Education

Are You A Public School Teacher In A State That Bans Collective Bargaining?

December 17, 2022 Olivia Wood, Left Voice. Organize! Education, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Recently, a friend of mine tweeted, “watching all these workers rise up in solidarity makes me so damn proud and excited… and sad i live in a state which forbids collective bargaining for public sector workers. the FOMO is real. if you can unionize, do it!!!” She then clarified that her state (Virginia) did amend the law so that municipal employees could unionize if given permission by the municipality, but that other state employees (including those like her, who work for public colleges and universities) still do not have a pathway forward. This made me think. I grew up in North Carolina, one of five states where public sector collective bargaining is still completely banned. Ballotpedia lists 17 other states, including Virginia, where public sector collective bargaining is “permitted” but not required (read: restricted in various ways, such as Virginia’s requirement for municipal permission), but even a map like this one obscures other union-busting legal measures.

‘I Walked Away Like A Giant’: New York Troublemakers School Draws 400

December 14, 2022 Hannah Grimmett, Labor Notes. Organize! Education, Labor Movement, New York (NY), Worker Rights and Jobs

New York City, New York - Four hundred rank-and-file organizers gathered November 19 in a New York City high school at the largest Troublemakers School yet. The day was part learning opportunity, part celebration of shared struggle. In the opening session, led by a Teamster and two educators, troublemakers roared with applause at the proclamation that a potential UPS strike next summer would cause “6 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] to stop moving” and booed the “customer service” mentality being pushed onto educators by school administrators. Then participants broke out into classrooms for workshops like New Organizing, Assertive Grievance Handling, and Race and Labor. Among the skills practiced were laying out step-by-step escalating campaigns that build capacity as you go; recognizing the qualities that make an issue ripe for organizing; and how to push co-workers to get more involved in the union, while also respecting their boundaries and complex personal and internal lives.

The City That Kicked Cops Out Of Schools

December 13, 2022 Andy Kopsa, In These Times. Create! Education, Iowa, Police in Schools, Restorative Justice

Des Moines, Iowa - Wearing bright yellow Crocs, carrying a backpack and holding a clipboard stacked with papers, Ahmed Musa listens intently to a student. You would be forgiven for thinking Mr. Musa was a student himself; it is “staff dress like a student” day during spirit week at Theodore Roosevelt High School, and Mr. Musa looks the part. Then again, Mr. Musa, 24, was a Roosevelt student not too long ago. He graduated in 2017. He is talking with senior Jackie in a second floor hallway. She is animated, her purple and white braids falling across her baby blue N95 mask as she explains a problem. She is the president of the K-Club and there was an incident among members.

New School Teachers’ Strike Ends As NYC University Cuts Deal With Union

December 13, 2022 Olivia Ebertz, Gothamist. Resist! Education, New York (NY), New York City (NYC), Strikes, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

New York City, New York - The New School reached a tentative contract agreement with its part-time faculty this weekend, ending a strike that lasted nearly a month. A joint statement released by the faculty’s union, ACT-United Auto Workers Local 7902, and the New School on Saturday said two highlights of the five-year deal are pay raises and boosts to health care for the workers. Union leaders said they expect the agreement to be ratified by the group’s 2,400 members later this week — and said all classes and events would resume immediately. “Now, together, we can return to our mission of teaching, learning, creating and supporting our students,” the statement said. The agreement comes just in time for the final week of the university’s fall semester.

A Communiqué From The Liberated Dining Halls Of So-Called Santa Cruz

December 11, 2022 IGD Worldwide, It's Going Down. Resist! California, Education, Labor Movement, Strikes, Unions, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

Santa Cruz, California - The colonial capitalist university will never win. Union sell-outs and scabs will never win. Here at so-called Santa Cruz, we declare and express our solidarity to all communities in struggle. Today, along with comrades across so-called California, we are engaging in a transterritorial attack on UC incorporated and what they call food insecurity, a condition created by their capitalist greed. These spaces, like the dining commons, are spaces we understand as battlegrounds of the ongoing war against subsistence, where proles take up the war against capital by expropriating dining halls and feeding one another.

How Academic Workers’ Leverage Can Grow In A Long-Haul Strike

December 10, 2022 Jonathan Mackris and Abrar Abidi, Labor Notes. Strategize! California, Education, Labor Movement, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

California - Forty-eight thousand academic workers have been on strike across the 10 campuses of the University of California since November 14. It’s the biggest strike in the country this year. The strikers are in four bargaining units—teaching assistants, student researchers, postdoctoral scholars, and academic researchers—all affiliated with the United Auto Workers. The following speeches were written for and read out at the Strike to Win Assembly on December 6 at UC Berkeley. This assembly was put together by rank-and-file members from the humanities, social sciences, and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) in UAW Local 2865 and Student Researchers United (SRU-UAW) in order to develop strategies for a building a longer, sustainable strike across campus.

We Need To Transform What It Means to Be An Academic Worker

December 7, 2022 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Resist! California, Education, Strikes, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

When it comes to corporate news media coverage of labor actions, there are unfortunately a few tropes to look out for, even in 2022. First, while strikes in other countries may be presented as signs of freedom, in the US they will often be presented in terms of the disruption they cause. The New York Times’ November 14 report on the strike by some 48,000 University of California teaching assistants, researchers and others gave skimming readers the shorthand “highlight” that these people “walked off the job Monday, forcing some classes to be canceled.” “Classes were disrupted, research slowed and office hours canceled,” the paper noted, “only a few weeks away from final examinations.” Whatever an article goes on to say, the “harmful disruption” presentation encourages readers to understand that the status quo before the action was not harmful and did not disrupt, and that worker actions are therefore willful, selfish and possibly malignant.

Black Market In Broad Daylight

December 7, 2022 Lauren Smith, Covert Action Magazine. Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Education, Food and Agriculture, Health Care, Human Rights

Operating in the shadows is easy in the United States secondary food market, as few question what happens to food that exceeds its expiration date in leading supermarket chains across the nation. Well, truth be told, expired food gets reprocessed, repackaged, relabeled, and resold to institutions, discount retailers and restaurants. With scant regulations in place for repurposed food, and institutional purchasing specifications silent, food liquidators underbid their competitors and win contracts nearly every time. In the secondary food market, you get what you pay for, and never has the saying “garbage in, garbage out” been more appropriate. No matter how much hot sauce or gravy is added as camouflage, spoiled food products are unfit for human consumption and cause foodborne illness. Here, what you don’t know can kill you.

How A Reservation School Graduates 100% Of Students

December 4, 2022 Tim Trudell, Flatwater Free Press. Create! Education, Indigenous culture, Nebraska, Schools

Kids in the hallway smile more than they have in the past. Laughs are a little louder than they once were, teachers say. Student pride – and the graduation rate – are on the upswing at Santee’s public school. School leaders trace that success to a new effort to teach the tribe’s culture – the very thing that the education system, generations ago, banned Santee Dakota students from learning. Now, a new cultural program immerses students in the tribe’s language, history and customs for as long as an hour each school day. The program, embraced by most teachers and students, has boosted student attendance and helped the iSanti Community School in Niobrara hit a perfect, 100% graduation rate two years running, school leaders say. This move to embrace the Santee culture at the main school on the Santee Dakota Reservation hasn’t always gone smoothly.

The Academic Proles On The Barricades

December 1, 2022 Harold Meyerson, Portside. Resist! California, Education, Strikes, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

In her 2019 book Squeezed, Alissa Quart gave a name to the middle class that was just getting by in today’s middle-class-unfriendly economy: the middle precariat. One group that may just manage to ascend, wobbily, to the ranks of the precarious middle are the 12,000 striking postdoctoral scholars who reached a tentative agreement with the University of California earlier today to boost their wages and benefits. Under the agreement, which will shortly be presented to the postdocs for an up-or-down vote, the scholars will receive raises of between 20 percent and 23 percent to take effect next year, as well as a couple thousand dollars in child care assistance. By my very rough calculations, that should put them in the lower ranks of the mid-precar, with annual incomes in the mid-40 thousands—not enough to get a decent rental in coastal California, but able to buy a good-sized car to sleep in.

This Year’s Biggest Strike Is By 48,000 University Of California Workers

November 24, 2022 Kenzo Esquivel, Labor Notes. Resist! California, Education, Strikes, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

California - Across the prestigious University of California system, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job last week for the nation’s largest strike of 2022, and the largest strike of academic workers in U.S. history. The energy was palpable as nearly 5,000 academic workers gathered at UC-Berkeley’s campus November 14 to launch our strike. Any last-minute worries dissolved as I stepped onto campus and heard my colleagues, strike captains, undergraduate students, and community members chanting, “48,000 workers strong, we can fight all day long!” Over the first week of our strike we shut down classes and lab operations, felt the solidarity from Teamsters drivers and building trades workers who honored our 5 a.m. pickets, marched with our students to the university president’s mansion, and showed the UC just how organized we are—and how ready we are to win big.

One State Mandates Teaching Climate Change In Almost All Subjects

November 18, 2022 Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report. Create! climate crisis, Education, New Jersey (NJ)

Pennington, New Jersey - There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsley’s stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the energetic efforts of her class of third graders to clear the air. Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School, in Pennington, New Jersey, had tasked the kids with tossing balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. The first round of the game was set in the 1700s, and the kids had cleared the field in under four minutes. But this third round took place in the present day, after the advent of cars, factories and electricity, and massive deforestation.

New School Staff Strike Shows The Institution Is Not So Progressive

November 16, 2022 Miles Hamberg, The Real News Network. Resist! Education, New York City (NYC), Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The union representing part-time faculty at The New School, a prestigious private university in New York, has been telling its members “You are The New School.” And for good reason—part-time faculty make up a whopping 87% of The New School’s teaching staff. These instructors love to teach, but they say that theirs is an unrequited love, and that their nominally progressive university has left them with no other option but to strike. At midnight on Nov. 13, after a 14-hour bargaining session that ended without closing the gulf between the university administration and the union bargaining committee, the union’s contract expired. In preparation for the possibility that their existing contract would expire before a new agreement was reached, 1,307 of the roughly 1,678 part-time faculty teaching this semester voted to authorize a strike, receiving a swell of support from students, staff, and other faculty members at the university.

Largest Strike In The Country Unfolds Across All Ten UC Campuses

November 15, 2022 Fair UC Now. Resist! California, Education, Strikes, University of California, Worker Rights and Jobs

Berkeley, California – 48,000 UAW-represented employees of the University of California will walk off the job and onto the picket line as a multi-unit, statewide Unfair Labor Practices strike begins this morning. UAW represents Academic Workers across ten campuses and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, including Teaching Assistants, Postdocs, Academic Student Employees, Graduate Student Researchers, Academic Researchers, Readers, Tutors and more. Together they perform the majority of teaching and research at UC. “We have been bargaining throughout the weekend and while important progress has been made, we are still far apart on many of the issues that will make UC a more equitable university: dignified compensation that addresses the crisis of affordable housing, access to transportation benefits so those who must commute can do so affordably and with a minimal carbon footprint, Non-Resident Supplemental Tuition Remission, and appointment lengths,” said Rafael Jaime, President of UAW 2865.

Undaunted By Fines, Massachusetts Teachers Defy Strike Ban

November 15, 2022 Barbara Madeloni, Labor Notes. Resist! Education, Massachusetts, Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs

Massachusetts - Two more illegal strikes have hit Massachusetts! On October 14, members of the Haverhill Educators Association voted to strike. Malden educators voted to strike just a few hours later. After four days out, Haverhill educators won their demands for school safety and commitment for diverse hiring; those in Malden settled their contract with a one-day strike. The school committee in Haverhill had dragged its feet and walked away from the table again and again. On the last night of the strike, hundreds of striking teachers, along with students, parents, and educators from nearby districts, stood outside city hall chanting “Do your job” and “Settle this now.”

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