside Shaker Road.

Citing beveragologists, the Times also reported that Americans are drinking less beer, with craft beers, imports, and hard seltzer displacing domestic legacy brands. That seems to be borne out by the roadside trash in my stretch of roadside.

A good example would be Buzzballz, which sells its “fun, innovative cocktails” in cute spherical plastic containers, perfect for taking to the beach or a party, according to the company’s website. I suppose they are also easy to hold while driving, and sized just right to toss out the window.

If you assume beer, hard seltzer, and Buzzballz drinkers are more likely to litter than consumers of non-alcoholic beverages, the statistics provide support. But don’t discount the litterary habits of those who drink soda, coffee, water, GatorAde, and, yes, milk. Pepsi triumphed this year in the plastic bottle competition, with more than 4 times as many empties as Coke. Dunkin topped McDonalds in plastic cups left by the roadside.

And in case you were wondering, Poland Springs and Crystal Geyser Roxane tied at 3 empties each in the bottled water division, but alsoI picked up 6 water bottles with their labels missing. Someone must be trying to mess with my research.

NH Nat. Guard Mission to TX a Waste of Tax Dollars

15 Members of the NH National Guard Deployed to the Rio Grande Valley Last Week to Join Operation Lone Star

This article was first published by InDepthNH on April 5, 2024.

Groups in Texas and New Hampshire say deploying the New Hampshire National Guard to Texas, where 15 New Hampshire soldiers joined Governor Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star this week, wastes tax dollars better spent elsewhere.

Until June 4, 15 volunteers from 237^th Military Police Company will be stationed at Base Camp Alpha in Del Rio, Texas, where their mission, according to Lt. Col. Greg Heilshorn, will be to “prevent, detect and interdict transnational criminal behavior between ports of entry, stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons and people into Texas in the United States, and then refer illegal immigrants to the official ports of entries.”

“They’re not going to be physically arresting people that are coming across the border,” said Heilshorn, the NH National Guard’s director of public affairs. “They’ll be in observation positions and what we call roving patrols. So, when they do observe illegal activity, or people coming across the border, they’ll report that.”

“It is a gross misuse of money that now not only the state of Texas is wasting, but is now including other states,” commented Karen Gonzalez of The Border Organization, a nonprofit community group based in Del Rio, a small city across the Rio Grande from Ciudad Acuña in the Mexican state of Coahuila.

“It’s a total waste of money,” agreed Eva Castillo of the NH Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees, “using our taxpayers’ dollars just to play politics with people’s lives.”

Another group of NH National Guard members went to the border for a year in 2022, in support of Customs and Border Patrol, a federal agency. The latest deployment, however, is in support of the State of Texas, which is at odds with the Biden administration over border enforcement.

The 15 MPs include 7 volunteers who were part of the earlier deployment. None of them speak Spanish, Heilshorn said, but they will be equipped with a card printed with phrases they can use if they have any interactions with Spanish-speaking people.

In 2021, Texas governor Greg Abbott declared a state of emergency, later stating that “the surge of individuals unlawfully crossing the Texas–Mexico border posed an ongoing and imminent threat of disaster for a number of Texas counties and for all state agencies affected by this disaster.”

Abbott launched Operation Lone Star later that year. The exercise, which involves personnel from the Texas Department of Safety and the Texas Military Department, has already cost the state more than $10 billion. Its stated purpose is to secure the border; prevent, detect, and interdict transnational criminal behavior between ports of entry; stop the smuggling of drugs, weapons, and people into Texas and the United States; deny the use of terrain to transnational criminal organizations; and to refer immigrants they believe to be unauthorized to official ports of entry.

Under federal law, immigrants who have a fear of persecution in their home country can request asylum once they cross into the United States, whether their crossing is authorized or not.

Heilshorn said the New Hampshire soldiers will not have specific training on the right of asylum. Neither will they be trained to interdict firearms crossing illegally from the United States into Mexico, where according to a statement released last November by Texas Congressman Joaquin Castro, “More than 500,000 American-made guns are trafficked to Mexico every year, and seventy percent of firearms recovered from crime scenes in Mexico can be traced to the United States.” More than half of migrants seeking asylum in the United States said they had experienced “persistent and unrelenting gunfire” before arriving in the United States, according to a 2023 study cited by Stop U.S. Arms to Mexico, a research and advocacy group based in California.

Claiming that the large influx of migrants constitutes “an invasion,” Abbott has deployed troops and police at the border, placed a line of buoys in the Rio Grande to obstruct migrants, and erected razor wire along the riverside. In December, Abbott signed a bill known as SB 4, which authorizes Texas police to arrest people they believe to be unauthorized immigrants on state charges and have them deported to Mexico. That law is currently held up in federal court, where previous rulings have blocked states from superseding federal authority over immigration.

Eagle Pass, 55 miles down the river from Del Rio, has become the epicenter of the controversy. Abbott plans to build a new 80-acre military base there to house up to 2300 Operation Lone Star troops from Texas and other states. In addition, Texas seized control of the city’s Shelby Park on January 11, not only excluding local residents but also ejecting federal border patrol officers.

photo by Vicky Martinez

While the locals have been kept out, Shelby Park has become a staging area for visiting GOP politicians, including New Hampshire’s Governor Chris Sununu, who traveled there on February 4 to back up Abbott’s claim that his state’s foray into immigration enforcement was a matter of self-defense.

“It is an affront to us as U.S. taxpayers and as citizens of this great state that you have seized our public park – which is owned by everyone – to support an extreme partisan political agenda that endangers our families,” said a February 7 letter to Gov. Abbott from the Eagle Pass Border Coalition, a local grassroots group. “Our beautiful and safe public park has been taken away from us, and turned into a military style staging area, now being used as a backdrop for political theater by you, who live over 200 miles away, and out-of-state politicians.”

Read more about local opposition to Operation Lone Star

After his February trip to Texas, Gov. Sununu asked for a special appropriation of $850,000 “to facilitate a state active-duty operation of the New Hampshire National Guard in support of security activities at the southern United States border to protect New Hampshire citizens from harm,” including illegal traffic in fentanyl. His proposal was approved by the Legislative Fiscal Committee on February 16.

Dozens of immigrants’ rights groups, peace organizations, and faith leaders responded with a statement that “New Hampshire needs affordable housing, substance use treatment, mental health resources, and much more—and Granite Staters have made it clear that using taxpayer dollars on immigration enforcement is not a wise nor supported use of that money. Using taxpayer dollars to send New Hampshire National Guard members to Texas is only designed to score political points and does nothing to improve quality of life in New Hampshire. Funding cruelty at the border is not what our state stands for.”

Read more about NH Opposition to Sending NH Troops to Texas

As for fentanyl, Amerika Garcia Grewal of the Eagle Pass Border Coalition says Sununu has his eyes on “the wrong spot.” Fentanyl is crossing the border, she said, at the ports of entry, mostly in vehicles driven by U.S. citizens, not unauthorized migrants in remote rural areas.

According to the NH National Guard, the budget for the two-month deployment includes $300,000 for pay and benefits, $400,000 for lodging and meals, $50,000 on logistics, and $15,000 on “consumables,” with $85,000 in reserves.

Karen Gonzales from Del Rio says the funds would be “better spent in their own state on addiction prevention and treatment programs.”

photo by Vicky Martinez

“Our area is economically underprivileged,” says Garcia Grewal. “That’s one thing that makes Operation Lone Star so painful for us. We’re seeing billions, billions and billions of dollars spent on these activities. And we’re not getting any kind of investment in our communities.” Maverick County, where Eagle Pass is the county seat, had a median household income of $48,497 in 2022. That’s about 55% of the median household income in Merrimack County, where the 237th Military Police Company is based. “The tax dollars that are going to Operation Lone Star are dollars that are not going to our communities,” she added.

“Hard-earned taxpayer dollars should be invested in uplifting our neighborhoods, supporting the environment, and fostering true community safety, not in perpetuating hate, fear, and the militarization of border communities. It’s time to prioritize compassion over conflict, and invest in people and the planet,” said Matt Nelson of Presente.org, a Latinx online advocacy group which is sponsoring a petition to demilitarize the Rio Grande Valley.

Gov. Sununu has also been criticized for budgeting $1.4 million on a hyped-up crisis at New Hampshire’s 58-mile border with Quebec. According to statistics the ACLU of New Hampshire obtained from the Department of Homeland Security, very few of the unauthorized border crossings taking place in northern states are in New Hampshire. “I think what we’re seeing are politics coming into play here, where people are trying to leverage perceived concerns with the southern border to New Hampshire and trying to argue that there needs to be increased enforcement here when the data doesn’t support it,” said Gilles Bissonette, the organization’s legal director.

New Hampshire is far from the only state sending troops to Texas. According to Bob Libal, who monitors Operation Lone Star for Human Rights Watch, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, Indiana, Iowa, Utah, Florida, South Dakota, North Dakota, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, and Idaho have sent or made commitments to contribute troops or police to the Texas project.

Wherever they are coming from, Garcia Grewal warns the National Guard members to be careful. It’s not danger from local residents or migrants they should heed; it’s a harsh environment with rattlesnakes, inch-long thorns, and a “sun that kills.”

Temperatures often rise above 100 degrees she said, and “people die of exposure here, every single year, quite literally in the hundreds.” That’s why she routinely stocks her car with bottled water, which she’ll give away to anyone she sees who might need it. Her advice to the New Hampshire group: “Wear your sunblock, drink more water, drink more water than you ever thought you ever would.”

Garcia Grewal is also one of the organizers of a prayer vigil in Shelby Park on the first Monday of every month, held to remember the hundreds of people who have died trying to cross the river and the many more who put their lives at risk seeking a better life in the United States. With the park now surrounded by a chain-link fence and guarded by armed soldiers, vigil organizers have had to negotiate with the Texas Military Department’s chaplain to gain access. But they’ll be there again on May 6, 30 minutes before sunset. Garcia Grewal says members of the New Hampshire National Guard will be welcome to attend.

NH Grad Unions Raise the Union Banner

UNH Grads Vote in Union

GOLD-UE members and supporters on Dartmouth Green.

This article was first published March 29, 2024 at InDepthNH.

Unionized graduate students took steps forward this week both at Dartmouth College in Hanover and the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Dartmouth grad students walked out of their labs and classrooms Wednesday for a rally on the Dartmouth Green and talked about a possible strike if they don’t get a positive response to their demands for higher pay and better benefits. And about a hundred miles away, in an election supervised by the Public Employee Labor Relations Board (PELRB), UNH grad students voted 455 to 8 to join the United Auto Workers Union (UAW).

Dartmouth grad students voted last April to unionize and join the United Electrical Workers (UE), which represents grad students at MIT and six other campuses. Calling themselves Graduate Organized Labor at Dartmouth, or GOLD-UE, they have been at the bargaining table with the college administration for seven months and have reached tentative agreements in a number of areas, including grievance procedures. A college spokesperson says, “It is common for initial union contract negotiations to take 12 to 18 months.” But it was obvious Wednesday that the union was unhappy with the pace of negotiations, especially the administration’s slow response to their proposals regarding pay and benefits.

“We gave them our proposals in mid-January, so it’s been over two months,” Genevieve Goebel, a member of the GOLD-UE’s bargaining team, told me before the rally. “No word from them. They keep on saying that they’re disorganized, and that they’re going to need more time.”

“We have had successful first contract negotiations at MIT, at Northwestern, at the University of Chicago, at other locations in half the time,” added Zach Knipe, a UE staff member who has been involved in the Dartmouth negotiations. “The delaying is unacceptable.”

Several other employee unions are engaged in labor struggles at Dartmouth. Two weeks ago, Dartmouth said that it would refuse to bargain with the recently unionized basketball team and force them to take the university to federal court. Two other campus unions, representing non-academic staff, are currently in negotiations, as are the recently organized campus librarians.

Speaking Wednesday on the Dartmouth Green to an assembly of about 200 supporters, GOLD-UE members addressed topics including the high cost of living, dental care, and childcare benefits. Lia Michaels, who is working toward a PhD in molecular and cellular biology, said she has a one-year-old daughter and spends two-thirds of her Dartmouth stipend on childcare. What the union wants, she said, is for graduate students to be able to use a college childcare center which offers services on a sliding scale based on income but is currently inaccessible to graduate student employees.

GOLD-UE member signs strike pledge.

A steady drizzle that started midway through the rally did not seem to dampen the enthusiasm of the grad students, who chanted, “Who runs Dartmouth? We run Dartmouth.” As the rally closed, the union passed out pledge cards, saying “If my union authorizes a strike, I pledge to honor our collective decision by withholding my teaching and research labor in solidarity with my fellow graduate workers.” A strike authorization vote could be on the agenda for the union’s general meeting next week.

Strikes on college campuses have not been unusual in recent years. Three thousand grad students walked out Monday at Boston University. Last year there were major strikes at Rutgers and the University of Michigan, where Sam Schaffer-Morrison, who grew up in Warner, is working on a PhD in forest ecology. He said the five-month strike was hard and revealed “how little the university actually cares about us.” It also revealed, he said, that “the amount we get paid, the health care we get, is a direct result of the union.”

Schaffer-Morrison said pay was frozen during the COVID pandemic while the cost of living, especially for housing, rose dramatically in the Ann Arbor area. The new contract came with a substantial pay increase, plus improvements in other benefits. “The benefits that we’ve gained from the union have been amazing,” he said, including “just knowing that if something goes wrong, you have an organization that can support you.”

Successful graduate student union organizing began at the University of Wisconsin in Madison in 1969, emerging out of protests against the university’s cooperation with the Selective Service during the U.S. war in Vietnam. The Teaching Assistants Association (TAA) won recognition after a strike lasting several weeks in 1970.

Dexter Arnold of Nashua, who began graduate study at Madison shortly after the strike, said “The key to the TAA’s success was this dual commitment to educational quality for our students and bread and butter issues,” including health coverage for spouses of grad students and pregnancy leave.

Arnold chaired the union’s grievance committee for several years. “We didn’t win every case,” he recalled, “but we made a difference. We saved people’s jobs, prevented management from revoking a job offer, and overturned some misclassifications that would have cheated people out of pay, health insurance and tuition remission. We enforced class size limits.”

Following the formation of the TAA at Madison, unionization was sporadic for years due changes in the makeup of the National Labor Relations Board. The latest union organizing wave began in 2016, when the NLRB ruled grad students are employees with collective bargaining rights. The pace intensified during the COVID pandemic.

New unions of graduate student employees, postdoctoral scholars, and researchers formed on 26 campuses in 2023, representing more than 48,000 workers. Most of them are affiliated with traditional unions, with the UAW and UE representing the largest numbers.

The identification of grad students as workers relates to a largescale shift in academic employment. According to a 2023 report by the American Association of University Professors, the “workforce has shifted from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty,” including full and part-time faculty with no access to tenure. AAUP also said grad student employment is going up at more than twice the rate of full-time and part-time faculty.

“Highly educated workers—frustrated by poorly paid and precarious employment options—have increasingly turned to unionization to improve their situation since the Great Recession, and in some sectors even earlier,” Ruth Milkman and Joseph van der Naald explained in a report called “The State of the Unions 2023. “Graduate student workers and adjuncts employed in higher education are an extreme case of this phenomenon: they are not merely college-educated but typically have (or are pursuing) advanced graduate degrees, yet their job prospects have deteriorated dramatically as contingent employment has increasingly replaced the tenure track jobs that were once the norm in institutions of higher education.”

Jed Siebert, who is working toward a PhD in forestry at UNH, said union organizing there started among students in natural resources and physics before spreading to other departments. After talking with several unions, he said the organizing committee decided the UAW was the best fit. Academic workers now make up nearly one quarter of the UAW’s 400,000 members nationwide.

“All of the research that gets done at UNH, all of the teaching that gets done at UNH, would not be possible without the labor of graduate students,” Siebert said. “And our pay or benefits most certainly don’t reflect that.”

Like the students at Michigan and Dartmouth, the UNH union’s demands will likely center around compensation, including pay, health care, and other benefits. Due to low pay, he said, “There’s only a certain kind of person who can become a grad student at UNH.” Most UNH graduate workers make about $22,000 for the academic year, with more for grad students who also work during the summer.

The UNH union election was held Wednesday and Thursday in the Granite State Room in the Memorial Union Building, where nearly 700 graduate research assistants, teaching assistants, and graduate assistants were eligible to vote.

With union observer Josh Trombley looking on, Doug Ingersoll of the PELRB piles up the pro-union ballots.

“It’s really hard to make ends meet because rent is really expensive in the area,” said Lee Hildebrand, who is finishing up a masters in soil science. While she does not expect to remain at UNH, she said the union will benefit those who come along after. “I’m happy that this union can really help those who are coming in the next semester.”

Anh Tran, who is studying civil engineering, cast the final vote. “It’s beneficial to have someone represent me,” he said, expressing concerns about the high cost of health care, tuition, and fees.

Kristin Petagna, who teaches Intro to psychology, sat in the hallway outside the Granite State Room while others trickled in to vote. When the polls closed at 4 pm, she joined about 15 other grad students in MUB Theater II to witness the vote counting. “We’ve been not considered employees, and we work really hard and care about our work,” she explained. “I’m really excited to be recognized for that, and paid justly for that, and just be able to have a living wage.”

In Theater II, Doug Ingersoll, the PELRB’s executive director, and Becky Black pulled batches of yellow ballots from three wooden boxes. With union and university representatives watching, Ingersoll examined each ballot and added it to a pile indicating whether the vote was for or against representation by the UAW. As the union pile grew taller, it was almost immediately apparent that the pro-union side would win.

The new UNH Graduate Employees Union is not trying to pick a fight with the administration, which in contrast to Dartmouth has been relatively cooperative so far, according to Siebert. “We’re doing this because we really like the work we’re doing. And we want it to be sustainable for everybody,” he said.

After the votes were tallied and the results announced, UNH released a statement saying, “We are pleased that the election was conducted in a fair manner consistent with PELRB rules. UNH is committed to following the appropriate processes with all labor organizations on campus and we look forward to negotiating in good faith to reach a new collective bargaining agreement with UNH GEU.”

“With a union, we will be able to sit down and bargain with the administration as equals,” said Eric Trautman-Mosher, who is working on a degree in history. “We hope to continue raising the standards for graduate workers here and across the country.”

Following a lengthy bargaining session with the Dartmouth administration Friday, Zach Knipe of the UE said the college was definitely aware of the Wednesday walkout and came forward with a substantive counter to the union’s demands for higher pay. “There’s still a long way to go,” he said, but he left today’s session feeling encouraged.

A Dartmouth representative said the university “is committed to working with GOLD-UE to reach a mutually beneficial agreement and is appreciative of the efforts of the GOLD-UE bargaining committee.”

Schaffer-Morrison’s advice to the unions is “stick with it.” He recommended the grad students look for support in their communities, especially with undergrads, who may have more contact with teaching assistants than they do with faculty members. If it comes to a strike, he emphasized the importance of mutual support. When the University of Michigan students were picketing last year, he said, “the union provided breakfast and lunches. And even if you weren’t on the picket line, you could go to the kitchen and grab a lunch and hang out with people that were picketing. And it just created a really nice community around the strike, because strikes are really hard.”

“It’s gonna be hard,” Schaffer-Morrison said, “but it’s worth it. And stick together, you know, solidarity.”

Clams Planning a No Nukes Comeback

Three Mile Island Melted Down 45 Years Ago

One version of this article was published at Waging Nonviolence on March 25, 2024.  Another version was published at InDepthNH on March 28, 2024. 

Visit the Clamshell Alliance: No Nukes website at clamshellalliance.com/ and the Facebook page at www.facebook.com/ClamshellAlliance.

When an accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Middletown, Pennsylvania transformed the plant from a technological miracle to a radioactive ruin in a matter of moments on March 28, 1979, the American people got the message: nuclear power was a bad way to generate electricity. Wall Street tycoons, Congressional staff members, and ordinary voters figured out that the nuclear industry’s promise of safe, clean, and affordable power was a fraud.

The sea change in public opinion did not occur spontaneously; the ground had been laid by a vibrant grassroots “No Nukes” movement which spread out from Seabrook, New Hampshire, where a series of nonviolent demonstrations put the risks of nuclear power on the national agenda.

Photo: Lionel Delevigne

It started small, with 18 New Hampshire residents arrested at the Seabrook construction site on August 1, 1976, organized by a young group called the Clamshell Alliance. Three weeks later, a group 10 times as big was arrested. On May 1, 1977, the police hauled away 1415 peaceful protesters, so many that they used National Guard armories as temporary jails. A two-week standoff between Meldrim Thomson, the avidly pro-nuclear governor, and the jailed activists attracted attention not just to the mass arrests but also to the reasons so many people had been willing to engage in anti-nuclear civil disobedience. Inspired by Clamshell’s example, there were soon dozens of No Nukes alliances across the country, each one conducting demonstrations and reaching out to their communities with information about the hazards of nuclear power and the potential of renewable alternatives.

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As the crisis at the Pennsylvania reactor developed over several days in 1979, the Clamshell office in Portsmouth, where I was working at the time, became busier than usual. Known for our creative protest techniques, we were in the rolodexes of journalists and activists from coast to coast.

Forty-five years later, Clamshell members are still campaigning against nukes, now being touted as the answer to climate catastrophe. For the Clams, many of whom have developed expertise in renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, the new pro-nuke campaign is another fraud.

“Whether they call it a ‘nuclear renaissance,’ a ‘nuclear enlightenment,’ or ‘inherently safe technology,’ nukes are just too expensive, take too long to build, and feature too many pathways to catastrophic accidents to be any kind of answer to the climate crisis,” says Paul Gunter, who was one of the first 18 Clamshell members arrested for civil disobedience at Seabrook in 1976. Now the co-director of Beyond Nuclear, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Takoma Park, Maryland, Gunter can tick off reason after reason why continued use of nuclear power — and building costly new reactors — makes climate change worse and the world less safe.

Over the past several years, “seasoned Clams,” as they jokingly call themselves, have been meeting regularly over Zoom and occasionally in person at World Fellowship in the White Mountains to discuss how to bring their message to younger generations and to boomers for whom Three Mile Island is fading from memory.

The Clams make the case on their new website, with a statement that begins, “A tsunami of nuclear power propaganda is sweeping the globe.”

Gunter says the propaganda is aligned with a multi-billion-dollar nuclear promotion campaign funded by taxpayers via the Biden administration’s Department of Energy. “They even have a plan to convert coal-fired power plants to nuclear generation,” Gunter says. Congress is on the verge of passing legislation to lessen regulatory hurdles to licensing new reactors and extend liability protection to reactor operators who can’t find insurance in the private market. A new generation of nuclear plants is backed, too, by the likes of Bill Gates and Oliver Stone.

“New nukes, we are told, are urgently needed to avert a climate crisis. This is nonsense,” the Clamshell statement asserts. “Far better options are being built much faster than nuclear power plants, at a fraction of the cost, and without the grave hazards. They include solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, efficiency, and conservation.”

The idea for the statement came from Anna Gyorgy, author of No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power, published in 1979.

True to their old principles, the statement was drafted by two writers after consultation with a larger group, reviewed by a committee, and ultimately approved by consensus. The Clams have also stuck to their belief that nonviolence is the best method for social movements to disrupt unjust systems and promote alternatives.

“Nonviolence, in the tradition of King and Gandhi, is an effective way to challenge institutional injustice,” says Gyorgy, now the communications coordinator for the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice in Deerfield, Massachusetts. She adds, “Nonviolence is also the best way to build the communities we need to get through crises caused by violence, racism, predatory capitalism, and climate disruption.” Nuclear power and its evil twin, nuclear weapons, have no role in the future Gyorgy has been trying to build for decades.

“Nukes just cannot compete with zero fuel cost solar and wind, and that means the era of base load plants running on fossil and nuclear fuel is ending,” says Roy Morrison, a former Clamshell staff member who for years has worked as a commercial solar energy developer and writes often about energy economics. “Solar arrays combined with energy storage from home roof tops already are acting as virtual power plants to meet utility demands for peak power,” he adds.

According to Morrison, new battery technology and plunging prices for solar will displace fuels that produce CO2. For Morrison, “The future for our economy and our planet lies with renewables, not nukes, oil, gas, or coal.”

Morrison and I first met in 1977, when we were arrested at Seabrook and held at the National Guard Armory in Concord (my first trip to the capitol city). Two years later, we were members of Clamshell’s office collective, based in a scruffy second-floor suite in downtown Portsmouth. Furnished by whatever we could scrounge, and with an IBM typewriter and a Gestetner mimeograph the most advanced technology in our possession, we did battle with a complex of utility companies, banks, engineering firms, and government agencies which were doing their best to foist nukes on the American public.

When a reporter from a national news agency called for our comment on Three Mile Island, I was the one who happened to pick up the phone. I don’t remember exactly what I said. What I do remember is that at roughly the same time, Dresser Industries, which made the valve which malfunctioned at TMI, was publishing pro-nuke display ads with Edward Teller, the physicist known as “the father of the H-bomb” and a dedicated advocate for all things nuclear, as their spokesperson.

When the news story came out, it went something like, “Physicist Edward Teller says nukes are safe, but Arnie Alpert from the Clamshell Alliance says they aren’t.” It’s a good memory, but more than that, it’s a reminder that grassroots movements that engage in what John Lewis called “good trouble” can shake up power structures and bring about change. In the current moment, when renewable alternatives to fossil and fissile energy are urgently needed, the Clams are trying to make it happen again.

Photo: Lionel Delevigne

Eagle Pass Residents Reject Northern Invasion

Amerika Garcia Grewal at the Shelby Park fence.  Photo by Vicky Martinez.

This article was first published March 6, 2024 at InDepthNH.

While Texas governor Greg Abbott has repeatedly railed against an “invasion” of migrants crossing the Rio Grande River into Texas, some residents of Eagle Pass, a border town where Abbott has taken over a city park and plans to build a new military base, are experiencing an invasion from the other direction.

Sixty-one Republican members of Congress led by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson held a press conference there in January. Hundreds of far-right activists, some armed, convoyed to the border community on February 4. New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu and 12 other Republican governors joined Abbott there the same day. Donald Trump, who can’t resist an opportunity for the limelight, was there with Abbott on February 27. Each delegation was accompanied by scads of reporters, few of whom seemed to express much interest in what the local community has to say.

The biggest and most heavily armed group of invaders are Texas police and members of the National Guard, mobilized under Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. In February, Abbott announced plans to build a new military base in Eagle Pass to house upwards of 2000 National Guard members. Following a special appropriation of $875,000, fifteen members of the New Hampshire National Guard will be among them for a 90-day deployment beginning around the first of April. Troops and police from Tennessee, South Dakota, Florida, Missouri, Montana, Indiana, Utah, Iowa, and possibly Alaska are headed there, too.

At the national level, Eagle Pass is seen as the site of a conflict over authority to enforce immigration law, with Shelby Park as the center stage. The Eagle Pass Business Journal calls the controversy “an epic political and legal battle between Governor Greg Abbott and the State of Texas with the United States government under President Joe Biden regarding the enforcement of American immigration law.” But at the local level, residents who see their governor as an authoritarian and a grandstander mostly want their town and their park back, as well as a compassionate response to migrants passing through their community.

When the Eagle Pass Border Coalition started in 2019, it was basically just an email list of people concerned about the impact of the border wall, says Amerika Garcia Grewal, an Eagle Pass native. When Gov. Abbott announced he was placing buoys in the Rio Grande last year and began lining the river with coils of concertina wire, the group became more active.

As Grewal describes it, Eagle Pass is a small city with mostly Mexican-American residents. It’s always had a close connection to Piedras Negras, the Mexican city on the other bank of the Rio Grande (or Rio Bravo, as it’s known in Mexico). With the school department and the federal government providing the bulk of employment, residents are generally disinclined to rock the boats of agencies responsible for their livelihoods, Grewal explained. But deaths of migrants in the river were something they couldn’t ignore.

The coalition held a vigil at the boat ramp in Shelby Park last August 7 after the first bodies were found trapped in Abbot’s buoys. But when more drowned bodies were found in the river between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras the next day, they agreed to hold vigils on the first Monday of each month featuring prayer, singing in Spanish and English, and pleas for healing. “What we found,” Grewal explained, “is that by having a vigil every single month, people start to realize, oh, wait, it’s not just here and there. Every week, people are dying here in Eagle Pass, every single week.” Whatever political views people hold, she said, they ought to be able to agree that too many people are dying.

Last Christmas season, when hundreds of Mexican-American families were crossing into Mexico to visit their families, the coalition placed 700 crosses in Shelby Park where they’d be visible from the international bridge. “We wanted to capture the attention of everybody who was crossing the Rio Grande,” Grewal said.

Shortly after Christmas, “the State of Texas invaded Shelby Park and took it over, reinforced it with even more concertina wire,” says Grewal. They even kicked out personnel from the federal Border Patrol. Mayor Rolando Salinas, Eagle Pass’ mayor, said the State had given no advance notice. “This is not something that we wanted. This is not something that we asked for as a city,” he said.

As he had with the buoys, the concertina wire, and the bulldozing of islands in the river, Gov. Abbott used a disaster declaration to assert authority over the park. Grewal calls him “mad with power.”

“Our beautiful and safe public park has been taken away from us, and turned into a military style staging area, now being used as a backdrop for political theater by you, who live over 200 miles away, and out-of-state politicians,” the Eagle Pass Border Coalition wrote in an open letter to Gov Abbott on February 7. “Local residents can no longer use our park for fishing, kayaking, flea markets, sports, barbecues, quinceañeras, or to have our children play, as we did daily for generations.”

The coalition held a “March to Take our Park

Photo by Vicky Martinez

Back” on February 18. They’ve also protested against a new Texas law which would enable local police to arrest people they believe to be unauthorized immigrants. The law, known as SB 4, was recently upheld by a federal appeals court after being struck down in federal district court. The Biden Administration will appeal, asserting that only the federal government can enforce immigration law.

Read about New Hampshire opposition to the dispatch of National Guard troops to Eagle Pass here.

When Donald Trump staged an event with Gov. Abbott in Shelby Park on February 27, the Eagle Pass Border Coalition held its own news conference nearby. Beginning and ending with prayers offered by local pastors, coalition members and allies expressed their own views on Operation Lone Star, Trump’s presence, and the militarization of the border region. They don’t want the concertina wire, the drones, the armies, the unwarranted police stops and chases on local highways, or an 80-acre military base in their town. They’d love to see the tax dollars getting sucked up by Operation Lone Star used for local schools, mental health, and water infrastructure. “We need to invest in humane solutions to keep both US citizens and immigrants safe,” added Karen Gonzalez from the nearby community of Del Rio.

They’d also love to sit down with their governor. Jessie Fuentes, who runs a canoe and kayak business, has a message for the governor: “You need to change your ways,” he said at the press conference.

The billions of Texas tax dollars going into Operation Lone Star “could go into infrastructure, education, health care, and making sure that the people on the border are listened to, because every time that you come here, we have to do this on our own,” he said. “Governor, what are you afraid of? I’ll have that one-on-one with you, and I’ll tell you what we really need in our community.”

On the same day, the San Antonio Express News reported that the $171 million contract to build the new National Guard base had been awarded to a firm called Team Housing Solutions. With some 27,000 homeless Texans according to the most recent point-in-time count and the rate of homelessness up by 12% last year, it’s hard to escape the irony. The new base will be partially built by the time New Hampshire National Guard members arrive.

For Amerika Garcia Grewal, the whole controversy reveals as much about conditions north of the border as it does about migration. “All these people coming into the United States, they’re not causing shortages of affordable housing,” she said. “They’re not causing issues with homelessness. They’re not causing shortage of benefits. They are highlighting that our social networks are already very, very weak.”

Instead of repairing the cracks in the system, Greg Abbott’s approach is just making it worse. “We need economic development, we need affordable housing, we need, you know, a better way to get benefits to people in these different cities. Instead, we’re blaming the victim,” she said. “We are saying that these immigrants who are trying to just survive aren’t the problem, when really what they’re doing is showing our problems more clearly than they’ve ever been shown before.”

Rights Groups Protest Deployment of NH National Guard to Texas

This is based on an article first published at InDepthNH on February 16, 2024. 

News conference opposing Gov. Sununu’s Northern Border Alliance, Oct. 25, 2023

It did not take long for immigrants’ rights defenders, peace groups, and faith leaders to register opposition to Gov. Chris Sununu’s request for $850,000 to fund the dispatch of New Hampshire National Guard troops to the Texas-Mexico border.

“New Hampshire needs affordable housing, substance use treatment, mental health resources, and much more—and Granite Staters have made it clear that using taxpayer dollars on immigration enforcement is not a wise nor supported use of that money,” said a statement released Wednesday by dozens of community leaders and organizations, including the American Friends Service Committee, ACLU of NH, Rights and Democracy, NH Peace Action, 350NH, NH Alliance for Immigrants and Refugees, and the Granite State Organizing Project.

Sununu’s request will go to the legislature’s Joint Fiscal Committee on Friday morning.  In his letter to the committee, Sununu said the special appropriation would “facilitate a state active-duty operation of the New Hampshire National Guard in support of security activities at the southern United States border to protect New Hampshire citizens from harm.”

According to the governor, who said he was briefed by Texas’ Governor Greg Abbot, “Fentanyl is pouring in, human trafficking is occurring unabated, and individuals on the terrorist watch list are coming in unchecked.”

But the activist groups, who plan to deliver their statement to the Fiscal Committee on Friday, say, “Using taxpayer dollars to send New Hampshire National Guard members to Texas is only designed to score political points and does nothing to improve quality of life in New Hampshire. Funding cruelty at the border is not what our state stands for.”

The statement bears the names of dozens of faith leaders in addition to advocacy groups.

“Billions of taxpayer dollars are already being spent to deter, detain and deport people at the southern border,” commented Grace Kindeke of the American Friends Service Committee.  “I have visited the southern border in Texas and in California,” she said, “and the on-the-ground reality is that people coming here are desperate for help; local communities are woefully underfunded and severely under resourced and yet still find ways to offer humanitarian aid and simple compassion to migrants.”

“Instead of working in partnership to coordinate and invest in the type of infrastructure that can humanely process people,” Kindeke added, “Governor Sununu continues to perpetuate the falsehood that Congress doesn’t already funnel billions into border security and ignores repeated calls from his own constituency to fully invest in the services NH people need to build and thrive within a safe community.”

The dispute about enforcement measures at the southern border parallel one set off by Sununu’s creation of a Northern Border Alliance to police the border between New Hampshire and Quebec, where data recently obtained by the ACLU indicates the degree of unauthorized border crossings is insignificant.  Many of the same activist groups are seeking to put limits on the northern border force’s operations, while the governor’s political allies are trying to expand anti-immigrant measures.

Sununu sent more than 150 Guard members to the Texas border region in 2022, which he said at the time was in response to “a humanitarian crisis.”  That deployment, too, prompted protest by faith leaders who said, “There is indeed a humanitarian crisis at the border.  Many ordinary, law-abiding people have been forced to flee their home countries due to shocking violence directed at them and their families, as well as the impact of climate change.”  From their perspective, the Guard deployment exacerbated the crisis instead of relieving it.   Rev. Jason Wells said the governor never responded to their request for a meeting.   

The controversial use of the National Guard for political purposes is also reminiscent of the actions of the current Governor Sununu’s father.  In 1986, Governor John H. Sununu sent National Guard members to Honduras, where road construction maneuvers were criticized as part of the Reagan Administration’s preparation for a possible invasion of Nicaragua.

According to the National Immigration Forum, most of the fentanyl and other illegal drugs which enter the United States from Mexico come through official Points of Entry, “contrary to common belief that they are smuggled between ports of entry, particularly in areas without fencing or other physical barriers.”

The governor’s latest request has drawn opposition from Democratic leaders, including Rep. Mary Jane Wallner, a Fiscal Committee member, who said, “Rather than pushing for real solutions and backing the bipartisan border legislation that passed the U.S. Senate, Governor Sununu and Donald Trump want to play up the crisis at the southern border to sow fear and division in an election year.”

Afterword:  The Joint Fiscal Committee voted February 16 on a party line basis to approve the governor’s proposal.  In case that’s not clear, the Republicans favored it and the Democrats did not. 

Do I Have the Right to Sue the State of NH?

Superior Court Hears Arguments in Case of Historical Marker for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Twenty supporters of the Elizabeth Gurley Flynn historical marker braved wintry conditions to attend a hearing at Merrimack County Superior Court on January 24 and hear Andy Volinsky make a case for the rights of Mary Lee Sargent and me to sue the State of New Hampshire for removing the marker last May.

Photo by Barbara Keshen, May 1, 2023

Represented by Michael DeGrandis from the Civil Bureau of the Attorney General’s office, the State argued that although the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR) solicits public input onto the placement of historical markers, May Lee and I lacked legal standing to challenge the marker’s removal and demand that it be returned to its place at the corner of Montgomery and Court Streets in Concord. “As the plaintiffs couldn’t have brought this case to require, or force DNCR, to put the Flynn marker up, they can’t come back and say, now that you’ve taken it down, you have to put it back up. They can’t do that,” DeGrandis told Judge John Kissinger.

Yes we can, responded Andy. As he put it, Mary Lee’s experience as a historian and mine as a community organizer represent expertise that distinguishes us from any old interested member of the public. Plus, we did the research, solicited community support, and organized the dedication ceremony. Mary Lee and I “are the people who did the work,” he said, which gives us standing.

The legal issues are tied to precedents from a case known as “Carrigan,” which set forth criteria for whether taxpayers have the right to sue the State. I’ll leave the legal analysis to the lawyers.  Our point, as Andy presented clearly, is that our standing comes from the time and effort we put into the statutorily outlined process of petitioning for a historical marker. Moreover, since DNCR never established formal rules for the marker program and there is no statute governing the removal of markers, the government’s action was illegal and can’t be allowed to stand. “We’re a rule-of-law country and for the government to violate its own laws is wrong,” he told the judge.

Andy also put it on the record that contrary to the State’s legal filings, the order for the Flynn marker to be removed came directly from Governor Chris Sununu, not from Sarah Stewart, the Commissioner of DNCR.

“Combining the absence of removal authority in statute with the invalidity of the rules that have not been properly promulgated, the state has no removal authority,” Andy told the judge.

Judge Kissinger had clearly come prepared. Aren’t Mary Lee and I “a little bit different than just anybody else in the state” in relation to the Flynn marker, he asked the State’s attorney. “That does put them in a somewhat different category, doesn’t it?”

DeGrandis acknowledged it did. “Yes, DNCR identified them as sponsors,” he said, but still held that the Department owed us no special deference. [The marker program’s public rules explicitly state that the Division of Historical Resources will inform sponsors of any markers of plans to “retire” them, something which did not happen in our case.]

The judge went further. If the governor had the authority to order our marker removed, could he just wake up one day and order state workers to remove all of them? Is there any check on the governor’s authority, he asked? DeGrandis hemmed and hawed a bit, but responded that yes, the governor could just order the DOT to take down all the historical markers if he felt like it.

The judge said he’d take it all “under advisement,” meaning he’ll think about it for awhile and issue a ruling later. The hearing ended about 30 minutes after it started.

One of my favorite moments came when the marker’s location next to the court’s parking lot came up. “I was hoping that was near your parking space,” Andy commented. “I’m not going to say anything further,” the judge responded, with a smile.

While it’s possible that Judge Kissinger could rule that the State’s action violated the law, and “we would be tickled pink” if he would do so, in Andy’s words, what’s more likely is that he will rule simply on whether the case can proceed. If he rules for the State that we lack legal standing, the case is probably over. If, on the other hand, he rules that Mary Lee and I indeed have legal standing, the case will proceed through discovery toward a trial. Stay tuned.

Upcoming Court Hearing on Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Historical Marker

This is a  news release I sent out last week about a Superior Court hearing January 24.

The controversy over the State’s installation and removal of a historical marker for 20^th century labor activist and civil libertarian Elizabeth Gurley Flynn will get an airing in Merrimack County Superior Court at 9:00 AM on Wednesday, January 24.

At issue is the State’s motion to dismiss a legal complaint filed by the historical marker’s sponsors, Arnie Alpert and Mary Lee Sargent, who claimed that the State violated the law and its own policies when it ordered the marker removed based on political objections to Flynn’s politics from Governor Chris Sununu and Executive Councilor Joe Kenney.

In a legal complaint filed on August 7, Alpert and Sargent’s attorney, Andru Volinsky argued that there is nothing in the law or the guidelines of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources (DNCR) which provide for historical markers to be removed “on grounds of political or personal ideology.”

Representing DNCR, which administers the Historical Marker Program along with the Department of Transportation, the Attorney General argued that Alpert and Sargent lacked legal standing to file their complaint because they suffered no personal harm from the State’s action.

Born in Concord to an Irish immigrant family on August 7, 1890, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was already a well-known speaker before reaching her twentieth birthday. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a labor union which sought to organize workers without regard to race, sex, or national origin, Flynn crisscrossed the country lifting the spirits of striking workers, raising funds for their defense, and helping to organize textile, mining, timber, and other workers to win better pay and working conditions. A staunch defender of women’s equality, Flynn also became a strong advocate for free speech and was among the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union.

At the age of 46, Flynn joined the Communist Party at a time the group was campaigning against fascism and promoting a “popular front” in support of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. She soon rose to prominence within the party, for which she was indicted, tried, convicted, and sent to prison under the Smith Act.

It was Flynn’s communist associations which aroused the ire of Governor Sununu and Councilor Kenney after the Division of Historical Resources (DHR) installed the Flynn marker.

Alpert and Sargent worked for months on research and gathering support for the historical marker, all the while following DHR guidelines. After giving its approval to the Flynn marker in 2022, the DHR unveiled the Flynn marker on May 1, 2023 at a ceremony organized by Alpert and Sargent. Two weeks later it was gone, apparently moved to a Department of Transportation storage facility. According to internal DHR messages the plaintiffs discovered in a right-to-know request, the order for the marker’s removal came directly from Gov. Sununu.

According to the DHR, historical markers are meant to educate the public about people, places, events, organizations, and innovations that “had a significant impact on its times and has demonstrated historical significance.”

“That is certainly an apt description for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn,” commented Sargent, who spent decades teaching American and women’s history at the university and college levels in Illinois and New Hampshire.

For Alpert and Sargent, the marker’s removal ironically gave more notoriety to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn than might have occurred had the State left it alone.

Also ironically, the Courthouse where the January 24 hearing will be held sits within shouting distance of the site where the marker used to be and from the home where Flynn was born.

Vote “Ceasefire” Write-In Campaign Launched for NH Primary

Supporters of Joe Biden aren’t the only ones organizing a write-in campaign for the New Hampshire Primary next Tuesday. Today a grassroots effort was launched urging critics of the Biden Administration’s support for Israel’s war in Gaza to vote for “Ceasefire.”

Vote Ceasefire, a newly formed grassroots group, is calling on New Hampshire primary voters to vote ‘Ceasefire’ as a write-in candidate “to draw attention to the urgent need to stop the violence in Palestine in the Middle East,” announced Rachel Rybaczuk, who moderated a news conference held over Zoom. “We’re encouraging New Hampshire residents to register to vote and use the power of the first-in-the-nation primary to push President Biden to call for an immediate ceasefire.”

“The United States has been funding genocide in Gaza, even though the vast majority of Americans, especially our Democratic voters, do not agree,” said Morgan Brown, who identified herself as a community organizer and health care advocate. “And although we have tried to make our voices heard in Washington, we have largely been ignored,” she said.

Bill Maddocks of Amherst, co-chair of NH Peace Action, agreed. “We as peace activists here in the state of New Hampshire have been vigiling. We’ve been calling our members of Congress, have been calling the president. We have tried to call attention to the possibility of peace. And our words, our letters, our texts, our calls are not being heard.”

“We need to get the message through,” said former Executive Councilor Andru Volinsky, who published a letter to the editor in the Concord Monitor on December 13 stating that he’d be writing in “Ceasefire” on his NH Primary ballot. His message to the Biden administration is, “You can veto a UN resolution in favor of a humanitarian ceasefire, but you can’t veto my vote.”

“I think about this in terms of ending the regional conflict, stopping the annihilation of the Palestinian people in Gaza and, returning the US to [being] a leader on the world stage when it comes to foreign policy,” Volinsky said.

Since one thing, perhaps the only thing, the Democratic Party cares about is votes, Brown suggested, the write-in campaign may be the best way to get their attention. “I want Democratic leaders to see that the American people are taking a stand against the bombing of civilians. These people are infants, they are children, and mothers and fathers and grandparents, aunts, uncles,” she said. “But I think the most important thing to remember here is that these are our fellow humans, and they deserve peace, and safety and comfort, just like we do. As a health care advocate, I cannot stand by and watch as hospitals are forced to treat wounds, like amputations, with no pain management, no sterilization, because the supplies simply aren’t there.”

It’s an uphill effort to be sure, with only a week to go before New Hampshire voters go to the polls and only a few dozen people actively involved so far. But, as Maddocks said, “If dozens or hundreds or thousands of people were to vote Ceasefire, we’d be able to make a strong statement that the candidates and the general public would be able to see.”

“Writing-in ‘Ceasefire’ in the NH primary does not help Donald Trump,” the group stated in an internal document. “This is a much better way to cast a protest vote than supporting third party candidates who would be spoilers that are actually helping Trump.”

Vote Ceasefire is hoping to spread the word – rapidly – by social media, posters, chalking, yard signs, and anything else that promotes awareness.

All votes for “Ceasefire” should get counted, said Anna Sventek, communications director in the Secretary of State’s office. “When our office tabulates the results, those votes would be categorized under the ‘Scatter’ category,” she wrote in an email message.

Volinsky, who has run for office several times and spent 25 years working as a volunteer voter protection lawyer, suggested that ceasefire supporters “self-report” their write in votes and keep an eye on the official count. “We’re encouraging everyone who writes in ‘Ceasefire’ to make that fact known,” he said.

Brown said she’s not planning to vote for Ceasefire in November, but wants to get the attention of the president and Democratic Party leaders now. “I would also really like to urge other young people to get to the polls. This is our future,” she said. “If you go to college here in New Hampshire, you can vote here, please bring your photo ID to the polls. Register, and let’s get some ‘Ceasefire’ votes in so that we can send a very clear message to the Biden administration that this massacre of people will never be tolerated.”

“If the Democratic establishment is concerned about my vote, they should be concerned enough to recognize that I care deeply about effecting a humanitarian ceasefire,” Volinsky said. “And I’m not alone.”

Maddocks said the situation in Gaza is dire, with famine conditions for thousands of people and weapons being made by companies with a significant presence in New Hampshire playing a role in the Israeli attacks. Yet, he sees hope in the recently announced deal by Qatar and France to provide medical assistance. A permanent ceasefire, he said, would open the possibility for dialog that could lead to harmonious relations between Israel and Palestine.

“This happened in Northern Ireland. At some point in that conflict that lasted for decades, the weapons flow ended, the negotiations began. And eventually, Ireland and Northern Ireland reached agreement,” he said.

“The Israeli newspaper Haaretz had a headline this morning, which was that the hostage deal is taking a backseat to Netanyahu’s political ambitions,” Volinsky said. “We want to get the hostages back, if we want to build a sustainable platform for lasting peace in the Middle East, we want to stop the annihilation of civilians, non-combatants, in Gaza. We should act this Tuesday to get our message through and write in ‘Ceasefire’ and sign up at voteceasefire.info.”

“Go vote. Go register. Bring a friend,” Volinsky advised. And make a poster to display outside the polls which says, “Write in ‘Ceasefire.’”