BY KARMA R. CHÁVEZ Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to get to know Callie Kennedy and Parham Daghighi, former teaching assistants (TAs) in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. I will detail the specific reason for our acquaintance, but the broader reason has to do with the…
BY PATRICIA NAVARRA “Employers threatening to cut off benefits is not uncommon, but actually doing it is,” offered Bethany Kosmicki, Temple University Graduate Students Association (TUGSA) past president and member of the negotiating committee, as she discussed the TUGSA strike with National Public Radio. Yet health care benefits were deactivated for graduate teaching assistants this…
BY MICHAEL MERANZE The strike continues with no end in sight. Although there have been tentative agreements concerning post-docs and academic researchers, in the academic student employee (ASE) and student researcher units, the parties appear to remain well apart on the fundamental economic issues. This distance is most easily seen in the ASE category: although…
BY THE COUNCIL OF UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA FACULTY ASSOCIATIONS (CUCFA) The following statement was released on October 30. Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. Given the escalating costs of living in California, 48,000 people in…
BY JEFFREY C. ISAAC Over 1,700 of the roughly 2,400 graduate student workers at Indiana University have signed union cards affiliating with the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition with the United Electrical Workers union. The Indiana University administration has refused to recognize or even to meet with coalition leaders. And after years of seeking recognition, the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Late last night the largest ongoing strike in the US came to an end as, after ten weeks out, student workers at Columbia University, represented by Student Workers of Columbia, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers, reached a tentative agreement with university management. All details are not yet public, but it…
BY HANK REICHMAN In March, more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. Yesterday they walked out again, this time indefinitely. The Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers has bargained with the…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today more than 3,000 student workers at Columbia University in New York City went on strike after more than two years of unsuccessful negotiations over the university’s first graduate student labor contract. The walkout comes more than four years after student workers voted to unionize, forming the Graduate Workers of Columbia-United Auto…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of a letter sent by the executive board of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations to UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Cynthia K. Larive on December 6. Dear Chancellor Larive, The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) rarely intervenes in matters that are not germane…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following open letter expressing the concerns of around a dozen Assistant Professors from the Faculty Organizing Group (FOG) at University of California at Santa Cruz is reposted from Remaking the University. For a previous statement on this topic from 176 UCSC faculty members go here. The authors would like to…