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Wednesday, November 27, 1996

PARODY:

SAGE's actions only served to insult true blue-collar workers' struggles, lessening value of future picketlinesBy Jason Caro

Watching TAs with signs "striking" on the corner of Westwood and Le Conte must bring a smile. It is not just that such mass political action is passé. (Just ask the air traffic controllers' union and workers at Hormel and Caterpillar). Nor is the problem that these "workers" in league "with" the UAW are actually the sons and daughters of America's upper classes. The problem is not that such strikers are an insult to those who can claim peasant/blue-collar parentage and are thankful for any opportunity to attend UCLA. Rather, it is the combination of all this that made a strike by SAGE (pronounced sag-ee) impossible.

This "strike" is a repeat performance with a series of choreographed responses: anxiety from the undergraduate "consumers," concerns from the faculty "management," and indignation by the graduate "workers" themselves. I even received a letter from the Chancellor (the "ruling class") demanding an account of my whereabouts for the week. Everybody plays his expected role in the media, radio and on the pages of the Daily Bruin. Yet nobody fits the part. It is Marxism with a toothless grin; unionizing with the shakes.

The problem is that SAGE does not meet its own criteria for a strike in the classic style of the union struggles of the 1920s, and yet there has been, apparently, a strike. How can this be explained?

The SAGE strike, despite its nostalgic feel, represents a new kind of political act. It is a parody of a working-class struggle and thereby cheapens and pushes the seriousness of such action further into the oblivion where it belongs. The solemnity with which a "union" like SAGE approaches its strike only accelerates this destructive effect.

Do not get me wrong. SAGE has de facto power. But it squanders it to achieve de jure power or legal recognition. Which is precisely the problem. That SAGE, whatever it is, did not strike for higher wages or better medical insurance only proves that it was not a real struggle. It never happened. It must therefore be something else that engenders something else: politics with a smile. And perhaps that is enough.