Category Archives: Union

I don’t read enough. I don’t have time; maybe I can sneak in 500 or 1000 words over breakfast. (I haven’t been writing either.) I do listen to good podcasts when I work out and one of the best is from Doug Henwood. I’ve been reading his Left Business Observer for about 15 years or so. Henwood has a radio show too, “Behind the News” or sometimes “Almost Behind the News”, which is sent out as a podcast. That’s what I was listening to this morning– everyone should listen to it– and the interview with Steve Horn pointed me to a piece about the Chicago public schools that I think needs to be more widely read. There is good and bad news coming out of the Windy City.

The bad news is that the Obama administration, Horn shows, has deep ties to the architects of school privatization. The Mayor, Rahm Emanuel, was, of course, an Obama aide; Emanuel has been closing down public schools right and left and firing teachers just as quickly. The goal seems transparent: there is a lot of money to be made in for-profit schools staffed by poorly paid teachers. This is what has happened in the college system more generally. Even in the public universities cheap labor is at the heart of the institutional model. There is some good news though, as this piece in the Nation suggests, Chicagoans are fighting back and in some cases winning. Maybe our long lost progressive movement can be reborn.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, a Republican, has proposed in his budget bill that boards of public colleges and universities be given the ability to unilaterally increase the workloads of faculty members.

The proposed change modifies the state code that governs the function of boards at public institutions. Should the budget pass, the code would state that boards “may choose to modify [colleges’] faculty workload policy” to require all full-time faculty members to teach one additional course in one of the next two academic years. The increased workload then becomes the new minimum for faculty members to maintain. Faculty members at most public colleges and universities are unionized, and have workload provisions in their contracts, but the proposal would permit the boards to ignore those provisions.

“Hours in the Classroom,” Carl Straumsheim

Technically, of course, the recession ended a few years ago, as soon as the economy began to show positive growth in 2009. Politically, though, the recession won’t be over in higher education until administrators stop using their fiscal power to try to undermine what they see as faculty privileges. Why do we never hear of administrative work loads rising?

Never mind that these so-called privileges, such as a course load that allows research, (already much too rare) contributes to the university’s mission as an institution that produces knowledge (and status) as well as teaches. These guys will always try to kill the goose that laid their golden eggs; it’s second-nature to the contemporary U.S. oligarchy.