Jon Stewart, Aasif Mandvi and Jason Jones do a riff on the race to the bottom, in the context of their adoption of right-to-work legislation by Michigan and Indiana.
It ends with Mandvi proposing a bill where workers remuneration is thrown into a pit where they fight each other using the bones of the dead.
Unlike his hands off position in Wisconsin, Obama has actually come out against the Koch suckers’ right to work law in Michigan:
Union leaders warned that, if organized labor can be so battered in the union heartland of Michigan, it can—and may—be attacked anywhere. And the national significance of the move was highlighted by a statement from the Obama White House, which said:
President Obama has long opposed so-called “right-to-work” laws and he continues to oppose them now. The President believes our economy is stronger when workers get good wages and good benefits, and he opposes attempts to roll back their rights. Michigan—and its workers’ role in the revival of the US automobile industry—is a prime example of how unions have helped build a strong middle class and a strong American economy.
The problem is that following the 2010 debacle, Michigan is so f%$#ing Gerrymandered it’s not funny.
Another problem is that if there is a wave election that gives Democrats back control, the power brokers will ensure that too many of the Democrats will be faux Dems, and so repealing this will be put on the back burner.
There is a context to the Republican moves in Michigan to pass a right to work law.
When you see increasing levels of rejection by the electorate, along with an increasingly radical and delusional base pushing in the other direction, your only alternative is to direct your actions toward political advantage by things like Gerrymandering, and going after your opponents’ power base, and you dry to prevent them from voting.
That’s why you see Republicans going after labor unions, plaintiff’s lawyers, and actively suppressing voter turnout.
Well, there’s that, there’s the fact that they, as Lee Atwater said, scream N***er, N***er, N***er, albeit with increasingly sophisticated code words.
If this passes, and it almost certainly will, then when the Democrats get power back in Michigan, repealing this is the first order of business.
As you may, or may not be aware, the clerks at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are on Strike.
The Los Angeles Times, in a reporting job that harkens back to their pre-Otis Chandler days, when they were the worst major daily in the nation, takes a claim by the management negotiator, and reports it as fact:
Stephen Berry, lead negotiator for the shipping lines and cargo terminals, said the clerical workers have been offered a deal that includes “absolute job security,” a raise that would take average annual pay to $195,000 from $165,000, 11 weeks’ paid vacation and a generous pension increase.
Of course, the idea that “clerks” get $165,000 a year, much less %195,000 a year.
Well, the slightly less credulous Long Beach Post, reports a slightly different number:
Employers however, feel most of these claims are highly questionable. They say that workers have rejected fair proposals in the last few years including the most recent one offered on Monday, the day before the walkout, which included: absolute guarantees that OCU workers will not be laid off; full-time pay for 52 weeks a year despite workload; permission to access computer database update histories and audit trails so as to allow clerical workers to research if anyone is using technology to divert their work; and most prominently, increase their compensation packages to over $190,000 in wages and benefits by 2016. Clerical workers currently make an average of $165,000 per year.
Well, if you assume about 10 hours of OT a week, normal in this environment, and that 30% of all remuneration is of the non wage form (healthcare, vacation, sick time, pensions), you get a base hourly rate of about $46/hour, which is nice, but not spectacular.
Also note that the union is demanding access to the job routing database, which indicates that there is a real suspicion that management is transferring jobs elsewhere.
Also, look how another source, from the same Stephen Berry, drops the pay number even further:
Stephen Berry, a negotiator for the employers, said under the old contracts, workers earn either $40 or $41 per hour, receive a full pension after as little as 10 years of work, and receive 11 weeks of paid time off annually.
Berry said the employers have offered slight raises. But both sides agree the dispute is not about money.
Union officials say the companies have been quietly moving some jobs to Taipei, Taiwan; Costa Rica; Charlotte, N.C.; and Texas, a charge employer representatives vehemently deny.
So,we are down to $40/hour.
But we are still relying on Stephen Berry, who is paid to lie for employers.
What if we found an independent source, something like an official government job posting, which lists the salary for a “Cargo Audit Clerk III- Provisional” as $16.69 – $22.80 Hourly.
Kevin Drum took the LA Times article as gospel, but his readers provided links (which I am using here) which show that both the Times, as well as Mr. Berry, to be full of crap.
Remember Carly Fiorina? The former CEO of HP? The one who first came to prominence by presiding over massive accounting irregularities masquerading as blockbuster sales at Lucent?
Well, when she got fired as CEO, HP employees are reported to have spontaneously burst into song, specifically the song Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.
I’m sure that she cried all the way to the bank, because she got a $40 million dollar golden parachute.
She knows what the problem with the good old USA is, it’s that public employees’ unions have it too good: (at about 3 minutes into the video.
Carly Fiorina, who reportedly stood to receive more than $42 million after being ousted at HP in 2005, says that public workers should receive less benefits because “it is not fair” that unions are “so rich.”
During a Sunday panel segment on NBC, MSNBC host Al Sharpton asserted that Congress must agree to raise taxes on the wealthy before cutting spending.
“This is about fairness,” he explained. “Why do we need to need to deal with the tax on the rich first? Because we must ensure Americans we are dealing with fairness. We keep talking about shared sacrifice, there was not shared wealth and shared prosperity. So, you’re asking people that didn’t enjoy the good times to share in paying for the tab that they never enjoyed.”
Most of the American public might think that a an unbroken record of failure, capped by a $40 million golden parachute might be a bigger problem than the the deferred compensation known as a mortgage.
Seriously, business management seems to be a petri dish for sociopaths.
H/t Chris in Paris at Americablog.
It appears that someone in the labor union movement has realized that with modern lean inventories, labor unions have another lever to use against recalcitrant management:
The recent Walmart strikes — beginning first among warehouse workers in California, then spreading to others in Elwood, Illinois, and finally to Walmart retail stores across the United States — raise the possibility that workers may be able to crack the anti-union wall at the country’s largest employer. The new momentum seems likely to spread among many more workplaces to come. But these wildcat strikes are a reminder that, if American workers are to have a better-organized future, they will have to better understand where their corporate opponents are vulnerable.
The Walmart strikes are part of a significant reevaluation of organizing strategy by labor unions and activists in the context of the continuing decline of unionism in the United States — where fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector belong to a union. As Nadine Bloch pointed out two weeks ago, such wildcat strikes on multiple levels of the supply chain at Walmart are unprecedented, and groups like OUR Walmart and Warehouse Workers for Justice are planning to escalate the campaign in the coming weeks.
………
Workers at key points in the supply chain can create massive disruptions in the process. A report conducted in 2002 found that a West Coast longshoremen lockout cost the U.S. economy $2 billion daily. And, in the recent strike of just two dozen subcontracted Walmart warehouse workers in Elwood, Illinois, the strikers heard reports from allies at Walmart retail stores in the region that there were already shortages of goods. This occurred less than 10 days into the strike, Elwood warehouse worker Mike Compton told me.
By focusing on key links in the supply chain, and by using a strike at the beginning of an organizing campaign instead of at the end, Walmart workers are not only taking advantage of the company’s 21st-century weaknesses. They’re also harkening back to an earlier form of union organization, which was far more common prior to the passage of the Wagner Act of 1935.
I’m not sure if I’m heartened, or alarmed that the union movement has to go back to the tactics of the early 1930s.
Because just about every official institution at every level is virulently anti-union. Case in point, the World Bank:
The World Bank has taken the extremely dubious science of deregulation one step further by creating a guide, known as the Doing Business report, that quantifies the regulatory “burden” that investors may face in various countries. The 2013 report was released this week.
Echoing the corporate “job creator” mythology of the Washington consensus, Doing Business encourages financiers and governments to erode public-interest protections, including safeguards for unions and workers. Labor groups say the publication’s warped views on regulation and worker protections effectively gives a statistical justification for leveraging economic aid or investment to pressure countries to privatize, deregulate and undermine unions.
Labor advocates are particularly critical of the section of the report that crystallizes these views, the “Employing Workers Indicator” (EWI) which purports to measure labor policy “as it affects the hiring and redundancy of workers and the rigidity of working hours.” Despite the World Bank’s past assurances that its analysis of labor regulations won’t factor into the main rankings on business friendliness, critics fear that these data nonetheless filter into the report’s evaluations, and in turn imply labor laws essentially impede development.
This is not just the “technocrats” who have this opinion. It’s the overwhelming majority on the so-called “center-left”.
Whenever you hear a Democrat talking about “training” so that workers are ready for “the new economy”, they are saying that they think that labor unions are an anachronism, and they won’t do anything to support them.
We need a real Labo(u)r party in the United States, because the political establishment is hostile to unions.
Wal-Mart workers on strike – Salon.com:
Today, for the first time in Walmart’s fifty-year history, workers at multiple stores are out on strike. Minutes ago, dozens of workers at Southern California stores launched a one-day work stoppage in protest of alleged retaliation against their attempts to organize. In a few hours, they’ll join supporters for a mass rally outside a Pico Rivera, CA store. This is the latest – and most dramatic – of the recent escalations in the decades-long struggle between organized labor and the largest private employer in the world.
“I’m excited, I’m nervous, I’m scared…” Pico Rivera Walmart employee Evelin Cruz told Salon yesterday about her decision to join today’s strike. “But I think the time has come, so they take notice that these associates are tried of all the issues in the stores, all the management retaliating against you.” Rivera, a department manager, said her store is chronically understaffed: “They expect the work to be done, without having the people to do the job.”
Walmart is entirely union-free in North America, and has worked aggressively to stay that way. Today’s strike is an outgrowth of a year of organizing by OUR Walmart, an organization of Walmart workers. OUR Walmart is backed by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, but hasn’t sought union recognition from Walmart; its members have campaigned for improvements in their local stores and converged at Walmart’s annual shareholder meeting.
They say their efforts have won some modest improvements, but also inspired a wave of illegal retaliation by the retail giant, which they charge is more concerned suppressing activism than complying with the law. I reported in July on three workers’ allegations that Walmart retaliated against them for their activism. Since then, OUR Walmart has filed many more Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging further punishment of activists.
Interviewed yesterday about OUR Walmart, Walmart spokesperson Dan Fogleman emphasized the group’s funding from unions, which he charged “are focused on their own agenda…getting more members to join their unions. That gives them more revenue to help fund the political agendas that they have.” He suggested that today’s rally might have been organized as a stunt to impress visiting leaders from the UNI global union federation, who are currently visiting Los Angeles to launch a global Walmart labor alliance. Fogleman denied the allegations of retaliation: “Unfair Labor Practice charges are similar to lawsuits. Anyone can file them, regardless of whether it’s a valid claim or not. We disagree with those assertions.”
Obviously this is a high risk strategy, but one hopes that it pays dividends.
Attempts by mainstream Democrats to turn education into another private sector profit center from which they can extract campaign donations is starting to piss off teachers:
The strike by public school teachers in Chicago this month drew national attention to a fierce debate over the future of education and exposed the ruptured relationship between teachers’ unions and Democrats like Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
Over the past few years, even as Republicans have led efforts to thwart unions, lawmakers previously considered solid supporters of teachers’ unions have tangled with them over a national education agenda that includes new performance evaluations based partly on test scores, the overhaul of tenure and the expansion of charter schools.
As these traditional political alliances have shifted, teachers’ unions have pursued some strange bedfellows among lawmakers who would not appear to be natural allies.
In Illinois, the top two recipients of political contributions from the Illinois Education Association through June 30 were Republicans, including a State House candidate who has Tea Party support and advocates lower taxes and smaller government.
………
“The notion that just because you’re a Democrat” you can take the teachers’ unions for granted has changed, said Jim Reed, director of government relations for the Illinois Education Association.
As teachers grapple with a reform agenda backed by hedge funds and large philanthropic donors and championed by the Obama administration as well as some conservative Republicans, the unions are navigating a delicate political landscape where they increasingly pursue friends in unlikely places.
There are way too many Democrats, including Barack Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who think that handing our schools off to hedge funds is a good thing.
It’s not.
The creation of the educational-industrial complex, much like the creation of the prison-industrial complex, and their granddaddy, the military-industrial complex, are a disaster for our society.
Technically, the strike is just suspended, but I can’t see the teachers hitting the line again:
The Chicago Teachers Union’s House of Delegates decided this afternoon to end the city’s first teacher strike in 25 years and return more than 350,000 students to the classroom Wednesday.
The voice vote was taken after some 800 delegates convened at a union meeting hall near Chinatown to discuss and debate a tentative contract. Union leaders had already signed off on the agreement with Chicago Public Schools.
“We said we couldn’t solve all the problems. . .and it was time to suspend the strike,” CTU President Karen Lewis said at a news conference after the vote.
One hopes that Rahm gets taken down at the next election.
To the degree than anyone lost, it was Emanuel, and here’s hoping that he gets taken down at the next election.
He’s a f%$#ing bully who never seems to muster the guts to use it on the other side, and he’s yet another case of an incompetence failing up.
He’s Dick Cheney minus one finger tip.
It overturned Scott Walker’s revocation of collective bargaining rights.
He declared that it violated the home rule provisions of the Wisconsin state constitution, as well as the 1st amendment.
I don’t expect this to stand on appeal, but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer.
So Rahm’s vision for education in Chicago is to break the unions and turn the schools over to his rich campaign contributors, and it’s gotten Randroid Paul Ryan positively giddy:
Vice Presidential nominee Paul Ryan has twisted the knife just a bit more in an attempt to draw out President Obama on the Chicago Teachers Union strike, now entering its second day. He told a fundraiser in Portland, OR yesterday that he endorsed the position in the strike of the former chief of staff of Barack Obama:………
I think the most important by-product of this strike is that it will show how deeply embedded the Students First/Waiting for Superman frame has become, in the traditional media, in the cultural firmament among elites, and in the Democratic Party. I’ve heard people on social media wondering what this strike is about. Narrowly speaking, Chicago teachers aren’t supposed to be able to strike over anything but pay and benefits. And certainly, they’re trying to retain their health care. But it’s not that hard to see what this is about. Significant sections of the Chicago Public Schools system are starved for funds. They are putting 40-50 students in classrooms without air conditioning. The kids don’t have books or materials weeks into the term. And ultimately, the goal is to make those schools so poorly maintained, staffed and administered that they “fail,” allowing Rahm Emanuel and his hedge fund buddies to essentially privatize them: ………
Seriously, all this guy has is his ability to suck up to rich people.
I have no clue as to why he is a Democrat.
As to what Obama will do, I expect crickets as a best outcome.
The AFL-CIO is going to fight voter suppression laws being enacted by Republicans:
The nation’s largest labor federation plans to mount an aggressive campaign against voter identification laws in a half-dozen battleground states that will be key in the presidential election.
AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker told reporters on Tuesday that the labor federation will have boots on the ground registering and helping voters in Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in coordination with the group’s political program.
Labor is pushing back against voter ID laws, which they say suppress voting by minorities, the elderly, the poor and students. Supporters of the measures say showing identification to vote is needed to crack down on fraud and protect the integrity of elections.
They should have started this a year ago.
Because our so-called leaders are cowardly incompetents:
The chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee said Friday that if Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett (D) doesn’t prevail over Gov. Scott Walker (R) in next month’s Wisconsin recall election, there won’t be any ramifications for Democrats nationally.
“I think, honestly, there aren’t going to be any repercussions,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said in a broad-ranging interview on C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers.”
“It’s an election that’s based in Wisconsin. It’s an election that I think is important nationally because Scott Walker is an example of how extreme the tea party has been when it comes to the policies that they have pushed the Republicans to adopt,” Wasserman Schultz said. “But I think it’ll be, at the end of the day, a Wisconsin-based election, and like I said, across the rest of the country and including in Wisconsin, President Obama is ahead.”
Timidity to the point of paralysis.
You have a major election, near on a make or break issue, for organized labor, and the DNC is afraid to expend any resources, because it’s not a slam dunk.
It is no wonder that George “If you not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it for a time” McClellan was a Democratic presidential nominee.
Yes, the folks that they are disappointing won’t vote for Mitt, but I think that they won’t canvass or stuff envelopes for you either.
Mario Andrew Cuomo has proposed putting a cap on executive pay at non-profits that get state contracts:
New York proposed regulations Wednesday to limit spending by state contractors, including a $199,000 executive pay cap that can be exceeded only with a special waiver or using money other than state tax dollars.
The proposals by 13 agencies cover contractors — many of them nonprofits providing social services — that receive more than $500,000 in state support annually representing at least 30 percent of their total funding. A contractor could pay executives more than $199,000 from other funds as long as salaries are below the top 25 percent in the field.
“These regulations will allow the state government to identify and stop the few providers that pocket taxpayer dollars rather than use them to serve the public,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a prepared statement. In January, he issued an executive order to limit reimbursable costs by service providers who account for roughly one-third of the state’s $132.5 billion budget, noting one downstate provider of early intervention special education drew a salary of $2.2 million and a $1 million shareholder distribution.
Now, start applying it to for profit’s as well.
We now have video of Scott Walker telling a wealthy donor that he will use divide and conquer to make Wisconsin a right-to-work red state:
A filmmaker released a video Thursday that shows Gov. Scott Walker saying he would use “divide and conquer” as a strategy against unions.
Walker made the comments to Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks, who has since given $510,000 to the governor’s campaign – making her Walker’s single-largest donor and the largest known donor to a candidate in state history.
The filmmaker has done work on Democratic campaigns and gave $100 in 2010 to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, Walker’s challenger in the June 5 recall election.
In the video shot on Jan. 18, 2011 – shortly before Walker’s controversial budget-repair bill was introduced and spawned mass protests – Hendricks asked the governor whether he could make Wisconsin a “completely red state, and work on these unions, and become a right-to-work” state. The Republican donor was referring to right-to-work laws, which prohibit private-sector unions from compelling workers to pay union dues if the workers choose not to belong to the union.
Walker replied that his “first step” would be “to divide and conquer” through his budget-adjustment bill, which curtailed most collective bargaining for most public employee unions.
It’s rather unsurprising therefore, that a number of public safety unions, like the State Troopers Union are withdrawing their endorsements of him in 2010, and endorsing Tom Barrett. (Hereafter referred to as “The other guy”)
While such rough and tumble politics may be the reality in Wisconsin, the people of the Badger State* tend to seem themselves as practicing a more civil form of politics.
*Except for the right-wing Fox River Valley, where they have a f%$#ing monument to f%$#ing Joe f%$#ing McCarthy.
If you diss organized labor by holding a convention in an anti-union right to work state, they are not inclined to pony up sponsorship money:
Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they’ve barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing.Democrats are struggling to raise money for the party’s national convention this summer in Charlotte, N.C., in part because they have barred corporations and lobbyists from contributing. Peter Nicholas has details on The News Hub. Photo: Reuters.Now, one set of donors the party was banking on—organized labor—says it won’t help pay for the event or will scale back contributions, partly because it is upset that the convention will be in a state considered unfriendly to unions.Labor unions chipped in $8.6 million of the $60.5 million the party spent in 2008 in Denver. This year, a number of construction unions, as well as the labor organization Unite Here, plan to give nothing, officials say.The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers gave $1 million in 2008, but it isn’t planning to contribute this year. It cites North Carolina’s “right to work law” that is opposed by unions, as well as labor’s need to spend money on grass-roots campaign work. “Registration drives, get-out-the-vote drives and leafleting—that’s where we can make our best contribution,” said spokesman Jim Spellane.“We are making no contribution this year,” said Tom Snyder, a top official at Unite Here, which contributed $100,000 to the 2008 convention. “That’s all I’m going to say about that,” he said.With about four months to go before the Sept. 3 opening of the Charlotte convention—which has been scaled back from the one in Denver four years ago—Democrats are about $20 million short of their fundraising goal of $36.7 million, according to two prominent Democrats who have been briefed by convention planners.
You know, if you sell your base down the river, this is what happens.
Anyone regretting the Obama administration decision to actively slow walk the Employee Free Choice Act over the past 3 years?
Probably not.
It appears that one of the consequences of privatizing prisons is that these private companies are renting out prison labor for a profit:
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.
Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.
These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.
Seriously, our country is becoming something profoundly disturbing.
The recall elections for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, his Lt. Governor, and 4 state Senators is now officially on:
The recall election ordered Friday for embattled first-term Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker quickly turned into a possible rematch when the Democrat he narrowly defeated in 2010 announced he was jumping into the race.
Walker expressed confidence he would hold on to his seat shortly after the Government Accountability Board ordered the election, after more than 900,000 signatures were collected supporting a recall in the wake of Walker’s push against union bargaining rights. It marks only the third recall of a governor in U.S. history.
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett announced hours later he would challenge Walker, shaking up a Democratic primary race that had been led by union-backed candidate Kathleen Falk. Barrett has publically clashed with unions who were urging him not to get into the race.
In an email to supporters, Barrett said he would begin campaigning immediately to win the primary that looms just 39 days away on May 8. The general election is June 5.
What’s More, a federal court, invalidated significant portions of his union busting bill today as well:
A federal judge in Madison on Friday ruled that portions of Act 10 – which removed most collective bargaining for most public employees – are unconstitutional.
Though critics of the law welcomed the decision as a major victory, backers seemed unconcerned since it preserved a main limit on bargaining, and suggested broader restrictions would pass muster if applied to all state workers.
Seven major public employee unions had challenged the fact that Act 10 dramatically narrowed what could be bargained by general employee unions, an required those unions to recertify every year, by an absolute majority union while denying the same unions voluntary union dues deductions for payrolls.
The court sided with state officials in upholding limitations on what can be bargained, but found the two other provisions violated the union members’ equal protection and First Amendment rights, considering that the same rules did not apply to unions for public safety workers such as police and firefighters.
I’m not sure how the election is going to go, though my guess is that it will flip the state senate, since it’s now a one senator margin.
In a very real way, the recall against Scott Walker may be the most important election of this cycle, because if he loses, it will create a bright line in the political process.
Of course, if he wins, the Republicans will take it as carte blanche, even if they lose the Senate.
It looks like the slaves student athletes are looking to unionize again:
With college basketball’s March Madness approaching, commentators will soon regale us with tales of underdogs, upsets and last second heroics. But few will mention the moment, 17 years ago, when a group of players planned to stop the games.
Rigo Núñez, a reserve on the 1995 University of Massachusetts basketball team, says more than 20 players from several teams attempted to organize an action to halt March Madness. The plan was that the players would show up on the court, in full uniform, and refuse to play ball. The goal, says Núñez, was to “paralyze the whole NCAA.” William Friday, who co-chaired the Knight Commission on College Athletics at the time, recalled to the Atlantic the time he was warned about a planned March Madness strike.
Those plans fell apart. Friday says the plan he was warned about centered on a certain team, and that team lost prior to reaching the Final Four. Núñez says the culprit was fear of retaliation. “The fear of being blackballed overcame the ‘rah rah’ emotion … No one went on to actually pull the trigger.”
But in the 17 years since that strike plan fizzled, there’s been little change in the conditions that fueled players’ unrest. And, with the backing of a major union, there are still players organizing to do something about it.
It’s about time.
At the top tier schools, in the big money sports, the fiction of student athletes is a disservice to the athletes, and the schools as institutes of higher learning.