Yes, it’s true. Against all best-informed expectations and a premature celebration by yours truly, Bush II proved himself a pugnacious clod to the bitter end and renominated Bloody Bob Battista to helm the National Labor Relations Board last week.
Returning Battista to the NLRB is like putting John Wayne Gacy in charge of an orphanage. If you thought you’d seen the height of the Bush League’s cynical contempt for democracy in the Justice department fiasco, the Libby affair, and the Harriet Myers nomination, think again. Workplace democracy has been their special target, and Battista has been their number-one guy.
You remember Battista from the Brown decision, which arrogantly overturned the results of the NYU case confirming the bargaining rights of graduate employees at private institutions.
Didn’t matter that the NYU decision was unanimous and bipartisan.
Didn’t matter that law, reason, and justice were on the side of the students.
Didn’t matter that bargaining rights have been enjoyed by grad employees at public institutions across the country for decades, with plenty of convincing data to show no harm to academic relations.
Nope.
With an unprincipled majority, the Bush League saddled up their donkeys and rode roughshod over GSOC and every other private-school grad union, braying triumphantly.
Read the brilliant, outraged dissent in that case and more hijinx by Battista on behalf of the Bush mob from our friends over at American Rights at Work. Don’t miss Erin Johannsson’s “Everyone’s the Boss in Bush Board’s Bizzaro World,” which discusses how nurses and other workers can be fancifully construed as “supervisory” in order to deny them their right to unionize.
The nurses’ plight is in substantial part fallout from the loony 5-4 Yeshiva decision, for which we can blame erratic swing voter John Paul Stevens. He voted with the majority on Yeshiva before many of today’s grad students were born, but has since been trying, and failing, to contain the damage he did there, voting against the nurses=supervisors cases. Give that oldster a time machine, and boy, would we save a lot of the pain we’ve seen in academic employment the past thirty years!
Speaking of the NYU case, keep up with GSOC by reading the militant correspondent posting over at Weapon of Class Instruction.
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