Southern #labor, #voting, #workplace & #education news @MikeElk @PaydayReport

…testing a new feature on newsletters. I subscribe to a number of email newsletters, which have become popular again. There are too many to share or even read all of them. Instead, plan post different newsletters related to precarious life and times, revisiting the most popular ones.  

Homemade signs displayed at Charlotte's "Day Without Immigrants" march and protest in Feb. 2017 (WFAE)​).  3 Pro-ICE Sheriffs Defeated in N.C. - GOP Moves to Cut Teachers' Raise - Tennessean Follows Payday's Lead on Nashville Construction Safety Crisis by Mike Elk with help from Max Zahn & Professor Karina Moreno Greetings from 'da Burgh, where Payday Senior Labor Reporter Mike Elk is getting ready to ship out to North Carolina for his 4th D-Day of the Teacher's Spring.

2 #precarity videos gleaned from #securework stream

…while waiting for quick (dare I hope?) re-cap post to make it out of drafts ~ and this afternoon's resumption of the NTEU Insecure Work Conference Livestream from Tasmania, I offer two videos from the #securework Twitter stream, one on insecure or precarious work and Verbatim Drama (Scene 3), a short dramatic performance ~ casual women academics talking about their retirement prospects.

In my opinion, the first, from the Australian Workers Union (AUW), has lessons for the often troubled relationship between contingent and tenured faculty ~ and for the unions organizing them.

Meet #SteveEarly & ❝Save Our Unions❞…video, book review +

…not that I intended to make this a movie marathon weekend but with this Saturday post and a Barbara Wolf selection scheduled for tomorrow's Sunday Matinee / COCAL XI lead in post, that's what the weekend is starting to look like. Some post decisions are considered, even planned and researched; others appear on the spur of the moment, unannounced or prompted by a chance exchange. This is one of the latter.

I've been reading and saving Steve Early articles on unions and organizing. Just recently Keith Hoeller brought up the most recent book. He met and spoke with Early at the book tour's Seattle. That gave me the idea of asking Keith to write a review of Save Our Unions from the perspective of organizing adjunct and academic labor. So I did. Then came the idea of this post while I''m waiting to hear from him (and  OK to nudge him on just a bit too). To accompany the video below, here are links to a review, an interview (podcast) and an author bio, short version:

#Adjunct/#AFT14 in brief & Sunday Night Late Show: Starting a #PTFaculty Union

…because it's far too late for a Matinee…Chicago seemed a particularly setting apt for this weekend's feature because of an announced CACHE Chicago event, The Pursuit of Truth, Friday July 11. I can't say how it went because haven't heard more

That might have been because the AFT convention in L.A. was also this weekend. It saw more contingent friendly resolutions than usual. Twitter covering for and posting on National Mobilization for Equity as well as a pre-convention AFT in the news special issue on Precarious Dispatches added more to the usual online busy.

K-12 issues usually dominate both AFT and NEA deliberations, leaving higher ed somewhat to the side and contingent faculty even more so. This year's battle was Common Core, not irrelevant to higher ed but that's for another time. For now, I'll go with +George Station who says it best: "no one will be pleased.").

Our news: the new Contingent Faculty Caucus organized by Bill Lipkin (yes, our Bill) held its first meeting at yesterday. Bill standing in front of the meeting sign smiling says it all.

On with the show, the final chapter. Next week will be with the Afterword filmed at COCAL VI in 2001 or a back track to Degrees of Shame, Barbara Wolf's first adjunct video and a perennial Campus Equity Week staple. ICYMI, catch the previous episodes in the series here. 

P-FAC: Starting a Part-Time Faculty Union (Chicago) from Adjunct and Contingent

In Chapter 6, of A Simple Matter of Justice, the part-time faculty at Columbia College in Chicago organized themselves into a union in an institution where the full-time faculty is not unionized. 

Sunday Matinee: Chs 4 & 5: Organizing Boston & California

Barbara Wolf, Workplace 4.2

#adjunct organizing is A Simple Matter of Justice (Barbara Wolf, 2001). This Sunday's videos examine two noted cases and still relevant organizing models for regional and state, respectively.

Each Chapter focuses on the barriers, opportunities and organizing approaches being undertaken in a different situation. For example, Boston part-timers, through COCAL-Boston, are organizing on a regional basis because of the vast number of schools there, which may be the first US example of "metro strategy" later described by Joe Berry in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower. 

California community college part-time faculty, CPFA (California Part Time Faculty Association), are shown organizing statewide to change state laws. Sadly, the Boston page is gone, leaving no more than a a description in a Kairos article and dead link to a no longer existing website. The last Wayback Machine snapshot was May 1, 2003.  CPFA is still going strong: website, discussion list, quarterly journal, blog, Twitter, etc

COCAL-Boston: Regional Organizing (Boston) from Adjunct and Contingent on Vimeo.

About Boston Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor 

Community Unionism—an #organizing idea for #adjunct fac to think about?

…A new organizing model that gives non-union workers a chance to engage and organize…by Roxanne DuBois in Canadian Dimension

At Unifor’s founding BC regional Council, a speaker stood up at the mic and shared an idea. As a member of the Vancouver-based Local 3000, representing workers at various White Spot locations and elsewhere in the service industry, the speaker shared thoughts about how to reach out to non-union restaurant workers and to engage them with the union, its services, and its knowledge. Restaurant workers exemplify what precarious work is all about: many of them are young, but not exclusively; they work irregular shifts, have dodgy contracts at best, and certainly don’t have any backup if they have problems getting paid or issues with their boss.

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:

Class Warfare: #Adjunct Profs address inequities of pay/work conditions

…pick of the day, an authentic voice…for sure the best, freshest piece on this topic I've read in a long time—and, like Prufrock, I've seen them all. 

The army of part-time professors teaching at the region’s colleges are merely working stiffs at the bottom of an enormous and lucrative enterprise.

Read all of Class Warfare: How Adjunct Professors Are Investigating Pay Conditions and then read it again. PS looks I'm getting the hang of short posts but may have gone too far the other direction.

#PrecariousFaculty Network Links (weekly)

…labor history (1998 Syracuse U strike, pictured: Ben Shahn mural at SU), strikes, adjunct unions, organizing, censorship, social media, academic freedom, adjunct blog posts, Labor Notes Conference, unpaid academic labor, retirement, higher inequalities, two-tier system, adjunct response to NYT Op-Ed

.@NewUnionism March Newsletter

…Democratising Economics from the Workplace

March 2014  Work in Progress This newsletter is produced by the New Unionism Network to promote workplace democracy, organizing, internationalism and creative thinking in the union movement. You are most welcome to pass it on. Better still, find out about joining us here. Putting OCCUPATION back into unionism Industrial unions replaced guilds and friendly societies during the first wave of new unionism - starting towards the end of the 19th century. Perhaps we lost something important along the way? Look at the way people talk about their work: we do jobs; but we are occupations. In our final paper on building global unionism, Guy Standing argues: "what we do and seek to do is more important than who we do it for." In fact, a revived focus on occupation within unionism might help us address some of our most difficult problems: How do we organize and bargain across borders in an age of globalization? How do we organize "the precariat", who come and go from workplaces before we can reach them? How do we rebuilt influence whilst struggling to survive? What's more, an occupational layer might not require any major change to the underlying structure of industrial unions. This is an idea you need to think about!  More

CFHE Conference January, 2014…

The CFHE Conference in Manhattan, hosted by PSC CUNY, was fantastic and a great success. The PSC staff went out of their way to accommodate the over 100 attendees, and Mike Fabricant ran the tightest, yet most informative and collaborative, conference possible. I am sure I speak for all attendees when I offer a resounding THANK YOU!

The conference began Friday evening with a unique dinner featuring tastes from all over the world and a comprehensive discussion of the accreditation battle at City College of San Francisco. It is amazing how corrupt an accreditation board can be.

Saturday morning began with a panel discussion on 'Effective Higher Ed Campaigns'.

The Power of Networks—Video + Links #rhizo14

… more #network theory « @theRSAorg…so BYOP

As an related aside and footnote to the video, I'm taking—and will be blogging here and elsewhere—about a course (see below) that applies this theory to learning and education. The New Unionism Network has published articles applying it to organizing labor—more rhizomatic connections and without even getting into ubiquitous social media—also not trees or hierarchies but networks.

End of year report from #adjunct BFF @USAS

…by Martin Macias, USAS. In case you thought United Students against Sweatshops was just tees and sweats, take note of and learn more about these important allies, whose mission includes organizing for student and worker power. Students in Boston, LA and DC are standing with adjuncts in their fight for a union voice. Now on with Martin Macias' years end report on old and new campaigns:

Support worker rights by making a $50 donation to USAS today, and we'll send you a union-made USAS t-shirt!

Our tiny and scrappy staff ensures that your contribution goes directly towards giving more student organizers the skills and tools they need to take on the biggest corporations in the business of exploiting workers.

Donate Now

It feels like only yesterday students were gathering at the USAS Summer Retreat to make plans for the coming academic year. Now, at the end of fall semester, we've put those plans into action and accomplished so much! We've made tons of progress on old campaigns, and launched exciting new efforts to rein in abusive corporations like T-Mobile.

We've also got some exciting new projects in the works, which we'd love to tell you all about soon. But we really need your support to keep doing our important work, while laying plans for future, even more ambitious campaigns.

Let's also take a moment to reflect on our successes this year — check out the report below for the highlights!

convergences: coming together

"spiral" from convergences series by tom cartmill

…this month has been a time of convergence for #adjuncts, precarious & #academiclabor issues. The adjunctiverse is buzzing; the flow, unrelenting.

The myriad issues and concerns related to and unforeseen consequences of the Affordable Care Act and preparing for the IRS contributed to the deluge (and still are) but are not its entirety. No doubt these have influenced, even initiated, other actions, and certainly contributed to increased coverage and thus public awareness.

More @SEIU500CAL #AcademicLabor Forum

…Panel 2 – Professor Staff Organizes – addressing contingent faculty working conditions, student impacts, and education policy.

• Esther Merves, Research Director, New Faculty Majority: New Faculty Majority Back to School Survey, Results and Uses
• Dan Maxey, Dean's Fellow in Urban Education Policy,  Pullias Center for Higher Education, University of Southern California: Contingent Faculty Working Conditions and Student Success
• Michael Best, SEIU, and Thomas Vadakkeveetil, Strayer University: The 
• For-profit Education Industry – Organizing for Reform

Marisa Allison@marisaallison

Having an amazing time at SEIU's coalition of Academic Labor Forum. #academiclabor

9:06am · 1 Dec 12 ·

Together at last!

Getting together. this?

#Adjuncts are steadily building networks, using technology to improve communications and share information. Is that enough? What are our options? Could Alternative (Academic) Worker Organizations, not unions as we know them, but something else ~ as yet undetermined, be a possible solution for adjuncts nationwide or regionally? Alternatives are especially important in regions where union organizing is, to repurpose a polite euphemism, problematic? "But what about us?" comments to a recent post on NFM's Facebook page about increased adjunct organizing activity reminded me of the too often overlooked plight of adjuncts. After sharing Bill Lipkin's good advice about focusing on local campus action, I recalled a few articles at New Unionism (also on Facebook here and @newunionism) and started looking for more.

#Adjunct Professors Unite…on radio

…right about NOW (Mon Oct 1) at 12:00 noon (EST), NewFac prez Maria Maisto,  along with SEIU Local 500 VP Kip Lornel, and Senior Chronicle Writer Schmidt will be guests on the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a Washington DC  social issues radio program on NPR affiliate WAMU that follows the Diane Riehm Show. Join them now or visit later. 

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates

...links & news on #COCALX in Mexico City, #ContingentFaculty & #HigherEd + an appeal to support the Chicago Teachers Union, AFT local 1, to their solidarity fund in their fight and possible fall strike to preserve and improve public education (and against the privatizers). He writes, "I personally urge us all to contribute and get further donations from your union and organization. No foundation will fund this fight. The rich and their foundations (Gates, Lumina, et al) are all on the other side." (image from JournalMex)

More about Chicago Teachers (because our history matters): A wonderful article on the revolt of the Chicago teachers, in 1933, when they, through massive direct action, and over the objetions of many union leaders, directly attacked the banks to get the money to pay them and keep the schools open. Every teacher unionist should read this. The best telling of this story that this labor historian has ever read. Not optional! Big lessons for us now.

COCAL news...

Joe Berry's July 19 COCAL Updates

...news & links about #ContingentFaculty, #academiclabor & #organizing in #highered. To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook.  

Getting organized...
According to UK political activist Richard Seymour writing in The Guardian, Chicago teachers could strike a blow for organised labor globally. Although risky, a successful, a fight to halt school budget cuts in Democratic heartland would be a huge boost for unions.

Joe Berry's COCAL Updates, July 11 & 13

...news & links about #ContingentFaculty, #academiclabor & #organizing in #highered. To subscribe to regular Updates, email joeberry@igc.org.  More about Joe Berry.  Updates are also archived at chicagococal.org. Follow COCAL International on Facebook.  

around the adjunctiverse

Judy Olson's first hand account and detailed analysis of contingent faculty success at NEA Assembly on unemployment support item, also covered by CHE and briefly in IHE   

New blog post by NFM veep Matt Williams, Wet Tinder or the contingent faculty movement catching fire?  

NFM blogger and board member, Bill Lipkin blogs for info about adjunct mentoring programs 

On adjuncting in Catholic higher ed and the threat of it (casualization) spreading into Catholic K12; Nashville K-12 schools going the adjunct route too  

Union made