Amazon Warehouse Workers Strike—in Europe
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Any resurgence of the American labor movement is going to have to focus on workers in the most exploited categories—from warehouse workers to misclassified “independent contractors” to adjunct faculty—whose numbers will continue to increase due to automation and the corporatization of the public sector. Under the headings “A Prime Day for…
Professor Sacked for Union Activity
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH The following item is from Labour Start, which reports on international labor issues: Maxim Balashov, a professor of mathematics, has been working at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) for nineteen years. He also serves as chair of the trade union at his university, known as UNISOL. The bosses…
Wright State Contract Campaign: More Pop Culture Memes
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…