Tag Archives: Organizing

California students unite against fee hikes, layoffs

Daily 49er: Students unite against fee hikes, layoffs
CSU faculty and students formed a rally Tuesday to give ‘shame’ to the CSU board of trustees

Protesters shouted “Shame on you!” and other slogans at trustees as they entered the chancellor’s office in Long Beach on Tuesday.

Ainsley Sanchez wiped the sweat off her forehead and punched her fists in the air as she marched and chanted alongside students, faculty members and parents who showed up Tuesday to protest outside California State University Chancellor Charles Reed’s office.

Rutgers Postdocs Unionize

Inside Higher Ed: Rutgers Postdocs Unionize

New Jersey has certified that postdoctoral fellows at Rutgers University have voted to unionize, affiliating with the joint American Federation of Teachers-American Association of University Professors union that represents more than 5,000 faculty members and graduate students at the university. The Rutgers postdocs are the third such union nationally, following those at the Universities of California and Connecticut.

Western Michigan Instructors and Adjunct Faculty Vote Union

FACE/AFT: Western Michigan Instructors and Adjunct Faculty Vote Union

Today the instructors and adjunct faculty at Western Michigan University overwhelmingly voted for the Professional Instructors Organization (PIO) to represent them. The Michigan Employment Relations Commission counted the votes in Lansing this morning and announced that the final vote tally was 207 to 29.

Taipei: Group calls on Ma to respect teacher’s right to form unions

Taipei Times: Group calls on Ma to respect teacher’s right to form unions

Ahead of the legislature’s scheduled review today and tomorrow of a bill on whether teachers can form unions, the National Teachers Association (NTA) yesterday publicized a letter from Education International (EI) calling on the government to respect teachers’ right to organize labor unions.

The English letter was written by Fred van Leeuwen, secretary-general of EI — a global federation of teachers representing more than 30 million members in 171 countries — and addressed to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九).

Adjunct and Tenure-Track Professors Need One Another, Say Speakers at AAUP Meeting

The Chronicle: Adjunct and Tenure-Track Professors Need One Another, Say Speakers at AAUP Meeting

Washington — Tenure-track faculty members and their adjunct brethren don’t have to be enemies, according to a paper presented here today during a conference held concurrently with the American Association of University Professors’ annual meeting.

Michigan: Nontenured faculty to unionize

The State News: Nontenured faculty to unionize

Nontenured faculty will have the opportunity to unionize this fall after voting to do so on Friday.

The 240 to 113 vote came after the Union of Nontenure-track Faculty organizing committee spent a year gauging union support among employees at MSU, said Richard Manderfield, a committee member and visiting assistant professor of writing, rhetoric and American culture. Now that union support has been solidified, the group plans to create a contract outlining its requests.

Two Part-time Faculty Unions Form in New York

AFT/FACE: Two Part-time Faculty Unions Form in New York

In back-to-back elections this spring, part-time/adjunct faculty teaching at two private colleges, the Manhattan School of Music and Cooper Union, have voted to unionize. The new unions are affiliated with the New York State United Teachers/AFT/NEA.

Michigan State Nontenure-Track Faculty Go Union

FACE: Michigan State Nontenure-Track Faculty Go Union

AFT Michigan has added another notch to its belt, as nontenure-track faculty at Michigan State University voted by a two-to-one margin for representation. The new union, the Union of Nontenure-Track Faculty (UNTF), will represent 650 part-time and full-time nontenure-track faculty on MSU’s East Lansing campus. The mail-in ballot election was overseen by the Michigan Employment Relations Commission and the votes were counted May 29. The final tally was 240-113.

Florida State Grads Say Yes to the Union

FACE: Florida State Grads Say Yes to the Union

When the ballots were counted this past Friday, it was clear that graduate employees at Florida State University wanted a union. By an overwhelming vote of 448-140, FSU grads voted in favor of the United Faculty of Florida being their sole representative for the purposes of collective bargaining. The new union, the FSU Graduate Assistants United, will represent 2,800 graduate employees.

Florida State graduate assistants OK union

Tallahassee Democrat: FSU graduate assistants OK union

588 out of 3,000 cast ballots; 448 vote for representation

Graduate assistants at Florida State University have voted overwhelmingly in favor of joining United Faculty of Florida, the statewide union representing higher education faculty and staff.

Only 588 of the approximately 3,000 eligible graduate students employed by FSU cast ballots during the two-day election, with 448 (76.2 percent) voting to have UFF represent them in collective bargaining. The election ended Friday afternoon.

Bush Gone, NYU Scrambles to Escape Anticipated NLRB Ruling

howtheuniversityworks.com: Bush Gone, NYU Scrambles to Escape Anticipated NLRB Ruling

While I was on the road, I heard from NYU students and faculty about the administration’s plan to restructure graduate education in response to the appointments of Liebman and Solis, which most observers feel will trigger a reversal of the absurd Brown decision, to which Liebman provided a scathing dissent. (That was the ruling that the Bush mob unapologetically used to overturn the landmark, unanimous, and bipartisan GSOC-UAW ruling that forced NYU to the table.)

New Idea on Grad Students, Unions at NYU

Inside Higher Ed: New Idea on Grad Students, Unions

New York University has been the site of a historic breakthrough for the push to unionize graduate teaching assistants — and a bitter strike to preserve the union, which ended in failure, without collective bargaining. NYU administrators are now floating an idea that would give graduate students the right to join the university’s adjunct union.

The idea is linked to improvements NYU is considering in doctoral students’ funding packages. Currently, students receive five years of support, but some of the support is linked to teaching for two or four semesters. The NYU plan would end the teaching requirement. Graduate students would still be encouraged to teach, but any teaching assignments would be paid on top of their fellowships. For those assignments, they would be treated as adjuncts, and covered by NYU’s adjunct union.

Montana State U profs vote to unionize

FACE: Clean Sweep in Montana

The votes have been counted and the Montana State University-Bozeman faculty, tenure-track and adjunct, have made it clear that they want a union. With this vote, MEA-MFT, the state affiliate of the AFT and the National Education Association, now represents all faculty in the public colleges and universities of Montana. That’s what we call “union density”!

Bozeman Daily Chronicle: MSU faculty votes to join union

The faculty at Montana State University voted Tuesday for the first time in history to join a union.

The vote was close among tenured and tenure-track faculty n 168 to 156 in favor of unionization, or 52 to 48 percent.

Florida: TCC faculty still want union representation

Tallahassee Democrat: TCC faculty still for union representation

A union update, the state’s economic shortfalls and federal stimulus dollars will dominate discussion at Monday’s Tallahassee Community College trustee board meeting — scheduled for 4 p.m. at the administration building.

The union activity, for example, is at a standstill. It’s been about two months since trustees unanimously agreed not to recognize United Faculty of Florida as the union representing the college’s 180 faculty members.

Loss for Private College Union

Inside Higher Ed: Loss for Private College Union
March 16, 2009

Union organizing of professors at private colleges has largely been squelched since 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in NLRB v. Yeshiva University that faculty members at private institutions should be considered managerial employees ineligible for collective bargaining.

A rare breakthrough for such union drives came in 2005, when the National Labor Relations Board ruled that faculty members at Carroll University had the right to unionize. But on Friday, in a ruling that focused primarily on whether Carroll was entitled to be exempt from unionization because of its religious ties, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reversed the NLRB ruling, effectively quashing the union drive.

Carroll U. Does Not Have to Bargain With Faculty Union, Appellate Court Rules

The Chronicle News Blog: Carroll U. Does Not Have to Bargain With Faculty Union, Appellate Court Rules

Carroll University, a private Presbyterian institution in Wisconsin, will not have to bargain with its faculty union because it qualifies for an exemption from the National Labor Relations Board’s jurisdiction on religious grounds, a federal appellate court ruled today.

A message from Staughton Lynd

I encourage you to get your library to purchase the new memoir by Staughton and Alice Lynd. EWR

Friends,
Greetings. Alice and I have written a joint autobiography entitled Stepping Stones: Memoir of a Life Together. We need your help in getting the book into the hands of the young people for whom it is most intended.

The book begins with a lovely Foreword by our longtime colleague, Tom Hayden. Then come chapters, some written by us both, some by one of us, some by the other. The chapters are grouped in the following sections:

Beginnings (our families, Staughton as a “premature New Leftist” and Alice on “Music and Dance and Discovering Childhood,” how we met and fell in love);

Community (our three years in the Macedonia Cooperative Community in the hills of Georgia);

The Sixties (among other matters, Mississippi Freedom Summer, a trip to Hanoi, Alice’s work in draft counseling and how it planted in our minds the idea of the “two experts” — the professionally trained person and the counselee, client or fellow struggler — who work together);

Accompaniment (how we found our way beyond the Sixties by doing oral history and then law together, with chapters on Nicaragua and Palestine);

The Worst of the Worst (representing and learning from prisoners);

Afterwords (a poem, retrospectives, Alice’s wishes for our daughter Martha’s marriage).

We had some difficulty finding a publisher. At length we signed a contract with Lexington Books. Lexington has produced an attractive hardback edition. On the front cover there is a photograph of the two of us on the day we married (looking very young) and on the back cover a picture taken at our 50th wedding anniversary.

The problem is that this hardback edition is intended for academic libraries and costs $70. Perhaps in part because of the current recession, we have been told that a paperback edition will be forthcoming only if orders from libraries are substantial.

This is where you can help. It could make all the difference in getting this book into the hands of those who will carry on from all of us if you could:

* Ask whatever libraries you are connected with — law libraries, college or university libraries, public libraries — to acquire Stepping Stones. The address of Lexington Books is:

Lexington Books
4501 Forbes Boulevard
Suite 200
Lanham MD 20706, www.lexingtonbooks.com.

There is a customer service number if desired: 800-462-6420.

* If you are told that the library would purchase a paperback edition but cannot afford an expensive hardback copy at this time, we hope you will write to Lexington Books and tell them that.

Let’s look at the bright side. If your library orders a copy, you can read the durned book for free. And if enough libraries order copies it will hopefully trigger paperback production, and together we can pass on to our successors what one Zapatista has called the hope of creating “another everything.”

With thanks, love, and comradeship,

Staughton Lynd for S & A

Creating a National Voice for Adjuncts

Inside Higher Ed: Creating a National Voice for Adjuncts
February 20, 2009

Some of the leading activists on behalf of adjuncts are planning Sunday to formally create an organization that would speak solely on behalf of those off the tenure track.

The new group — currently with the working name of the National Coalition for Adjunct Equity — would seek to perform a role that its organizers feel existing groups do not. In recent years, all three national faculty unions as well as some disciplinary associations have focused increased attention on those off the tenure track. But these organizations also represent full-time faculty members, and many adjuncts feel that full-time perspectives dominate. And while there is a Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, known as COCAL, that group has largely focused on periodic national and regional meetings, not day-to-day advocacy on behalf of adjuncts.

Montana: MSU profs will vote on union this spring

Bozeman Daily Chronicle: MSU profs will vote on union this spring

Professors and adjunct instructors at Montana State University appear to be headed for a vote this spring on the controversial question of whether to form a faculty union.