Historians or Fossils?

The Organization of American Historians has announced that it is moving its annual convention to San Jose to show solidarity with the hotel workers in San Francisco who are on strike against the Hilton where the meeting was originally planned. This will cost the OAH $450,000 because the change came late in the day and the contracts with the hotel had already been signed. According to the OAH website going to SF would also have cost them $500,000 because of unrented rooms. This is too confusing for me, but it's really beside the point. Professors are a privileged elite. Very privileged. Paid in the main by Hotel Worker's taxes (85% of the college population is in state institutions) they teach classes 6 hours a week, 8 months out of the year, for which they make six figure incomes and every seven years get 6 months paid vacation (in addition to the normal four months per year, which actually makes ten months during the sabbatical year). Professors can afford to take a little economic bath like this for their politics. But what politics! Unions are social fossils as everybody academics seems to know -- special interests whose main function is to create artifical labor shortages, drive up prices and make everybody poorer in the long run (witness how the greed of auto workers unions destroyed the dominance of their industry in the American and thus the worl d auto market, depriving generations of both income and jobs). Of course the Hotel Workers unions are run by radicals with politics (19th Century variety) very much akin to that of professional historians these days (as this account of the OAH in DiscoverTheNetwork will make clear). Which is the real reason for the solidarity.