Company Towns Are Still with Us
On a May morning in 1920, a train pulled into town on the Kentucky–West Virginia border. Its passengers included a small army of armed private security guards, who had been dispatched to evict the families of striking workers at a nearby coal mine. Meeting them at the station were the local police chief—a Hatfield of the infamous Hatfield-McCoy feud—and several out-of-work miners with guns. The private dicks and the local militia produced competing court orders. The street erupted in gunfire. When the smoke cleared, ten men lay dead—including two striking miners, the town mayor, and seven of the hired guns. The striking miners had worked for the Stone Mountain Coal Company, in mines located outside the city limits of Matewan. There, they rented homes that were owned by their employer, shopped at a general store that was owned by their employer, and paid in a company-generated form of “cash” that […]
The Two-Tier Provision in the Chicago Teachers Union’s Tentative Agreement, Explained
The tentative agreement that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) struck with district management less than an hour before a midnight October 10 strike deadline has been hailed by many as a victory. Facing another round of concessionary demands, the union managed to extract $88 million from the mayor’s corporate slush fund to restore some badly needed funding to the school system. The union also managed to win an increase in compensation. But the way that the compensation is structured—with current teachers keeping their current 7 percent pension “pickup,” and new hires receiving a salary increase in lieu of a pension contribution—has some critics decrying the deal as a solidarity-killing, two-tier contract. A pickup is the percentage of a worker’s pay that an employer puts directly into a pension fund. The CTU’s House of Delegates meets Wednesday to deliberate over the tentative agreement and vote on whether to send it to […]
The Other Chicago Teachers’ Strike
As the countdown to the Chicago Teachers Union’s October 11 strike deadline approaches, another teachers’ union in Chicago has voted to authorize a strike as their own contract negotiations have dragged on over strikingly similar disagreements. The teachers and staff at the fifteen-campus UNO Charter School Network (UCSN) have spent seven months bargaining for a successor to their groundbreaking first collective bargaining agreement. But talks with management have stalled. So this week, all but one of the 533 bargaining unit members participated in the strike vote, which delivered a 96 percent vote in favor of strike authorization. The teachers want to limit class size, reverse layoffs of student support personnel, and win more say over the school-year calendar. USCN executives want to shift more pension and health-care costs onto the workers, consolidate the pay schedule, and limit support staff to a 1 percent raise. “We sympathize with the CTU, we […]
The Fight to Save UMass Labor Center Is a Fight for Worker Power
The Labor Center at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) at Amherst is in turmoil. Its director, Eve Weinbaum, says she was abruptly pushed out of the position. In an alarming e-mail to alumni, students and allies, she protested funding cuts to teaching assistants and part-time instructors and, more troublingly, threats to the “Labor Studies faculty’s autonomy to make programmatic decisions and to designate a Director.” Founded in 1964, the Labor Center is one of about 30 labor centers around the country. Most are rooted in the extension programs of land grant public universities. In addition to its extension work—providing trainings for unions and worker centers—the Labor Center runs undergraduate and graduate degree programs in labor studies. These days it is most renowned for its limited residency Union Leadership and Administration (ULA) program, in which union leaders, staff and rank-and-file activists meet for intense 10-day periods of instruction every summer and […]
Charter School Board Conundrum
A conundrum that charter schools face when recruiting prestigious one percenty-types (celebrities, politicians, stockbrokers and lawyers) to serve on their governing boards is that, yes, this may open the school up to more charitable giving. But, people with outrageous fortunes sometimes came to them through outrageous means. When a school board member is hoisted on his own petard, to what extent should that reflect on the school? Old-fashioned school district school boards – however incompetent, corrupt or amateurish – have the benefit of being democratically elected by the people, and therefore, NOT OUR SCHOOL’S FAULT when they go to jail for their own idiocy. In the era of charter schools, where governing boards are corporations appointed through insular networks of money and influence, things get tricker. Take the scary situation of Bronx Charter School for the Arts, an otherwise lovely and totally rare arts-centric (in this day of standardized math […]
Good Write-Up in the Nerd Press
I rarely write directly about work on this blarg, but some of this year’s big adventures got a nice write-up from Beryl Benderly at Science Magazine. Relevant excerpts follows: On 20 July, the postdocs at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, received official recognition for their new union. It’s the nation’s third postdoc union, but the first to be part of the same union as their lab chiefs. After a swift and successful signature-collecting campaign, the 350 postdocs on the university’s three campuses became a bargaining unit of the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)-American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Chapters. Affiliated with both AAUP, the professional society for college and university teachers, and AFT, a national labor union within AFL/CIO, this hybrid group represents all of Rutgers’s faculty members, research associates, and graduate student employees. A sister union under the all-university AFT umbrella represents the […]
Christ May Be King, But At Least He Spares Us Monarchistic Thinking
Teachers at ten New York City schools went on strike Friday over the high cost of health care, but their union was not sued, their president not imprisoned and their members not fined two days of pay for every day out on the picket line. What gives? The teachers in question work at Catholic schools in the archdiocese of New York so their union is not subject to the same draconian law that would apply to the city’s public school teachers. Is their strike not a “disruption” in the lives of the parents who enroll their children there? Do Catholic school-kids not rely on the structure and safety of the classroom as much as public school kids? Of course not. The simple truth is that while Catholic school teachers might arguably have to answer to a higher law, only public school teachers have to report to a Boss that makes […]
Pride of the Nappy-Headed Hoes
There was an enormous protest today on the traditional women’s college campus of Rutgers University over Don Imus. Imus, of course, disparaged the University’s second place NCAA women’s basketball team in crudely racist and demeaning terms about two weeks ago. The controversy, which has raged across the country and which threatens Imus’ career, started out with very little notice here: a “dart” to Imus in the Daily Targum newspaper’s traditional “Darts and Laurels” Friday editorial. Today’s rally, however, seemed to attract the majority of the student body of Cook and Douglas Colleges, and cleared out the staff from most of the offices. The women’s basketball team’s success in the Final Four tournament united the women and the bleeding hearts of Rutgers University in a way that the comparable success of the school’s football team – which came at the expense of budget cuts to academic programs and less popular sports […]
Comrades in the Library
The Times has an article on one of my favorite places in the world, the Tamiment Institute archives at NYU, which has recently acquired a huge chunk of the Communist Party USA’s files. The CP should really be applauded for its openness and willingness to view its past truly as history. I have seen some of the neato gems of these files – such as Seeger’s handwritten lyrics to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” – on display while doing my own research at the library. It was there that I recently found Michael Obermeier’s letter to Jay Rubin. The letter would have provided much-needed pathos to the term paper that I ultimately wrote about the Communists who founded New York’s Hotel Employees union, who were ultimately thrown out early in the Cold War. The letter was meticulously misfiled away with Rubin’s correspondence from the 1970’s (he must have kept the letter close […]
Letter From Munich, 1953
Munich, June 12, 1953 Dear Jay, It’s over a half a year now, since we stood on that ship to say goodby. You asked me to write and I promised to do so. To tell you the truth I hesitated because I did not want to be carried away with my feelings. I was a very disappointed man, not because of the court proceedings, the prison, ect. but because of my so called friends, the last days in the Union, the way Georgette was treated and Sindeys promises were certainly an agony to go through with. If you took away the carfare from the collection money for Georgette, she could not have existed on the support. She took the bus only to save money and she could have visited me more often but $30 was too much. Many a guest of Local 6 was more expensive that all the Local […]