{"id":181229,"date":"2016-08-23T21:02:00","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T02:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/23\/look-for-the-union-label-when-you-are-researching-or-grading-that-test\/"},"modified":"2016-08-23T21:02:00","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T02:02:00","slug":"look-for-the-union-label-when-you-are-researching-or-grading-that-test","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2016\/08\/23\/look-for-the-union-label-when-you-are-researching-or-grading-that-test\/","title":{"rendered":"Look for the Union Label, When You Are Researching or Grading That Test\u2026\u2026\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Labor Relations Board has <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2016\/08\/24\/business\/graduate-students-clear-hurdle-in-effort-to-form-union.html\">ruled that graduate assistants are employees and have the right to organize<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have a federally backed right to unionize.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The case arose from a petition filed by a group of graduate students at Columbia University, who are seeking to win recognition for a union that will allow them a say over such issues as the quality of their health insurance and the timeliness of stipend payments.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Echoing longstanding complaints from blue-collar workers that they have become replaceable cogs in a globalized economic machine, the effort reflects a growing view among more highly educated employees in recent decades that they, too, are at the mercy of faceless organizations and are not being treated like professionals and aspiring professionals whose opinions are worthy of respect.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cWhat we\u2019re fundamentally concerned about isn\u2019t really money,\u201d said Paul R. Katz, one of the Columbia graduate students involved in the organizing efforts. \u201cIt\u2019s a question of power and democracy in a space in the academy that\u2019s increasingly corporatized, hierarchical. That\u2019s what we\u2019re most concerned about.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Columbia and other universities that weighed in with the board before the ruling argued that collective bargaining would lead to a more adversarial relationship between students and the university that would undermine its educational purpose.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The idea that this could, &#8220;Lead to a more adversarial relationship,&#8221; is laughable.<\/p>\n<p>The current relationship is akin to slavery, particularly at Columbia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Labor Relations Board has ruled that graduate assistants are employees and have the right to organize: Punctuating a string of Obama-era moves to shore up labor rights and expand protections for workers, the National Labor Relations Board ruled Tuesday that students who work as teaching and research assistants at private universities have a &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1010,968,1023,1022],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-education","category-labor","category-union"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181229"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}