Labor Organizing as a Civil Right

 …an idea and article worth revisiting: a 2012 Dissent Magazine article by Century Foundation senior fellow Richard D. Kahlenberg and labor/employment discrimination attorney Moshe Z. Marvit, also authors of Why Labor Organizing Should Be a Civil Right: Rebuilding a Middle-Class Democracy by Enhancing Worker Voice. 

The "union organizing as a civil right" concept, implicit in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, appeared in 2008, reported by David Sirota in the Nation and elsewhere as "labor attorney Tom Geoghegan's 6 little words". Although widely cited at the time and still remembered by many, nobody took the idea and ran with it. Or so I thought until discovering the Dissent link in "The problem with Thomas Piketty: Capital destroys right-wing lies, but there’s one solution it forgets"  (Salon) by Thomas Franks, author of What's The Matter With Kansas and Baffler founding editor. That solution would be unions and reforming labor laws:

Disposable Teachers

 = adjuncts and other precarious academic knowledge workers, also Dissident Voice article, "Cutting to the Bone on College Campuses through Reducing, Reusing, Repurposing" by Paul Haeder / April 28th, 2012

It’s the equal pay for equal work thing, stupid. Union strong and proud. (Bumper sticker on 1972 VW Rabbit, Vancouver, Canada).

Sure, that might be the mantra for the "new faculty majority"  [increasingly organizing into faculty unions. Actually New Faculty Majority's is "Faculty working conditions are student learning  conditions" but close enough], but in a large sense, the fight to normalize the work, pay and benefits of part-time/ contingent/ temporary/migratory/ irregular/ at-will/ auxiliary faculty, AKA “freeway fliers,” is one centered on dismantling the two-tiered system of inequitable pay and punitive treatment between tenure track faculty and non-tenure track faculty.