the guy by the door …

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The beginning of the rally that ended at the Harvard Club

Local 615 of the Service Employees Internation Union reached a tentative deal with Harvard administration on Tuesday. The Union is holding it’s ratification vote today. SEIU and SLAM held a very impressive rally at the Harvard Club superbly reported by the Cambridge Common Blog. That appears to have made a difference.

SLAM, which surely helped in this matter will be engaged in some after-action analysis. Personally, I’m pleased that the student members have not forgotten that their job #1 is learning. I hope they don’t feel patronized. I certainly do not yet know what happened. I would just like to raise the question, “Did blogging help?”

Techtopians among the blogging crowd may be overly eager to assume that it did. Some ideological activists will say that the blogosphere is dominated by capitalism and therefore should be shunned. They are obligated to say that blogging is of no use. I am an empiricist, experimentalist – and a bit of a nominalist. I believe that blogging has some political effectiveness. There is a number which crudely describes it. That number is somewhere between +100% and -100%. My own [arguably self-serving] analysis of these recent events is this. It is a positive number closer to zero than 100%. But it’s not zero.

Ideologues are aware that it is not just bad publicity that moves administration. Sometimes the threat is enough. What the ideologues miss is that the threat must be credible. If they think you’re bluffing, they will call. Then you have to have the cards. The significant shift between Monday and Tuesday appears to be due to the Monday rally. The quetion is: “How?” Surely Pr. Larry was aware of the peasants outside. Did that alone change his mind? Did Alums inside convince him? The Cambridge Common photo essay probably appeared after the tentative agreement had been made. But was there a concern that a broader audience of Alums would eventually see the rally through the blogosphere? One thing is clear the blogosphere would have had a smaller effect if the workers and students hadn’t turned out in good numbers. And for that reason, I was happy Cambridge Common was taking pictures. I was a worker among workers. It was a good feeling. That students cared enough to join in, made it great.