Weekly Reader

If workers already must contend with employers’ obvious privacy intrusions — including keyloggers, periodic browser history checks, and access to email inboxes — how quickly will their spying within our home workplaces be normalized? Will we gladly take an expensive, ergonomic chair that also tells your far-away boss when you are not at your desk? Will all your smart home devices — the smart refrigerator, the Ring doorbell, or your Alexa — keep track of not only your own work but the relationship between workers? Through facial recognition attached to the camera outside your front door, the voice recognition in, your Alexa, and the MDM software on your devices, your boss would know everything about who was at the organizing meeting you hosted at your house. Then they will fire you on the premise that your smart fridge colluded with your bank to tell your insurance company that all that fast food and beer is putting you at risk for diabetes and they marked you as a future cost liability.

It’s hard when someone you like, someone you think is a good man or woman, is accused of rape. Our first instinct is to not believe it. That’s normal. But when the evidence starts to pile up, when multiple witnesses come forward, as is the case with Tara Reade, saying she told them decades ago about how Joe Biden raped her, it gets harder to not believe it. When Tara’s mother’s voice crosses space and time to ask Larry King in 1993 about a serious problem her daughter was having with a prominent senator, it’s even harder. That’s where rape culture comes in. It gives us an out. Like the mother who said her daughter’s rapist was a “good man”. It makes it easier to move through this world thinking men we like don’t rape, thinking victims are liars. He’s a good man, something must be wrong with her.

Moreover, Rutgers is embedded in three cities that are primarily comprised of working-class populations of color: Newark, New Brunswick, and Camden. Rutgers continually pays lip service to its commitment to those communities. In our vision, by contrast, the university should have a much larger commitment to communities where the university resides. People who live in these cities send their children to Rutgers, or are working at Rutgers, or have a partner working at Rutgers. We envision a university that supports their development with their voices at the center. This entails a very different university—one that values our amazing dining staff, adjunct faculty, groundskeepers, and building staff. We imagine a university that includes and hears everyone’s voices and prioritizes the core missions of the institution: teaching, research, and service, particularly service to the communities in which we are located.

It was these unique conditions which gave birth to an Irish movement whose “distinguishing character,” Marx claimed, was “socialist, lower-class,” “republican” in the universalist sense of the term, and non-sectarian And whereas he and Engels previously thought “it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy… Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.”