Aug

24

Hershey: Bad, But Typical

Category: Precarity, UPS, academic labor system, current events, decline of the west (hurray!), higher ed in the news, proletarian thought, real institutional sleaze, solidarity and a tiered workforce, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived | Leave a Comment

The real scandal of Hershey’s exploitation of hundreds of international student workers is that it isn’t actually news.
Kudos to the students, who revolted en masse after paying a labor contractor $3,000 to $6,000 apiece to get $8.25/hour summer warehouse jobs in sweltering central Pennsylvania, and also to the U.S. labor associations to whom they […]

Mar

23

Don’t Follow Leaders: Why Faculty Like Me Support Unions

Category: "job market theory" and why it's silly, "quality" and other fighting words, UPS, academic labor system, administrators, coming attractions, corporate university, faculty on food stamps, feminization of the humanities, gender, graduate education, health care for all faculty, higher ed in the news, intellectuals are workers, nlrb, proletarian thought, solidarity and a tiered workforce, undergraduate labor, what i'm reading, youth is a category through which class is lived | Leave a Comment

Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Look out kid
They keep it all hid
–Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
On March 22, a prominent group of education bloggers agreed to provide statements loosely organized on the theme of “why faculty like me support unions.” Unexpectedly Stanley Fish, a career-long opponent of faculty unionism, […]

Jun

4

Extreme Work-Study

Category: UPS, academic labor system, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships | 1 Comment

Loyal readers will have seen some of this before, but I’ve just cross-posted this to the Chronicle of Higher Ed Brainstorm and The Valve.  NYU has made a pdf of the entire chapter available for free download: it’s written for general readership and is suitable for undergraduate reading. Ask your students about their working lives–you’ll […]

Jan

22

Students Turn to Sex Work; Tenured Faculty Chuckle

Category: UPS, academic labor system, administrators, real institutional sleaze, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived | Leave a Comment

I was appalled to read some of the reader comments at the Chronicle of Higher Ed to a news wire story about books by two of the estimated 40,000 students in France who may have turned to sex work to finance their educations (as a result of a steady turn toward the U.S. model of […]

Jan

10

(excerpt) For Many Undergraduates, The Nightmare of Cheap Labor

Category: UPS, academic labor system, corporate university, real institutional sleaze, tuition gold rush, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived | Leave a Comment

NYU Press has kindly made available a pdf of chapter 4, which is suitable for undergraduate reading. It discusses the nightmarish experience of working-class students recruited to work midnight shifts five school nights every week at UPS on the promise of education benefits that few persist to receive.
Per shift, they earn about what administrators spend […]

Dec

7

10,000 Students and 300 Degrees

Category: MLA, UPS, academic labor system, administrators, corporate university, real institutional sleaze, undergraduate labor, university-corporate partnerships, youth is a category through which class is lived | 1 Comment

On many campuses, the largest segment of campus workers are students, outnumbering faculty, staff and other workers combined.Undergraduates work for their degree-granting institution as painters, maids, janitors, cooks, groundskeepers, truck loaders, physical therapists, daycare staff, teaching assistants, computer technicians, coaches, security guards and administrative assistants, typically for wages at or near the national or local […]