SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Common Dreams reports:
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) said [August 23] that graduate students who work as teaching and research assistants at private colleges are employees--a ruling with "big implications" for both higher education and organized labor in the United States.
Inside Higher Ed explains:
The NLRB said that a previous ruling by the board--that these workers were not entitled to collective bargaining because they are students--was flawed. The NLRB ruling, 3 to 1, came in a case involving a bid by the United Auto Workers to organize graduate students at Columbia University. The decision reverses a 2004 decision--which has been the governing one until today--about a similar union drive at Brown University.
[...] Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and "the entire Ivy League" had jointly submitted a brief, the Washington Post reports, "arguing that involving students in the bargaining process would disrupt operations, if they want to negotiate the length of a class, amount or grading or what's included in curriculum. Bringing more people to the table, they said, could lead to lengthy and expensive bargaining to the detriment of all students".
But the NLRB, in its ruling (pdf), sided with the students, in a decision that "could potentially deliver tens of thousands of members to the nation's struggling labor movement", according to The Wall Street Journal.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:56AM
As far as I can tell, the NLRB is just the dancing partner of the big unions. While working with the big unions may bring some initial advantages, I'm not sure that's a camel you really want in your tent.
The idea of a union is very simple: "we will sink or swim together". They tell their employer what they want, and (typically) threaten to stop doing their jobs if they don't get it. Any group of people can do this. It doesn't take government approval.
Of course, the flip side of a union's implicit threat is often forgotten: the employer is free to say "ok, then you're fired". It doesn't happen often, but it does happen [newhistorian.com].
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday August 25 2016, @12:31PM
Actually, that's just it: Under US labor law since the 1930's, firing most employees for union membership (or attempted union membership) is illegal. It absolutely happens, but that's exactly what the NLRB was set up to prevent. Before that, anybody who even breathed the word "union" was routinely fired on the spot, and more extreme company reactions [wikipedia.org] were not unheard of.
Hence the government approval in this case was to make it so that Columbia can't legally fire and/or expel all the graduate students who want to unionize.
Reagan got away with firing the entire membership of PATCO because he claimed the air traffic controllers were essential for public safety and thus aren't allowed to strike, which is one of those categories that doesn't fall under the "most". Cops and firefighters have the same sort of issue, so instead they all simultaneously call in sick.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:22PM
I think you're mixing two different things. Either that, or I wasn't clear in my post. Firing people for being a member of a union is obviously illegal, and should be.
When I talk about firing union members, I mean firing them for striking. That absolutely *is* legal. They're your employees, and if they refuse to work, you have cause to end their employment. Obviously a drastic step - suddenly, you are missing most of your work force - but sometimes the right step.
Taking the Reagan example: it wasn't a problem for the ATCs to be unionized. However, when they went on strike, they basically shut down air transportation in the entire country, which Reagan wasn't willing to tolerate. He ordered them back to work. They refused, so he fired them.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:37PM
No it isn't [nlrb.gov], provided that what they were striking for was a raise, benefits, or a challenge to unfair labor practices.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @06:30AM
Wow. I was basically neutral on the idea of unions before, but is that claim was true (and your link suggests it is), unions are extremely toxic and my sympathies now lie with exployers who go to extremes to keep that poison out of their business relationships (to include employees).
It turns the very concept of voluntary association on its head.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @08:12PM
Unions also have explicit exclusions from anti-trust law, and in many states can legally extract dues from non-members (called "agency fees").
You can see how their powers could possibly be abused, in theory. Fortunately organised crime syndicates have failed to take advantage of this situation.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:17PM
Employees everywhere are getting screwed, hard, and the decline in union power has contributed. Yes, sometimes unions have demanded too much, and used stupid tactics. I grew up in an anti-union Republican household. My father's employer moved from the north to Texas to get away from the unions. We were very unhappy about having to move, leave all our friends and family behind, but my father blamed it all on the unions, and not his employer.
The surest sign that employees are getting a raw deal is a huge gap between their pay and the pay of upper management. You can tell all this crying about the company not being able to afford to pay employees more is completely fake, when they pay upper management outsized salaries, plus big bonuses, and of course frequently hand out a Golden Parachute.
Graduate student employees get a terrible deal. I should know, I was one. My pay was $10,000/year, for 20 hours/week, which equates to a rate of $10/hour, and that was after a slight pay increase, because I was promoted from paper grader to lecturer. For professional work, that's shamefully low. One good thing was that at least my university didn't cheat us further by saying we only worked 19 hours/week, which would have allowed them to classify us differently and not have to pay into the unemployment fund-- seems a worker has to be employed for a minimum of 20 hours/week to qualify for unemployment if that job is lost. But I know other universities did pull that one. I have no trouble believing there are professors on food stamps. The last semester I considered working for them, I decided not to, and my advisor agreed, and not because he felt I needed to spend more time studying, but because he felt I should not help enable them to lowball professors. A rich source of employees, for the public universities, are all the foreign students. They have to pay the much higher out of state tuition rate, but if they are an employee, then they get to pay the in state tuition rate. Whenever the university asks me for money, I tell them I already gave, and point to what I was paid.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday August 25 2016, @02:52PM
My pay was $10,000/year, for 20 hours/week
Uni has to decide if its a "real lifestyle for real people" and semi-vocational, in your example it failed, or if its going to continue to be its original purpose of a holding tank for rich young kids too young and dumb to handle responsibilities but too old to live at home plus respectable old folks semi-retiring on a pile of money who want to mentor a bit.
As a counterexample to your hellish lifestyle an engineer coworker (aka well paid) was moonlighting on weekends for $2K/yr at a local school, and he doesn't need any money, in fact he could do just as well at $0 pay WRT resume stuffing and save the kids some money. So $10K sounds bad in your case, but theres a long way downward to go...
Its likely that having to pay a living wage will result in the jobs going away, older guy like me and my coworkers who have a pile of money will do it for "free" well really in exchange for industry contacts, resume stuffing, boredom reduction, and free access to the lab and facilities, and simultaneously they'll hire rich trust fund babies from NYC at $0 intern jobs who need never earn a dollar in their lives to get by.
Another fun one is trying to live on $10K/yr is painful, but if you have a real job, then real job plus professor/education discount is pretty awesome. How much is ANSYS-electromag suite license for a civilian, like $50K, but for a professor its free or $50 or something like that? I mean my specific example is bad but you know what I mean. Also you get to abuse the Uni site license system which must be interesting.
I'm not sure its necessarily a bad idea to "get rid of grad student employees". We overproduce grads now, so cutting back 50% might enable real salaries to rise for the first time in generations. My bartender not having a liberal arts degree will not make my rum -n- coke taste any worse. Some corrupt bankers (but I repeat myself) and corrupt politicians (again..) won't make money off kids student loans, but I don't feel all that bad about that. Aside from that, for jobs where you need a warm body and some rich idiot kid is adequate, not using a "real grad student" won't be a loss, and for jobs where they need wisdom and skill having graybeards handle it is better than using zero-real-word-experience grad students. Meanwhile the remaining grad students can work on important stuff like research and theses and graduating instead of babysitting undergrads. Also if the uni wants to hand out $10K to grad students, there's nothing wrong with stipends and scholarships...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:15PM
The NLRB is pure corruption, and its genesis came from the fact UNIONS WERE FUCKING WINNING. All of the strongest tools that strikers had such as general strikes, sister strikes, hot cargo, etc. were causing the real problems. It didn't matter that the employers refused to sit down and talk. Scabs had the shit beaten out of them, and employers simply had no choice. ESPECIALLY under a general strike, and a sister strike. The NLRB was very much a response by government from corporate requests to handle their slavery pools that were getting 'uppity' with notions like fair pay, safety, etc. It was bad enough the government outlawed slavery, drastically increasing the prices of commodities, but to be forced to deal with workers fairly? That was apocalyptic apparently to the 1%'er.
Enter the NLRB. With promises of helping the unions, forcing the employers to listen, and stopping employers from striking back by firing organizing workers.
Sounds good in theory, except the NLRB gets to dictate what behavior is under a union, and if you are one. Once you're a union, now all of the sudden.... union organizers need to get paid. Dues are FORCEFULLY collected, whereas they were voluntary before. General strikes are out of the question, as well as anything remotely like a sister strike or hot cargo. Now, the costs of organizing can become prohibitive. It's not good enough to meet in somebodies house, and donate all your free time to help your brothers and sisters. Now there are regulations, payments, COSTS, OVERHEAD. Stuff that simply wasn't a major consideration before, or barrier to entry to organizing.
Basically, the NLRB was created to hamstring the fuck out of the unions. About 2-3 decades later after riding the high of a largely unionized work force, the corrupt 1% used their whores in government to allow outsourcing of jobs, continually restrict what a union can do, and more importantly: DECIDE WHO GETS TO BE UNIONIZED AND WHO DOESN'T!
What happened here today was ridiculous. Those graduates *always* had the right to unionize. It's the 1st Amendment after all. They aren't the only ones. Initially, farm workers and domestic workers weren't covered. In fact, there is a huge chunk of people not even remotely covered by the NLRB.
The NLRB is a corporate tool used to moderate unions to their satisfaction, not a government agency designed to support unions and protect their members.
That's fine. We're going to rise up and kill every one of those mother fuckers in the 1%. Soon. Real Soon. Why? You can only keep people from organizing to ask for a meager standard of living for so long, before it becomes clear that being reasonable gets you nothing. Violence and killing people will work, simply because that 1%'er is no longer breathing and able to instruct politicians to create something like the NLRB in the first place.
Unions? We're well past that. Revolution!
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:39PM
Interesting position.
Unions were winning (because they were enacting violence on those who disagreed with them, what in other words would be called assault, often extending to the point of murder) but it's an outrage if they can require payments?
Persuading people to beat, mutilate, maim and kill is no problem, but union dues were the cunning plot that broke the back of the union movement?
I know what my problems are with the unions, and they mostly relate to the corruption of the unions themselves, but if the unions were honest, efficient and truly worked to represent my interests, I wouldn't mind the dues. I mind it when they go to criminal politicians and criminal ... well, criminals.
And you cap all this with the claim that real soon now, you (and your horde of fellows) will start cutting the throats of people who ... work within the system.
I'm having a real hard time with the idea of respecting your revolutionary plans on the grounds that I don't think that killing any group of people is going to change the system, so much as just end up with a new set of people on top who look a lot like the previous bunch. Like most african revolutions, in fact. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edIII on Thursday August 25 2016, @10:28PM
False. If there were any murders, they were in response to workers being murdered. Look up the Pinkertons. In fact, what you alleged happened, did happen. Except it was the corporations doing it to the workers.
Look up history some time. Chicago was notorious because you could hire an off-duty cop for union-busting work, which often meant head-busting, or flat out disappearing people.
Violence? Perhaps on scabs, but it wasn't organized violence as an ideology or anything. It was workers fighting for their lives in many cases. It's not hyperbole to say that hundreds of unionized workers were shot in the back by authorities while fleeing.
Violence against the owners? Highly unlikely in their gilded ivory towers sitting right next to the Chief of Police, the Mayor, and the Governor.
That's just flat out false. Nobody set out to beat scabs unless the scab tried crossing the line. Again, violence was not the primary tool of the organizer. At all. Striking was the primary tool, which required organization and all of the members assisting each other to make it through the strike.
So, yes. Union dues did break the backs of many, especially when they were increased and regulated. The dues weren't nearly as important as active membership. Meaning, you attended meetings, helped other members with material needs, collaborated on strategy, and took votes. That's what organizing needs. People, not money.
You fucking betcha. There is no hope anymore, the 1% fully corrupted the government. Automation is going to start eliminating service jobs soon (Wendy's is going full auto), H1B visas are preferred to citizens, and there simply is no ability anymore to strike or force corporations to do anything. So since they literally will not listen anymore, and we're starving and dying, the only logical result to such a situation is bloody revolution. It's either that, or a bunch of very mature and obedient workers simply dying in the street homeless without being too much of a bother on anyone else. Yeah, right, and rainbow Unicorns are going to fly out of my butt.
A human being is an animal, and we've been treated with as much respect and diginity as an animal being led to slaughter since the 70's.
I don't claim anything but to realize that soon corporations will be reaping what they sowed. That's all.
Respect isn't required. It's not my plans, but the only logical course of action. These are not simple disagreements in which we can walk away like adults with a agree-to-disagree attitude and still have beers at the local watering hole. We, the workers, have been asking, then pleading, then begging, then demanding a living wage for over 100 years. That's all that is being asked, and assertions to the contrary that union workers must be Goldbrickers is just giving in to the nasty corporate propaganda of the last 100 years. The truth is that American workers have been some of the hardest working people on the whole planet, and executives would crumple at the first hard day of work.
Is safety so unreasonable? Remember that Keyhoe (burning in hell) blamed his workers for getting sick on TEL. Especially before OSHA, manufacturing and mining were incredibly dangerous professions simply due to avarice of the owners, nothing more. Asking for safety is not being unreasonable, or acting entitled in any way, shape, or form.
Is a living wage really so unreasonable? So Communist, so liberal, so evil? A living wage is exactly that; The amount you need to afford food, clothing, shelter, & medical. Sometimes it is expanded, but in general it is the amount you need for a basic standard of living. Note, I said basic. Many use ridiculous appeals to emotion stating that a living wage is asking for a McMansion per employee, of which it isn't.
The lack of a living wage has striking results. Everyone denied a living wage is living materially deprived as a self-evident statement of fact. This situation demands they either continue to go without, or seek government assistance. When a living wage is as strongly denied as it is with base employment in hell holes like Walmart, you and I are instantly on the hook via taxes to subsidize that worker so the fucking Waltons (also burning in hell) can have multiple billions. Each.
The bloody revolution will come because people are critically materially deprived, their situation never improves, representative government has long ago died, and it is crystal clear that the 1% has fully co-opted the government with absolute political and regulatory capture. Those forms of capture are set to dramatically expand with the TPP.
If things actually got better once in awhile, or were a little more balanced towards the worker, then revolution would be nigh impossible. However, with the right circumstances, the people will elect Hitler and destroy themselves. If you think we aren't exactly as desperate as the German people during their times of inflation and austerity, you would be sadly mistaken.
It will be a bloody revolution because we have no choice. Not because the choice was revolution, but the choice was to rebel or die starving.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @04:18AM
OK, cool. Obviously you have made an air-tight case that the american worker is strong, upright, virtuous, and unceasingly dicked over by some very cunning, conniving, bloodthirsty human parasites.
Right, well, I have a proposal for you. I think you'll like this one.
You ready?
Establish workers' cooperatives. Pay the strong, upright, super-efficient, virtuous workers what you deem to be a fair wage. Let the parasites find a bunch of miserable scabs from other countries to work their sweatshops. You should beat them hands down because of the upright virtuous strength of the american workers, right?
No slaughter necessary; and frankly, if you boycott all the monstrous exploit-o-rations, they should run out of cash eventually.
Let me know when you try that. I want to watch.
(Score: 2) by edIII on Friday August 26 2016, @07:33PM
Your ideas are quite good, and are already in the works.
I do boycott nearly everything with my wallet. You're talking to somebody that doesn't give a FUCK about how SHINY something is, or even if it gives the best blowjobs on Earth, while making perfect grilled cheese sandwiches and mining multiple cryptocurrencies to pay for itself.
There is a single consideration when I purchase anything, or contribute ANY of my production on a daily basis: Does it benefit an executive? If so, how much? Was there any alternative company, that I can also afford, that offers a similar product? Is this the best way for me to make executives starve and their companies to go under?
One big problem with that.
How do you know? Big corporations, and those parasites within, often buy up companies with good images, and then destroy them in the normal ways. Yet, the box still looks the same. The story is still the same; The workers paradise at the company. You can't trust any stories about a collective, till you actually call up the company, and perform significant research on ownership. What is lacking is extremely strong branding and an organization that verifies these things. That way, you can look for "Good For The Worker" label similar to GF (Gluten Free) and the organic labels. We need an org like this so that we can know with confidence, not being duped by slick marketing, corporate buyouts, etc.
It's much easier to just shop at a farmer's market, refuse to buy ANY more technology, and move towards self-suffiency in which you participate very little with monetized markets.... like water. Water was fucking monetized with Nestle killing our forests in California to sell us our own water back for a profit.
Much easier said than done, and even in the face of such great difficulties, I deny executives the cash every single day of the week, all year long.
Run out of cash? You mean like Wall Street and the bankers after our ongoing Great Depression started?
Yeah, that only works when we can also make sure they can't steal it from us in the form of taxes and corrupt politicians. Take a wild fucking guess if I would have given a single solitary penny away in bailouts? That's why I instantly stopped paying on over $100,000 in credit card debt. Fuck them, they got paid by me anyways. Not just me, but whatever children I would have, and everybody's else's children, etc.
No, we have in fact been trying it your way for quite some time. In the meantime, our country is dying:
1) Brain drain. We are some stupid fuckers now compared to the rest of the world. We cannot attract or retain anyone, once they got what they needed: Knowledge and experience.
2) Brain damage for our children. 1/4 children are critically malnourished in the U.S with striking consequences in neural development. This means in 20 years, that 1 out of 4 of us is literally mentally handicapped compared to citizens in foreign countries. This will not help us at all, but be a great burden upon us.
3) Over 90% of the money is in the hands of 63 people/entities. Living wages have disappeared unless you're a member of the elite class. All of the money is already at the top, eliminating your idea of starvation. At least, in any reasonable time period.
4) Our manufacturing is dead and dying. All of the highly skilled workers are now old and retired, or have already died. This one we've seen the writing on the wall, which is why some older workers are seeing work again to train younger workers. It's not enough though. We've fallen down hard on this one, and greatly depend on other countries to manufacture our goods.
5) Nearly all factory, and union jobs in general, have disappeared to make way for the new service/slave economy. That is comprised of workers placed in general slave pools whereby the corporations can ensure a steady supply of cheap and exploited labor.
6) #5 is becoming irrelevant as automation has reached the point where a Wendy's fast food outlet can be completely automated. Huge numbers of service jobs are now set to disappear.
7) Homelessness has spiked to critical levels. What is critical? When you walk around your neighborhood, and public walking paths through nature, and see dozens of people camping. On that, I'm entirely serious. The population density is not trivial, and that's a population of desperate, hungry, and thoroughly disenfranchised people.
8) We are not represented anymore, and this is actually an open and lamented secret. Nobody believes we're represented, and on that, don't take my word for it. There are polls and studies.
9) The elite are literally healthier, able to afford age-reversing drugs and age-lengthening quality of food, water, and shelter. That's not an opinion, but scientific fact after studying the telomeres of inner city slaves (often minorities) versus their much richer counterparts in suburbia. If you live a life of privilege provided by exploitation of others, it literally pays for an amorally higher standard of living, as well as ensuring a long life while you do it.
I could keep going on, but all of them lead towards bloody revolution and a shattered America that will take decades to get back to what it was. I predict we will be a 3rd world country for a good time period, having lost whatever influence and good will we had with the world. Our only saving grace will be a military of such size and ferocity, and two huge oceans protecting us from conquest.
We either have a revolution in the next few years, rise up and kill the 1%, or resign ourselves to being slaves again with a standard of living commensurate with our new status.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @08:21PM
Ok, so build the cooperative. Build it, and they will come. I know for a fact if you told me that you had a cooperative in my area, and I could join that and get a piece of the productivity, and get paid a decent wage compared to what the corporate fatcats do, I'd leap on it like a starving dog on a steak.
And the corporations could go find some guy elsewhere to do their bidding.
What's stopping you?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Saturday August 27 2016, @12:30AM
There's no cooperative in my area, and perhaps somebody that still has youth, vitality, money, and health should do it. I'm getting something probably cancerous biopsied here in a minute.
Build it and *I* will come. I can still do a bit of work, I just can't keep to a regular schedule anymore that Corporate America would accept. Too many sick days.
I have no problems whatsoever sacrificing and working very hard for my brothers and sisters. Just wish I still had what it takes to go out there and be a real activist. All I can do is watch in horror as my country and planet dies around me in violence, despair, and exploitation.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:06AM
Well, hope the biopsy has good news for you.
Maybe you can get together with gewg and at least work out a plan that would work it all out before we have global revolution.
You'll have to figure out at least an industry that will work for your first cooperative, and how to capitalise it so that it can get off the ground.
Actually, here's an idea:
Find a group of folks who have their own tools, pool some beer money, get a run-down garage for cheap rental, paint it up nice, and found the Weekend Mechanics. Whenever their weekend is, they're ready to work on poor people's shitty cars for reasonable rates. As they accumulate money, they get better tools and so on, and broaden their capabilities.
Think about it; even if you can't do this yourself, can you handle the accounting? Some of the paperwork? Maybe you have some cash to contribute? Could you paint the building? Wash the restroom?
Billboard says: "We're a cooperative, not a multinational. We keep you on the road as cheap as we can. And we will never upsell you just to make a buck."