BY JAMES RIVER ROBBINS I was at an educators’ union meeting recently when a member raised the issue of reproductive care. Their argument was simple: With institutions and governments cutting away at members’ reproductive rights, the union should stand behind its members and, at minimum, connect them with accurate information about reproductive health. Before I…
BY ROBERT OVETZ The wave of unionization in higher education over the past decade has resulted in a new breakthrough. The first exclusive student worker union at a community college has been certified by the California Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). While there are some unionized student workers at private colleges and public universities, most…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On July 7, the executive committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued a statement in solidarity with Research Associates and Postdocs United at Penn (RAPUP) which is seeking union recognition in an NLRB election scheduled for July 16-17. In addition, the committee released an open letter to the Penn…
BY JONATHAN REES Back in December, I was listening to Adam Conover’s podcast, and his guests were the directors of Union: A Documentary Film, which is about the successful organizing effort by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island. In the discussion, I learned that the film has been unable…
BY MATTHEW BOEDY My former classmate Phil Christman wrote a long essay at Plough about the future of higher education, the humanities, and his particular context as a lecturer at the University of Michigan. If you haven’t read it, I wanted to bring it to your attention because it’s great. I wanted to highlight the…
BY RYAN HARROD, DOUGLAS COST, ANDREA DEWEES, AND CINDY TRUSSELL Solidarity in collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions is the basis of any union activity. Pitting union members against each other is a common tactic employed by management in its union-busting strategy. It’s a tactic we are facing in Alaska. In the current…
BY JONATHAN REES Back in the 1990s, I studied labor history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Naturally, I belonged to the Teaching Assistants’ Association, the first graduate student union in the country. When I arrived in Colorado as a tenure-track academic, I naturally wanted to know if I could somehow duplicate my positive…
BY THERESA A. KULBAGA Standing in solidarity with colleagues for better wages and working conditions is what being a union means. It’s no surprise, then, that management’s first union-busting tactic is always to attempt to divide workers and turn us against each other. At Miami University, we voted overwhelmingly to unionize faculty and librarians in…
BY MICHAEL FERGUSON Following is the editor’s introduction to the fall 2024 issue of Academe, “The Status of Academic Collective Bargaining,” out this week. The full table of contents for the issue can be found here. Recently released data from the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions brought…
BY HANK REICHMAN Last week I was scheduled to participate in a Round Table discussion of a recently published book, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History, edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene, in a session sponsored by the Labor and Working Class History Association at the Organization of American…