My employer just mandated vaccines. What can I do?

 This is from my thread on twitter.

Q: My employer just mandated vaccines for all employees. I don't want the injection. What do I do?

A: Become an injection-refusal activist. This is how.

- find and connect with colleagues who feel the same way, even just one other colleague, and meet to talk about it.

- research what others are doing, research - consult your union to see where they stand - document everything you do, for your safety - explore work venues in which you would be allowed to express your concerns - build strength with your group, try things, share

- create an anonymous/private group via social media to find colleagues and share ideas - decide if you want to go public about your position, learn how to do that - act, take small learner steps at first, evaluate each action

- reach out to other such groups, and share experience - read your contract, and corp. policy/rules - meet and talk to your member of parliament - write to the Minister in charge of overseeing your industry - document adverse reactions at your work

- don't argue, stay calm, only clearly express your position - don't backdown too easily - after all, it is your body, and your personal dignity (see great responses on the original twitter thread)

RESOURCES:

OCLA's

Statement on new Canadian government proposal to force injections on employees and travellers

(and see references therein)

Adult students please get real

By Denis G. Rancourt


You have been had.

You can't see the obvious.

When the obvious is stated, you viscerally reject it, or fain being deaf.

Stated as plainly as I can manage:

You are workers in a controlled economy. The educational and service-professional sectors are integrated parts of the same system of extraction of your intellectual labour. If you withdraw your labour, the system grinds to a halt. This means you have real leverage to extract fair working conditions.

You should be salaried for your school work. The points of negotiation need to be the amount of salary, the working conditions, and your participation in governance of the institution.

Instead, you agree to sell yourselves into indebted servitude for the privilege of working. This is no different than a slave who works all his/her life in the hope of buying his/her freedom.

If you could please just see the obvious, then you could stop "demanding that the system not further increase tuition fees" and start organizing to take negotiated control of the workplace.

You also falsely believe:

1. That you are stupid to the point that you need to be trained in "how to learn" and even "how to think"
2. That the professor-handlers have real knowledge and that this knowledge will somehow rub-off on you if you download all the PowerPoint presentations and satisfy all the course requirements

P-l-e-a-s-e wake up and take your rightful place. You need only take it. It will not be a lost battle if you insist. You will learn more than is otherwise possible.

Do not let the masters divide and conquer you. You are all working adults, irrespective of your ages, because you decide to take your place as working adults who also partake in running the school. Do not let them infantilize you. Be a child only when you, as an adult, want to be a child.

In the 1960s, tuition was peanuts and outside labour was plentiful and well paid. Today, however, you must stop the exploiters in their tracks. They have gone much too far. It's time to roll it back. You are the most exploited professional workers, and your very humanity is denied every day of the academic year.

You are denied your agency in your own development. You are denied your identity and your influence. Identity, influence, struggle, and learning go together. Allow them to divide these parts of you and you are less than what you truly want to be, and you experience less than the full human experience.

Free humans are meant to make their lives, not have lives of enforced servitude.

Please stand and fight. Now is the time. You will have allies. Exclude your enemies and make them irrelevant. Join all those who dare. Respond to intimidation with increased dedication to the struggle. Always ramp it up when they want to confine you.


Link to author's other essays about students and education.
And this LIST.

Adult university students are entrapped unpaid workers, captured and broken by institutional schooling

By Denis G. Rancourt


Adult university students are entrapped unpaid managerial-labourers, intellectual slave-workers in forced indoctrination camps.

The institutionally imposed "study" is unpaid forced labour done by adults and minors.

By virtue of entirely blocking a person's freedom of inquiry, and freedom to thus self-define within the unpartitioned community, schooling and university "education" are as dehumanizing as any regime of forced labour. Furthermore, university is not only unpaid but also imposes life-long personal debt and relative health deterioration.

The relative health deterioration comes from the well-known dominant individual-health determinant that is the particular stress inherent in a dominance hierarchy (see articles under the label "medical"; and reading below).

Schooling's ancillary benefit arising from social-interaction is strictly limited and codified, and otherwise only tolerated as a necessary management allowance. (Studies in the developing World have shown that the main benefits from classic schooling arise from the students from several villages meeting and comparing communicated experiences about home-life.)

The fact that university, by virtue of unavoidable spatiotemporality, allows a melting pot of meetings, including between students and the few non-student adults, does not diminish the inherent violence in the institution's systemic and willful attack against student freedom. The said meetings occur despite the structural cantonizations into year-groups, study programs, academic disciplines, schools of thought, professional doctrines, and so on, and despite the grueling impositions of mindless (uncreative) and constrained "intellectual" work.

* * *

At the very least, students should be PAID a salary, and allowed to be unionize as workers. Those should be the demands from students. These demands are a rational imperative within the logic of a (hypothetical) capitalism that rejects all slavery except wage-slavery.

Anything less -- such as demanding "free" tuition, or "merit" scholarships, or interest-free loans -- condones unpaid child labour and professional-worker slavery.

Student loans, in particular, are exactly a buying-of-freedom system of slavery, which extends for decades beyond the actual schooling. The "schooling" itself is analogous to slave capture and breaking of the will, followed by forced behavioural and task training. Only fully integrated student-slaves and unconscious managers of student-slaves cannot recognize this obvious fact about student "loans" and "education funds".

Regarding public schooling, if the system is going to take children, hoard them into factories, and rob them of their natural developments, then it should at the very least pay money for the forced labour. This would make the dealing overt rather than covert, and would allow an evaluation of the arrangement, based on reality.

Likewise, home-schooling parents should be paid at least the same per-capita cost that the state pays for institutionalizing children, including any state salary to the institutionalized child. That should be the parents' negotiating position when home-schooling parents demand their due.

Note: In this post, I used the word "slavery" for the wage slavery of professional workers, including university students. It is completely predictable, in this age of "words that wound", that some readers will complain. I don't agree that my use of the word "slavery" trivialize the word. Quite to the contrary, my use of the word unifies struggles across social classes and historic periods. The human mind is more-than-able to discern violent and brutal physical enslavement from the violent psychological domination described by Paulo Freire, and explained in the context of the modern professional worker and graduate student by Jeff Schmidt.


Related reading and related links

Farber, Jerry, "The Student as Nigger", Canadian Union of Students, May 6, 1968.

Freire, Paulo, "Pedagogy of the Oppressed", 1970.

Rancourt, Denis G., "Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism", Stairway Press, Mount Vernon, WA, 2013.

Rancourt, Denis G., Links to Denis Rancourt's essays about the student condition and student liberation

Schmidt, Jeff, "Disciplined Minds -- A Critical Look at Salaried Professionals and the Soul-Battering System that Shapes their Lives", Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. 

Dr. Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and Full Professor of physics at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He is known for his applications of physics education research (TVO Interview). He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals, and has written several social commentary essays. He is the author of the book Hierarchy and Free Expression in the Fight Against Racism. While he was at the University of Ottawa, he supported student activism and opposed the influence of the Israel lobby on that institution, which fired him for a false pretext in 2009: LINK.  

Lawyering 101::: Ottawa lawyer Lynn Harnden provides a brilliant example

(This post is opinion-commentary, as should be obvious.)

Have you ever noticed that every time a lawyer makes an argument for some crazy thing he always starts by saying that he doesn't want the crazy thing?

In this video, University of Ottawa's hired lawyer Lynn Harnden provides a brilliant example, at the May 2, 2011, first day of labour arbitration hearings into the wrongful dismissal case of physics professor Denis Rancourt.

Lawyering 101: "He doesn't want a publication ban on the hearings."

Just a ban until the hearings are done and a decision is rendered, two years or more say, since he agrees this is of public interest... ah humm. Oh, and he doesn't want to show his arguments as to why such an "enriched exclusion" is necessary...

This passes for reasonable arguments in the world of binding labour arbitrations in Ontario, Canada.



See another video of Lynn Harnden in action HERE.

See all UofOWatch posts about the arbitration hearings HERE.

See links and details about the arbitration hearings at academicfreedom.ca HERE.

This is Canada::: Labour union works against student employee dignity and rights at "Canada's university"

Suggested marketing slogan for the University of Ottawa:

U of O, Canada's university, where the information we gather on you will never end up in your employee file, in fact, you'll probably never know why you lose your grant, or scholarship, or get expelled!

Unfortunately, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) which represents student employees (Local 2626) at the University of Ottawa (which brands itself "Canada's university") has worked to thus help degrade civil and worker rights in Canadian society.

Read the original report HERE.

See all UofOWatch posts about U of O covert surveillance

See all the "This is Canada" posts