SCOTUS Union Attack Rooted in Politics
BY JOHN McNAY The Supreme Court’s attack on the labor movement last week by the five Republican justices was an unjust act rooted entirely in politics and having nothing to do with the Constitution. It is a right-wing fantasy to suggest that everything public union members do is a political act. With the increasing corporate…
Janus is Law; Time to Step Up!
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, as expected, the U.S. Supreme Court in a narrow 5-4 ruling capped a week of outrageous decisions by declaring agency fee payments by non-union members unconstitutional in the public sector. The ruling, which overturned a unanimous 1977 decision supported by such conservative luminaries as William Rehnquist, Lewis Powell, and Warren Burger,…
Protesting Janus: The First Day of Many
BY AARON BARLOW This afternoon, from 5:30 to 6:30, union members in New York City protested outside of the Federal Courts in lower Manhattan. The event, organized by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty union of the City University of New York, drew hundreds of frustrated and angry people in what is surely one…
You Don’t Need Collective Bargaining Rights to Have a Union
POSTED BY GWENDOLYN BRADLEY The following is a condensed version of an address made by AAUP president Rudy Fichtenbaum to the AAUP’s 104th Annual Meeting on June 16. We are awaiting a Supreme Court decision that will likely have a profound effect on the way that most unions in the public sector operate, and it…
Summer Series: Are you going to the Summer Institute?
BY JUDY A. VAN WYK I attended my first AAUP/AAUP-CBC Summer Institute in 2015. Even though I work just two floors below my colleague, Sandy Hicks, it was at this conference that she and I brainstormed our URI AAUP Membership Committee and developed our ambitious goals for the committee. Inspired by what we learned there,…
OSU and OIT Form Unions
POSTED BY THE AAUP We have great news to report! Yesterday, faculty at both the Oregon Institute of Technology and Oregon State University moved to form unions affiliated with the AAUP. With this, faculty at all public universities in the state have joined together in unions in an effort to protect quality higher education and…
What Kind of World Do You Want to Live In?
BY WENDY BROWN The following is the text of an address delivered at commencement ceremonies for the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, on May 14. Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley. Her remarks were originally posted at the Remaking the University blog. …
Harvard Grad Students Vote to Unionize, Prepare to Negotiate Initial Contract
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In a post for Talking Union, Paul Garver provides details on the decision of Harvard University to recognize and to bargain with the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Automobile Workers. Some of the basic details of the vote on unionization are not especially surprising: Of the ca. 5000 eligible Harvard graduate students/research…
Becoming More Political, in Very Focused Ways
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH In Ohio, the AAUP was historically apolitical. Then, in 2011, Senate Bill 5 was passed, completely eliminating our collective-bargaining rights in the space of just a few weeks at the beginning of John Kasich’s first term as governor. At the state and chapter levels, we mobilized to support the referendum that…