Tag Archives: NEA

Unions Confront the Fault Lines Between Adjuncts and Full-Timers

The Chronicle: Unions Confront the Fault Lines Between Adjuncts and Full-Timers
Some look beyond the big unions for real improvement in working conditions

The largest organizers of college faculty unions—the American Association of University Professors, the American Federation of Teachers, and the National Education Association—have made big strides in recruiting adjunct instructors and helping them gain representation through collective bargaining.

But the three groups have a long way to go before their membership and their leadership reflect the dominant role that adjunct instructors play in the higher-education work force, a Chronicle survey of the organizations reveals. Such instructors now account for about two-thirds of all faculty members employed by public and private colleges.

Prominent Advocate for Adjunct Faculty Clashes Again With Union Leaders

The Chronicle: Prominent Advocate for Adjunct Faculty Clashes Again With Union Leaders

Jack Longmate, a part-time English instructor who drew national attention this year by clashing with the National Education Association and its Olympic College affiliate over their representation of adjunct faculty, is once again at odds with union leaders.

Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others

Commentary

The Chronicle: Some Union Members Are More Equal Than Others

By Keith Hoeller and Jack Longmate

Do tenure-track and adjunct faculty belong in the same union? A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision ruled that tenure-track faculty are “managerial employees” and not entitled to unions in the private sector. But in public-sector unions, tenured professors are often combined with contingent faculty, who are certainly not “managerial.” Tenure-stream faculty supervise the adjuncts, determining workload, interviewing, hiring, evaluating, and deciding whether to rehire them. Gregory Saltzman observed in the National Education Association’s “2000 Almanac of Higher Education” that combined units may not be ideal because of the “conflicts of interests between these two groups.”

In fact, the unequal treatment of professors by their unions has come to resemble the plot of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Animal Farm.

Update to issue 17 of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor

The current issue of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has been updated with two new field reports.

Issue No. 17 of Workplace “Working In, and Against, the Neo-Liberal State: Global Perspectives on K-12 Teacher Unions” is guest edited by Howard Stevenson of Lincoln University (UK).

The new field reports include:

The NEA Representative Assembly of 2010: A Longer View of Crisis and Consciousness
Rich Gibson

Abstract
Following the 2009 National Education Association (NEA) Representative Assembly (RA) in San Diego, new NEA president Dennis Van Roekel was hugging Arne Duncan, fawning over new President Obama, and hustling the slogan, “Hope Starts Here!” At the very close of the 2009 RA, delegates were treated to a video of themselves chanting, “Hope starts Here!” and “Hope Starts with Obama and Duncan!” The NEA poured untold millions of dollars, and hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours, into the Obama campaign. In 2009, Van Roekel promised to tighten NEA-Obama ties, despite the President’s educational policies and investment in war. What happened in the year’s interim? What was the social context of the 2010 RA?

Resisting the Common-nonsense of Neoliberalism: A Report from British Columbia
E. Wayne Ross

Abstract
Faced with a $16 million budget shortfall, the Vancouver school trustees, who have a mandate to meet the needs of their students, have lobbied for more provincial funding to avoid draconian service cuts. The government has refused the request, and its special advisor to the Vancouver School Board criticizes trustees for engaging in “advocacy” rather than making “cost containment” first priority. The clash between Vancouver trustees and the ministry of education is not “just politics.” Rather, education policy in BC reflects the key features of neoliberal globalization, not the least of which is the principle that more and more of our collective wealth is devoted to maximizing private profits rather than serving public needs. British Columbia is home to one of the most politically successful neoliberal governments in the world, but fortunately it is also a place to look for models of mass resistance to the neoliberal agenda. One of the most important examples of resistance to the common-nonsense of neoliberalism in the past decade is the British Columbia teachers’ 2005 strike, which united student, parent, and educator interests in resisting the neoliberal onslaught on education in the public interest.

A backdoor approach to the merger of the AFT and NEA

A backdoor approach to the merger of the AFT and NEA
By Rich Gibson

Since the rank and file delegates to the 1998 convention of the National Education Association rejected a leadership scheme to merge the 2 million + member NEA with the American Federation of Teachers and its parent body, the AFL-CIO, NEA bosses have worked hard to win a merger through the back door.

The run-up and result of the 1998 vote is described here http://clogic.eserver.org/2-1/gibson.html

From 1998 on, NEA executives struggled for a merger in other ways, urging state affiliates to join the state AFL-CIO, locals to join county AFL-CIO affiliates, and so on.

In 2006, Reg Weaver, then the NEA president, hugged AFL-CIO president John Sweeney in the Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego, favorite watering spot of George W. Bush, and declared that the two had reached an agreement that would spur more merger efforts. Sweeney called it the “Most Important Thing in the History of the Labor Movement Since the Merger of the AFL-CIO.” That silly comment, and the hug of two truly bulbous but very well dressed old men, is described in Substance, here: http://www.substancenews.com/content/view/352/81/.

Why would the growing and relatively strong NEA want to merge with the moribund, corrupt, sold out, quisling, racist, AFL-CIO which loses tens of thousand every month and does less than nothing, actually employing violence against militant workers who fight concessions?

Well, the most common excuse: Solidarity.

That’s a hollow claim, a lie. The AFL-CIO won’t offer solidarity with the rank and file members of NEA. To the contrary, NEA members will simply add another layer of enemies, AFL-CIO hacks, and redouble that problem with the fact that NEA will have to pay dues, subsidize, the rot of the AFL-CIO.

The AFL-CIO and its affiliates do not unite workers. They divide us–by job, by race, by industry, even by views on taxation–the public sector vs the private.

Not a single top leader of any AFL union (or the NEA for that matter) believes in the reason most people think they join unions in the first place: the contradictory interests of workers and bosses.

Instead, labor mis-leaders believe in corporate-state unionism, that is, the unity of labor bosses, government, and corporate heads, “in the national interest.” That’s why you see the UAW losing a million members and doing nothing whatsoever, other than break the strikes of their own members, in order to “save the auto industry.” We see the results of that now.

The entire AFL-CIO (split about in two by opportunist competitors who formed the Change to Win coalition–from the most corrupt unions in the USA like the Teamsters–about three years ago) has refused to fight concessions and labor retreats, instead organized the decay and ruin of industrial work in the US, while its guiding union, the American Federation of Teachers, organized the wreckage of urban education in the US, supports merit pay and national standards in education.

So, really, why the NEA push to merge with the AFL-CIO?

It is probably because some NEA leaders at the top, like NEA boss Dennis Van Roekel, envision jobs for life in a merged body that might be able to draw back CTW as well. This would apply to local NEA leaders too, being promised perks from on high and yet another meeting to attend in a fancy resort, far from the classroom, topped off by a new prestigious title. In exchange, the labor aristocrats can offer elites greater control over educators and schooling in general. The education agenda is a war agenda. Arne Duncan recently described the Detroit schools as a “Homeland Security issue.” Obama, the demagogue, sits on top of a full-blown corporate state promising perpetual war and lost, or meaningless jobs. Such a nation will make seemingly odd demands on schools: high stakes exams, a national curricula, militarization, merit pay, more inequality, racism, sexism, irrationalism taught as truth, nationalism over all, etc.

For the NEA rank and file, the AFL-CIO is just another link in the handcuffs.

But for AFL-CIO bosses, the millions of dollars that would be collected from educators’ dues could stave off bankruptcy for a bit.

We can expect to hear more merger talk at the upcoming NEA representative assembly in San Diego in early July. We surely will not hear the sensible cry: Organize a general strike to win taxing the rich! Nor, When They Say Cutback, We Say Fightback! Nor, Concessions Don’t Save Jobs! Not unless that comes from some rule breakers in the rank and file who have the good sense to set aside the prison of normalcy, storm the podium, grab a microphone, and say it. Perhaps to lots of cheers. Remember to hold up your web site.