Daily Nation: Teachers’ 13-year patience runs out
6,000 tutors threaten to strike over promotions
More than 6,000 teachers have threatened to go on strike over a 13-year wait for promotion.
The A level teachers with P1 qualifications accused the government of giving preferential treatment to their untrained colleagues who, they said, earned twice their salaries and allowances.
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CBC: NSCC teachers set strike date
Teachers and support staff at the Nova Scotia Community College have set Oct. 20 as a possible strike for its 930 instructors and support staff.
The Nova Scotia Teachers Union announced the decision in a news release Thursday evening in a move that could affect the education of 25,000 students at 13 campuses across the province.
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CaribbeanBusinessPR.com: UPR idled for full week due to general strike
he University of Puerto Rico system will be shuttered all week due to the planned general strike by island labor unions scheduled for Thursday to protest the dismissal of more than 16,000 government workers.
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howtheuniveristyworks.com: “OCCUPY AND ESCALATE”: INSIDE THE BARRICADES AT UC SANTA CRUZ
During last week’s massive 10-campus walkout, several dozen students and workers occupied the Graduate Student Commons at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), issuing statements frankly acknowledging their intention to escalate the conflict: “Occupation is a tactic for escalating struggles,” they note at their website, “We must face the fact that the time for pointless negotiations is over.”
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Tagged Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of California, UC Santa Cruz, walkouts
Press-Enterprise: Students protest campus cuts
Rallies, teach-ins and class walkouts were held Thursday at University of California campuses, including UC Riverside, to draw attention to state cuts to higher education.
Hundreds of UC Riverside students, faculty, staff, union leaders and alumni gathered to voice anger over decisions earlier this year to increase student fees, decrease enrollment, cut class offerings and lower employee pay.
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Posted in Budgets & Funding, Protests, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged Budgets & Funding, Protests, Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of California
The Berkeley Daily Planet: Walkout, Rally Hailed as Rebirth of UC Activism
Hundreds of University of California employees, including both faculty and hourly employees, have vowed a work stoppage today (Thursday) to protest low pay for campus workers and higher fees for students.
And, on a deeper level, many of the activists say they’re fighting the privatization of the public university system and the corporate values which, they say, favor profits over people.
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Daily Californian: Crowds Flood UC Berkeley in Protest
Amid shouts of “Whose university? Our university!” and “Lay off Yudof!” thousands of protesters demonstrated on the UC Berkeley campus yesterday against the university administration’s handling of the budget crisis.
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Tagged Budgets & Funding, Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of California, walkouts
Inside Higher Ed: Walkouts Across U. of California
A broad coalition at the University of California formed a united front Thursday, joining in a protest that participants say will be the first of many opposing budget cuts across the 10-campus system. Students, faculty, staff and unionized labor workers on a one-day strike participated in organized class walkouts, picketing and teach-ins. Jorge Serrato, a senior at the Riverside campus, had declared the Riverside campus’s walkout a success by mid-afternoon. “The whole [protest] spot was completely flooded by students,” said Serrato, raising his voice over bongo drums and bullhorns in the background. Participants in the Riverside protest estimated that as many as 500 to 1,000 protesters attended rallies at peak times. Davis campus officials used a Web site to communicate the impact of the walkout, indicating that some professors had canceled classes and e-mailed students syllabuses and assignments. Officials at the University of California president’s office said the protests had caused “minimal” disruptions to classes. The demonstrations came in response to the university regents’ approach to filling an $813 million budget gap, which they have addressed with a combination of furloughs and tuition hikes. If regents approve another tuition increase in November, tuition could go up by as much as 45 percent in a two-year period.
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The Chronicle: Professors and Picket Signs: When a Strike Seems Like the Only Choice
On the day before classes were set to begin for the current semester at Oakland University, near Detroit, months of negotiating had yet to yield a new contract for faculty members. So the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors did what it has typically done when negotiations go down to the wire: The members voted on whether to strike.
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BUDGET CUTS AFFECT US ALL!
600 UA JOBS LOST ALREADY!
Join a group of concerned faculty, students and staff to learn about how budget cuts will affect us and help plan a university-wide day of action to let state law makers and university administration know we won’t stand by as higher education is dismantled.
When: Friday, Sept 18 @ 2:00pm
Where: Old Main Fountain
Goals: (1) Establish a unified voice amongst those concerned about budget cuts to higher education at the UofA. (2) Plan a university-wide day of action in solidarity with the faculty, staff and students of the UC system, who are staging a walkout on September 24th.
more info:
> At the University of Arizona we are facing the most dramatic budget
> cuts and restructuring of the University in a generation. These cuts
> will affect every aspect of the University system – from the quality
> of education available to students, to the conditions of our labor as
> researchers, teachers, administrators and staff.
>
> The administration is pursuing a strategy designed to weaken our
> capacity for collective action, our ability to protect our interests
> and participate in the budget and restructuring process.
>
> In some departments, Graduate Teaching Assistants, already working for
> poverty wages, have seen their salaries slashed. In others, course
> loads have been expanded overnight, with little explanation and no
> accountability. Faculty have been furloughed in a way that minimizes
> disruption to teaching, and maximizes the possibility that they will
> continue working without pay. Hiring freezes and layoffs are
> undermining the integrity and functioning of departments and spreading
> work around to already over-burdened faculty and staff. And the
> decisions about whose budget is cut, by how much and why have been
> anything but transparent and accountable, let alone “participatory”.
> All of this while new fees and “tuition surcharges” reduce access to
> and affordability of higher education, redistributing the burden of
> budget shortfalls onto the backs of students.
>
> The UA budget has been cut as much as possible under the current
> stimulus
 package. If it is cut any more, we will lose our
> stimulus funding. The 2010 state budget will not include any stimulus
> money, and state
 revenues are already coming in under
> projection. We will have no protection from further dramatic cuts after
this fiscal year.
>
> By subjecting the budgetary restructuring to an arbitrary and
> subjective process whose impact is felt differentially, we remain
> divided and pitted against each other, rather than capable of uniting
> around our common interests. As long as we remain divided in our
> individual colleges and departments we will have no power or voice as
> our colleagues lose their jobs, as the conditions of our labor and the
> quality of our institution deteriorates, and as the legislature and
> administration continue to pull the rug out from under our feet.
>
> For these reasons, we invite graduate assistants, faculty and staff to
> a meeting on Friday September 18 at 2pm on the fountain in front of
> Old Main organize an action in solidarity with the faculty, staff and
> students of the UC system.
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Tagged Job cuts, Strikes & Labor Disputes, U of Arizona, U of California
San Francisco Chronicle: Walkout called over UC budget cuts
The protest is intended to disrupt classes to call attention to the deep impact of millions of dollars of budget cuts on the quality of education throughout the UC system.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/15/BAKV19N5S5.DTL#ixzz0RktcbDLy
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
To the UC Faculty:
We at the Rouge Forum applaud, admire, and support your efforts to respond to tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes, which are indeed, complicit with the privatization of public education.
The Rouge Forum is a group of 4500 educators, students, and parents seeking a democratic society. We are concerned with questions like: How can we teach against racism, nationalism and sexism in an increasingly authoritarian and undemocratic society? How can we gain enough real power to keep our ideals AND teach? Whose interests do schools serve in a society that is ever more unequal? We want to learn about equality, democracy and social justice as we simultaneously struggle to bring those into practice. (http://www.rougeforum.org/, http://www.therougeforum.blogspot.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouge_Forum).
In the German Ideology, Marx submits, “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
The connection and simultaneous control of this material and mental production comes into ever-sharper relief anytime we are confronted by our corporate media. The level of discourse is less than satisfying. And, frankly, frightening. Pick the issue: health care, immigration, worker’s rights, war, education. While all of the issues are truly critical, the last is particularly problematic since control of schools is a final domino to fall in the imperial quest to completely (re)fashion our reality. Remove critical thinking, make children compete against each other for perceived scarce resources (standardized tests), use the results to reify hierarchies based on social constructions like race and gender and class status, make teachers compete against one another for perceived scarce resources (merit pay), boil dissent down to participation in (mostly) corrupt unions, excuse and/or cover-up the school to military and prison pipelines, monitor and make impotent our schools of education through if-it-wasn’t-so-sinister-it-would-be-comical accrediting bodies like NCATE, and regulate truth. This has been the agenda. And, it has already buried itself deep into our educational psyche.
Your willingness to confront this reality on September 24 is an illustration of the work we will all have to do to protect public education toward the creation of a more whole and healthy society. Where Rouge Forum members are affiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to join you. Where Rouge Forum members are unaffiliated with the UC system, we have encouraged them to take part in campus wide discussions relative to the status of higher education, academic freedom, and the importance of public education.
We stand in solidarity with you and offer the graphic, created by Rouge Forum member, Bryan Reinholdt, an elementary performing arts teacher in Louisville, Ky.
Sincerely,
the Rouge Forum Steering Committee
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Inside Higher Ed: Friending a Strike
When Oakland University, in Michigan, and the union that represents 600 of its faculty members failed to reach labor agreement last week, the professors went on strike and the university shut down — while representatives from the opposing sides went behind closed doors in downtown Detroit to negotiate. At the same time, a much larger and more eclectic group began discussing the issue in a space that had no doors — just walls.
Facebook walls, that is. Faculty officers from the Association of American University Professors (AAUP) created a group on the popular social networking site and began posting updates on the negotiations. They also started using the union’s Facebook fan page to post fliers, press releases, and links to media coverage of the strike. Supporters began leaving messages on the page’s comment wall. Others started chattering on the wall of the university’s official fan page. Soon, a student group devoted to the strike appeared on the social networking site and quickly acquired more than 300 members. Then a Twitter hash tag. Then another. Then a Flickr account. Then a YouTube channel.
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Tagged Facebook, Oakland U, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Twitter, YouTube
Detroit Free Press: Judge orders Oakland University, union back to table
An Oakland County Circuit Court judge has ordered round-the-clock negotiations between Oakland University and the American Association of University Professors.
If the sides can’t reach an agreement by 10 a.m. Thursday, Judge Edward Sosnick said, he will hold a court hearing on the university’s request for a preliminary injunction. The university has called the strike by its faculty “illegal” and said it has caused “irreparable harm” to students and parents.
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Tagged Legal issues, Michigan, Oakland U, Strikes & Labor Disputes
Detroit Free Press: Oakland University, union meet with judge on strike
Representatives for Oakland University and the American Association of University Professors are talking with Oakland County Circuit Court Judge Edward Sosnick behind closed doors this morning in an attempt to settle the labor dispute that has now canceled classes for a fourth day.
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Tagged Legal issues, Michigan, Oakland U, Strikes & Labor Disputes
The Chronicle: Oakland U. to Ask Judge to Order Striking Professors Back to Work
Administrators at Oakland University, the Michigan institution where classes have been canceled since
Thursday because of a faculty strike, plan to ask a state judge to order professors back to work. The university’s chapter of the American Association of University professors said on its Web site that, a few hours before dawn today, talks held over the Labor Day weekend yielded a settlement agreement that the union’s bargaining team has “no authority to sign.” Negotiators for both sides will meet with a state mediator this afternoon.
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Tagged Legal issues, Michigan, Oakland U, Strikes & Labor Disputes
UC Faculty Walkout 9/24
Update: AAUP Endorses Walkout
To support this action, please send your name and affiliation to this addresss: ucfacultywalkout@gmail.com
Hundreds of UC professors, from all divisions and campuses, wrote in support of the 9/24 walkout during the first two days of the call. With that support, and more that is now pouring in, the letter posted below will be recirculated to faculty throughout the UC system shortly. Student organizations throughout the UC system have begun mobilizing in solidarity.
* The AAUP (American Association of University Professors) has endorsed this call for collective action: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/newsroom/2009PRS/ucwalkout.htm
* UPTE, representing over 10,000 University Professional and Technical Employees, will strike on 9/24 in solidarity with faculty: http://www.upte.org/publication-mm/2009-08-31.html
* SAVE, a faculty organization at UC Berkeley, has called for a “Day of Education” on 9/24 in solidarity with the walkout:
http://ucfacultywalkout.wordpress.com/
* Article in the Daily Californian:http://www.dailycal.org/article/106486/uc_faculty_plan_walkout_to_protest_recent_budget_c
* STUDENTS: Berkeley Professor Catherine Cole’s open letter to UC students has been posted with the call for a faculty walkout here: http://berkeleycuts.org/
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The Chronicle: Faculty Strike Shuts Down Michigan’s Oakland U.
The first day of the fall semester at Oakland University was marked today by the start of a faculty strike that forced the 18,000-student public college in Michigan to cancel classes indefinitely.
The Oakland University chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which represents roughly 600 faculty members, has been in contract talks with the university since mid-May. Among the sticking points are workload issues, how to include the institution’s medical school in the contract, the elimination of some health-insurance plans, no new salary increases, and cuts in summer pay, the union said.
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Canadian Press: Canada’s top court refuses to hear B.C. unions’ appeals about one-day strikes
VANCOUVER, B.C. — Two prominent British Columbia unions have lost their bid to have the Supreme Court of Canada decide whether a pair of one-day walkouts were Charter-protected political protests or illegal strikes.The teachers’ and health-workers’ unions staged separate walkouts in 2002 and 2003 to protest a provincial law that stripped their collective agreements – walkouts the province’s Labour Relations Board ruled were illegal.
Examiner.com: Pending strike for east bay schools
Teachers come out in droves for a strike authorization vote in East Bay District of West Contra Costa Unified School District, WCCUSD. They voted 93% yes, authorizing the United Teachers of Richmond, UTR, the authority to strike.
Wichita Business Journal: Teachers union rejects proposed contract
Untied Teachers of Wichita rejected a tentative agreement with the board of education, with 56 percent voting against the contract that called for pay freezes, elimination of bonuses and increases in health care premiums. In all, 2,684 teachers voted.
Providence Journal: 15 teacher contracts remain unresolved in R.I.
With just days to go before the start of school, a high number of school districts have unsettled teacher contracts, an indication of the tough financial times facing communities, say education and union officials.
NarcoNews: The Learning Curve of the Teachers vs. the Honduras Coup
AUGUST 23, 2009, SABA, HONDURAS: The classrooms were empty but the assembly hall was full. Last Thursday afternoon, more than two hundred striking schoolteachers and other members of the civil resistance from the northeastern state of Colón gathered at the city high school to chart their next steps.
Arab News: PA dismisses teachers, arrests Hamas loyalists
RAMALLAH: Hamas on Saturday said that the West Bank-based government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has dismissed 17 Palestinian teachers following recommendation from the Palestinian Authority security forces.
Toronto Sun: Oh, no, not another strike!
Toronto’s public high school teachers still don’t have a new contract, but at least they’re still talking
Free Press: Detroit unions threaten to strike over cuts
They rally in protest over plans that call for furloughs, layoffs and labor concessions
Public employees and members of several Detroit labor unions threatened to strike Wednesday in response to Mayor Dave Bing’s plans to trim the city’s budget through furloughs, layoffs and union concessions. Representatives from AFSCME Local 207, the Detroit Federation of Teachers and the activist group By Any Means Necessary threatened to strike if Bing and Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb continue to lay off people and threaten bankruptcy and wage and benefit cuts.
Detroit News: Editorial: Strike would damage chance for recovery
A strike by public employees in Detroit would hurt recovery chances for the city and region
The last thing Detroit needs is a strike by its public employees. The city and region are reeling from the shrinkage of the domestic auto industry and declining tax revenues. A labor walkout would seriously hurt the chances of this area to join in any economic recovery in the rest of the nation.
Nigeria: ASUU Strike Threatens National Interest
Lagos Civil Society Alliance of Nigeria, a Kaduna-based rights group, has appealed to Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) to embrace dialogue with the Federal Government and suspend its six-week-old strike in the interest of students.Addressing a press conference in Lagos, the group’s convener, Bashir Abdul, expressed concern over ASUU’s plight, but pleaded with the university dons to rev…
The Post (Zambia): PTUZ calls for reimbursement of teachers’ salaries
NEWLY formed Professional Teachers Union of Zambia (PTUZ) interim president Osward Matandiko has challenged teacher unions to reimburse teachers salary deductions they are suffering as a result of taking part in the recent strike action. Matandiko said Basic Education Teachers Union of Zambia (BETUZ), Secondary Education School Teachers Union of Zambia (SESTUZ) and Zambia National Union of Teachers (ZNUT) had huge financial reserves from which they could pay their members the deductions that the government had slapped on them for taking part in the strike.
Bucks County Courier Times: Teachers contract talks at a standstill
Teachers will weigh their options at a Sept. 2 union meeting. Less than a month before school starts, the North Penn School District and its teachers union are still deadlocked over a new contract.
Business Day (Nigeria): Teachers Strike: FG pulls out of talks
Hopes of getting the university students back to school have been dashed as the Federal Government negotiating team announced its official withdrawal from the ongoing re-negotiation exercise with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) on the ongoing industrial action. Gamaliel Onosode leader of the federal government team who announced government withdrawal from the exercise also urged the Governing Councils of Federal Universities to recall their staff that are on strike and provide an enabling environment for teaching, research and community services for those who are willing to work.
Onosode said until the Union suspends its current strike, it will not continue because of non availability of enabling environment for governing councils to continue the negotiation with their employees.
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Posted in Strikes & Labor Disputes
Tagged BCTF, British Columbia, Bucks County (PA), Canada, Detroit, East Bay (CA), Honduras, K-12 issues, Nigeria, Oakland, Palestine, Strikes & Labor Disputes, Toronto, Wichita, Zambia
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