American Watch
US labor law currently permits a wide range of employer conduct that interferes with worker organizing. Enforcement delays are endemic, regularly denying aggrieved workers their right to an “effective remedy.” Sanctions for illegal conduct are too feeble to adequately discourage employer law breaking, breaching the international law requirement that penalties be “sufficiently dissuasive” to deter violations.
Unfair union election rules allow employers to engage in one-sided, aggressive anti-union campaigning while denying union advocates a similar chance to respond and banning union organizers from the workplace or even from distributing information on company property. If confronted with clear evidence of employee support for a union, employers can force a formal election and manipulate the often lengthy pre-election period to pound their anti-union drumbeat and, in many cases, violate US labor laws, confident that any penalties will be minimal and long delayed.
Workers who overcome these obstacles and successfully form a union may still be unable to conclude a collective agreement, in large part because weak US labor law provisions fail to meaningfully punish illegal employer bad-faith negotiating or to adequately define good-faith bargaining requirements.
Human Rights Watch: The Employee Free Choice Act, A Human Rights Imperative
Nothing spooks the U.S. managerial cadres more than unions. I have always been surprised, for example, at the money universities spend to prevent unionization or to fight an existing union. Administrators would cut their own salaries before they would stop paying a retainer to their union fighting law firm.
If you have never been around contract negotiations, or an organizing drive, you probably think this is just one of those lefty myths about the big bad Capital wolf waiting at our door. If you want a feel for the reality of the paranoia, though, you just have to do a quick search on the act. It’s very real.
What’s so interesting is that all of the fear assumes that people don’t really want unions. The law, then, won’t make it easier for people to make a decision about unions, it will make it easier for unions to manipulate people. Because, of course, no one in their right mind wants a union. I bet those law firms know better.
The Mystery of the Disappearing Student
Among online students who dropped out of their degree or certificate programs, 40 percent failed to seek any help or resources before abandoning their programs, according to a recent EducationDynamics survey. Conducted in November 2008 among about 150 respondents who visited EducationDynamics’ sites eLearners.com and EarnMyDegree.com, the survey was designed to identify students’ motivations for deserting their online degree or certificate programs.
Financial challenges (41 percent) proved to be the main contributor to student attrition, followed by life events (32 percent), health issues (23 percent), lack of personal motivation (21 percent), and lack of faculty interaction (21 percent). Nearly half (47 percent) of students who dropped out did so even before completing one online course.
Survey Reports Many Online Learners Never Seek Help Before Dropping Out, Dian Schaffhauser, 1/09/09
This is one of those studies that seems to confirm the obvious and to deepen a kind of mystery. As an online teacher, I see this phenomena all of the time. Students sign up but don’t show up. They start a class but don’t finish. At one online school, I had classes in which almost half of all students routinely disappeared.
Most often they do this without any notification to me, although in some cases I know they have spoken to advisers or financial aid administrators. I’m certain this has to do with class, both economically and culturally. As the survey notes, money is the most important reason, followed closely by life events.
Almost all of these problems, though, suggest that many online students lack the cultural capital that middle class students take for granted. The one that strikes me as most important is the sense that a professor is someone you can talk to if you have problems. Professors often don’t feel approachable, even when they work at it.
My dad had a college degree, but my mom didn’t; when I first went to college I have never seen a campus before, and certainly never met a professor. Like a lot of people, I had professors who went out of their way to be helpful and friendly. Still, it took years before I felt comfortable enough to talk to them.
I am not sure how we can fix this in an online classroom, although calling students at the start of the session seems to help. Somehow, though, we have to encourage students to see us as allies rather than arbitrary authorities. It’s a particular challenge in a writing class because students are also dealing with criticism, often for the first time.
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Get my book at Southern Illinois University Press, Amazon, or Powell's Books.
The C.C.C.C webpage, A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies includes a short podcast interview with me along with links to these reviews:
... by Victor Villanueva in CCC 62.4 (June 2011)
... by Chanon Adsanatham in Teaching English in the Two-Year College 38.3 (March 2011)
... by Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Education (17 Feb 2010)Note: you need to be a member of NCTE, and a subscriber to the relevant journal, to read the reviews by Villanueva and Adsanatham; the review by McLemee is available to the general public.