POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN Graduate employees at the University of Chicago have overwhelmingly re-affirmed their choice to organize for collective bargaining with the AAUP, AFT and IFT. Members of Chicago Graduate Students United voted for continued AAUP-AFT-IFT affiliation in a ballot that concluded Tuesday night. Since 2007, GSU has been working to improve conditions for…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is based on reports from the Boston Globe and BuzzFeed. Harvard University’s 600 dining hall workers went on strike this morning, calling for the university to pay them a living wage just a month after the elite school’s current fundraising drive hit a record-breaking $7 billion in donations. Harvard has been…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN In 2011, Saint Xavier University adjunct faculty voted to organize under the banner of the Illinois Education Association. President Christine Wiseman challenged the right of adjunct faculty at the Sisters of Mercy Catholic institution to unionize, in claiming a religious exemption under the First Amendment. Federal labour law, they argued, should not apply to…
BY KEVIN MAHONEY In the morning session of APSCUF’s Legislative Assembly meeting, faculty delegates received the unvarnished news about the state of negotiations from the union’s chief negotiator Stuart Davidson. Davidson emphasized that PASSHE’s behavior at the bargaining table indicates that they are not really serious about reaching an agreement. “Do you remember the tapes…
BY KEVIN MAHONEY APSCUF, the faculty union representing faculty at the 14 universities of the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE), announced a short time ago that union leaders will have an “important announcement” at a press event in Hershey tomorrow. While local reporters will be able to attend the event in person at the Red…
BY KEVIN MAHONEY Faculty union members at the 14 Pennsylvania state-owned universities (PASSHE) have had just about enough. Following three consecutive days of marathon negotiating sessions on Tuesday and more sessions scheduled for Wednesday and beyond, faculty members were showing signs of optimism that a deal might not be that far off. However, after PASSHE continued to put…
BY MARTIN KICH In an article published by AlterNet, Vijay Prashad reports on the latest and most massive general strike that occurred in India in early September. Although the article has a Marxist slant that may make it seem more op-ed than news report, Prashad gets several things undeniably right: (1) the corporate media has…
By DEBORAH MUTNICK Saturday, September 17, three days after the LIU administration ended its lockout of faculty in the midst of contract negotiations, I feel a little like Wile E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff. I can’t stop running. As I hover over that abyss, before resuming the more or less normal…
BY PETER N. KIRSTEIN Our Collective Bargaining Agreement at a private Catholic institution has a no-strike-no-lockout clause: ARTICLE 6: NO STRIKE, NO LOCKOUT Neither the Union nor any member of the bargaining unit shall, during the term of this Agreement, instigate, engage in, support, encourage, or condone any strike, work stoppage, other concerted refusal to…