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I wanted to live in a world where my voice mattered, where I could see the people around me as comrades instead of competitors. The union was imperfect in ways that I knew as well as anyone--

How can we reduce the emotional and physical tolls that come with organizing?

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"Sometimes I felt I was organizing for the future of the entire world, in a deductive train that went: capitalism was going to devastate the planet; to fight it we needed strong unions"

How would I handle this?

Why did she continue fighting?

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"We were all too busy, but the too-busyness wasn’t really about time, or at least not only. Being too busy meant people didn’t see why the union was worth making time for."

Is this due to a lack of information, or is it due to people not knowing enough about what the union is trying to do?

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"I liked who I was when I put myself out there with other people again and again."

How do you keep believing in your work when it feels like nothing’s changing?

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“Realizing that it was not enough for people to like me was revelatory. I had to learn to be more comfortable with antagonism and disagreement, with putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it instead of smiling away tension and doing the work myself.”

My question is do organizers have more than one body? (from the quote “You have one body and 24 hours in a day.”)

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1. "I had to learn to be more comfortable with antagonism and disagreement, with putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it instead of smiling away tension and doing the work myself."

2. How does she want people who don’t partake in the working class to approach this story?

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1. They were long and exhausting. It was astonishing how much work everything took, how many minor crises could erupt in the course of a day, how many long-planned events came down to arrangements made at the last minute. I met the people I organized; I met my organizer; I met groups of organizers — in my department, across the union, across the city. I was constantly on the phone. I scarfed down protein bars between meetings and greasy slices at the pizzeria that served as the unofficial union hangout. My last meetings ended around eight; I went to the gym afterward and ran on the treadmill while simultaneously texting updates, cursing at presidential debates on CNN and fuming at whoever had most recently ranted about politics on Facebook but not called me back. I shared my apartment with two other grad students and a rotating cast of friends who had left New Haven long ago but now were returning to organize, crashing at our house on an air mattress in what was essentially an oversized closet. When I got home late at night I ate eggs on toast, the only meal I could be bothered to make, and wrote emails — so many emails.

2. How can we build communities where people feel empowered and supported enough to take collective action, even when the systems around us discourage it?

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“On the eve of the election, I realized I had never wanted anything so much in my life, and had never wanted so badly something over which I ultimately had so little control.”

This made me question how come it’s always the things you want the most that are the hardest to achieve and we have the least amount of control.

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1. "Too often I tried to gloss over the discomfort instead of letting it sit."

2. What is the long-term impact of organizing on individual consciousness?

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"Compared to so many grad students, we had it good, and surely jobs were waiting on the other side for us, if for anyone. Who were we to complain? Organizing a union of graduate students at Yale seemed to many like an act of unbearable privilege — a bunch of Ivy League self-styled radicals doing worker cosplay."

What was her argument for people who thought that unions in graduate schools were useless? What was her reasoning for the disbelievers?

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" So we demanded bread and butter, but we were ultimately organizing for the future of academic life, which was visibly crumbling around us; or for the revival of the labor movement, which had mostly already crumbled; or because it was intolerable to live in a city as segregated as New Haven and not do something about it."

How can labor movements address the needs of workers that have different identities and positions socially?

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How does Alyssa Battistoni’s Spadework contribute to our understanding of political organizing by linking the labor of care and maintenance to the broader project of building social movements?

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"Many people were happy to sign a membership card and a petition from time to time but didn’t want to go to more meetings or talk to colleagues about the union: they were already busy, so busy. They supported the union, they said, but they wanted it to leave them alone."

-From this part how did they feel about the union and wanting but not wanting to be apart of it and how did they think it would have effected them.