Labor & Unionization

This week looms large, with a possible no-confidence vote for university administrators and public dissent within the graduate student workers’ union.

Faculty and staff are forming unions even in states that lack collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. These recent actions are part of a long history.

The university has ended striking graduate student workers’ health coverage and, in what the AFT calls an “unprecedented” move, is demanding they pay tuition, too. Temple says over 80 percent of the local union members aren’t striking.

Indiana University Northwest fired a Black professor after alleging he said something about killing white people. An AAUP report found “racist tropes of incompetent, angry and physically violent Black men in the language used to justify his dismissal.”

Yale teaching and research assistants form a union after decades of organizing and amid a wave of union activity.

While University of California grad workers won important gains, the system remains broken, along with graduate and undergraduate students’ trust, Laura J. Mitchell writes.

The adjunct faculty strike at the New School ended over the weekend, and two of four groups of academic workers striking across the University of California system ended their labor action. But undergraduates continue to struggle.

Adjuncts walk out indefinitely, demanding better pay and job security, among other changes. University of California strike continues.