Which Side Are You On, APA? LAURIE SHRAGE The American Philosophical Association recently held one of its annual divisional meetings in a hotel in San Francisco whose workers had voted for a strike, were on strike call, and had called for a public boycott of the hotel. Both the APA Board of Officers and the Executive Committee (EC) of the Pacific Division failed to inform APA members and conference participants about the hotel situation in the months before the meeting, when they had this information. At the last minute, when several dissident APA members succeeded in getting information out to APA members around the country, many program participants were faced with crossing a boycott and possibly a picket line (hotel workers did picket the hotel on the first day of the meetings) to attend their sessions and fulfill other professional obligations. Some confer- ence participants switched their room reservations to unionized hotels not on the union’s boycott or strike list, and some managed to move their sessions to other venues, with the assistance of Pacific SWlP and the University of San Francisco Philosophy Department, Some philosophers simply boycotted the meetings and San Francisco. One philosopher who canceled his trip to San Francisco on hearing about the boycott told me that his grandmother would rise from her grave and strike him dead if he were to enter the conference hotel. His grandmother happened to be one of the founders of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. At the alternative meeting sites in San Francisco, some philosophers shared stories of their pre-academic careers as waitresses, bartenders, cashiers, and, yes, hotel workers. Some recalled parents’ and grandparents’ union activism. But unfortunately, the large majority of philosophers I encountered were naive and ignorant about worker struggles and management efforts to undermine and break strikes. Indeed, our own professional organization seemed to be collaborating with management by suppressing information about the boycott that union members were trying to get to philosophers, by supplying APA members with misinfor- mation about the labor dispute, and by discouraging APA members behind the scenes from moving their sessions and meetings. In the week before the meetings, officers of the Pacific Division told anxious APA members they could honor the boycott by not spending money at the hotel, even though union representatives had told these officers, months before the meetings, that this Hypatia vol. 20, no. zyxwvuts 4 (Fall 2005) zyxwvu 0 by Laurie Shrage