Contrary to administrative propaganda (and the self-image of many faculty members), tenure-stream professors are not tweedy library mice or individualistic mavericks wildly hostile to collective endeavor.
In fact, by the calculation of the brilliant, indispensable Gary Rhoades (Managed Professionals and Academic Capitalism in the New Economy), nearly half of all faculty in the tenure stream bargain collectively–a rate more than 300% of typical U.S. workers. Graduate employees are close behind with, according to Gordon Lafer, a nearly 20% unionization rate. Both rates would be higher without the scandalous violation of international human rights represented by the laughable 5-4 Yeshiva decision and the Bush mob’s arrogant reversal of the NYU decision.
I’m reprinting the announcement below in its entirety from the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions mailing list.
The 17th Annual CGEU conference will be held at Yale University in New Haven, CT on July 31 - Aug 3, 2008.
Please contact Mary Reynolds, UNITE HERE/GESO, for more information: mary@yaleunions.org or 203-500-4698.
Higher education is one of the fastest growing sectors of the U.S. economy. Despite the economic downturn, many university endowments are hitting record highs (at Yale, for example, the endowment topped $22 billion in 2007). Public and private universities are competing in a race to open campuses abroad and build partnerships with foreignuniversities, particularly in the Middle East and China. In the United States, campuses are expanding to attract a record number of potential undergraduates.
The CGEU and the academic labor movement can provide a model for how to combat the increasing corporatization and casualization in the academy. Graduate teachers and researchers have an opportunity to use the expansion in higher education and our contract negotiations or demands for recognition to increase the number of good, union faculty jobs on our campuses. We must create and strengthen coalitions with other workers and unions on our campuses and across the academy, develop legislative and bargaining strategies to protect and expand organizing rights for more workers, and build consensus that union growth and power is the most important issue facing all academic workers.
Workshops could include:
Privatization at Public Universities
University of Michigan Victory: A Case Study
Building Power: Union density and lining up our contracts
Coalition Building: How to build alliances with other workers on campus, academic and non-academic?
The Changing Face of Higher Ed: Casualization, Race, Gender, and LGBTQ concerns
University Growth, Faculty Shrinkage: Endowments, Development and the Restructuring of Academic Work
The Global University and organizing global scholars
The Local University and organizing within our local communities
Legal and legislative strategies: Teaching and Research Assistants Collective Bargaining Rights Act, Employee Free Choice Act
Bargaining Strategies: How can unions help universities help themselves? How to use grad research to improve health care, create
innovative job strategies, etc.?
Building organizing committees: High Turnover, the memory problem, and the union difference
Recently:
- 30 Seconds From Humiliation
- Certify, Re-Tool, or Stand and Fight
- Ivory Tower Inc, Coerce U, and other Recent Reviews
- ‘Adjuncts’ to the Barricades!
- Pushback
- I’ll be Watching You
- Ballad of the Dissertators
- The Churchill Case Goes To Trial
- AAUP and the Ward Churchill case
- AP Profile of Cary Nelson
