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posted by martyb on Thursday August 25 2016, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the not-just-studying dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @04:18AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @04:18AM (#393332)

    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

    by edIII (791) on Friday August 26 2016, @07:33PM (#393644)

    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.

    No slaughter necessary; and frankly, if you boycott all the monstrous exploit-o-rations, they should run out of cash eventually.

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @08:21PM (#393664)

      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

        by edIII (791) on Saturday August 27 2016, @12:30AM (#393774)

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 27 2016, @05:06AM (#393862)

          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."