BY MARTIN KICH What follows is a petition posted to Change-org by Seth Alterman, asking for public support for a petition protesting the elimination of the campus police force at Dean College, which is located outside of Boston. The officers had just chosen to unionize when the college suddenly announced that it was outsourcing campus…
This unsigned opinion piece was published through the Institute for America’s Future of the Campaign for America’s Future [http://ourfuture.org/], which has become a driving force behind the New Populist Movement. The group’s report, Organizing to Take Back America: The New Populist Movement, is available at: http://y.ourfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/New-Populist-Movement-Organizing.pdf. Prepared by Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America’s…
Yesterday’s troubling oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association has prompted a flurry of doom-and-gloom stories in the media about the potentially devastating consequences for the union movement of a decision by the high court to overturn 40 years of precedent and outlaw “agency fee” payments…
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Friedrichs and the other petitioners in the case argue that the Supreme Court’s 40 year precedent upholding the constitutionality of agency fees – or fair share fees – should be overruled. The AAUP filed an amicus brief in…
The following statement was released today and posted on the AAUP website: Today, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, a case which threatens to reverse decades-old decisions allowing for the collection of fair share fees from public employees. The case has far-reaching consequences for American workers, students and the…
The “right-to-work” states are indicated in red, and the pro-labor states in white: Compare that map with the following maps: __________________________ Previous posts in this series have included: Right to Work by the Numbers, Part 1: Population Growth and Movement: https://academeblog.org/2013/04/03/2666/. Right to Work by the Numbers, Part 2: Immigration: https://academeblog.org/2013/04/21/right-to-work-by-the-numbers-part-2/. Right to Work by…
Each year the University of Cincinnati chapter holds a Solidarity Lunch to which it invites not only its own members but also the members of all of the other unions that represent university employees. At my own university, only the maintenance workers are also unionized, but I think that this sort of “solidarity” event is…
Dear Fellow Workers, Compatriots, and Friends from around the World: Happy New Year! Toward the end of 2015, the labor community in China experienced an unprecedented attack. A group of activists who have dedicated years to defending the rights and interests of workers were detained, monitored and interrogated by the police. It could have been…
The following item was written by Peter Dreier for the blog Talking Union: “Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post’s editorial page editor, has fired columnist Harold Meyerson, one of the nation’s finest journalists and perhaps the only self-proclaimed socialist to write a weekly column for a major American newspaper during the past decade or two. “At…
I recently re-posted a piece by Paul Garver on the detention of labor activists in China. Paul edits the Talking Union blog of the Democratic Socialists of America, and I included the re-post of his piece in a somewhat broader article on labor activism in China: https://academeblog.org/2015/12/10/supporting-the-emerging-chinese-labor-movement-on-international-human-rights-day/. That post was then re-posted on the Facebook…