Dear Reviewers,
We at Wheelhouse Magazine do not know why you refused to grant Professor Bhagwati the Nobel Prize for Economics. He has championed fair trade for many years, providing us with new insights into the benefits--but potential threats--of globalization. He has also been an outspoken advocate of trade unionism for many years, and this, in our troubled times, with the income gap increasingly threatening workers around the world, is an unusual and heartening stance. We do, however, applaud you for looking elsewhere in your quest to elevate individuals for an award that is at bottom, a collective enterprise.
This is because Professor Bhagwati is an elitist, asare many of you who sit on this committee. Attached is one of several e-mails he sent our union local that indicates a kind of myopic view of "work" and "class" that might only be befitting of economists in the United States. In short, Professor Bhagwati not only hypocritically separated classes of workers into those who "deserve" a union (say, unskilled workers) and those who don't (professionals in a given field such as teaching), but he also played a major role in busting our faculty union of teaching assistants here, in his own back yard at Columbia University.
In this short correspondence we do not want to delve into all of the implications that busting a teaching assistant union has had on workers throughout the private sector (approximately 110,000) given a recent Bush-appointed National Labor Relations Board ruling that Professor Bhagwati has supported. Rather, we would like to point out that one's academic work should be consistent with how one lives--if one is to measure up to the prestigious Nobel Prize that so many tenured academics seek in order to avoid teaching undergraduates. In Professor Bhagwati's case, there is a cleft that is larger than can be ignored. During our union election Bhagwati was a willing bully in attempting to convince his own teaching assistants that unionization would mark their demise--a kind of threat typical of anti-union campaigns throughout the United States.
For Professor Bhagwati to state that unskilled workers, or in any case, "blue collar" workers should deserve the protection of a union while other workers should not, is at best elitist. At worst, it is a paternalistic attitude towards the very hard working men and women who sew our clothes, who serve us our tasty meals, and who slave away trying to make our worlds (the priviledged and the few) more convenient, and happier.
In closing, we say congratulations to all of you. Congratulations for acting as the scaffolding so
important to the upholding of the ivory tower.
Sincerely,
The Editors
Wheelhouse Magazine
-----Original Message-----
From: Jagdish Bhagwati [mailto:jb38@columbia.edu]
Sent: Friday, April 15, 2005 7:07 PM
To: GSEU@2110uaw.org
Subject: Re: Faculty support for TA and RA union
I am afraid I do not support a union by RAs & TAs who are among the upper-income groups in our country and who also do not seem to recognize that universities are not trucking companies.. I do support strongly the right to unionize by our staff .
Professor Bhagwati