“What is different about the People’s Summit as compared to now separate G8 and NATO summits?
Let’s start with people…. The people who attend the People’s Summit are there as a result of their own decision. They don’t pretend to speak for tens of millions of people; they speak for themselves.
Now look at the venues. The G8 Summit is at the President’s retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountains — Camp David. The NATO Summit is at McCormick Place, a world-class convention center in Chicago on Lake Michigan.
The People’s Summit was held here.”
An Interview with Joe Burns, author of Reviving the Strike
at Lawrence, Mass. Bread and Roses Centennial April 28th, 2012
by Camilo Viveiros
Introduction: Many in the Occupy movement have called for a general strike on May 1st but most Occupy activists aren’t involved in labor…
By Stefan Ostrach, Special Correspondent, nwLaborPress
EUGENE — A new faculty union at the University of Oregon was certified by the Oregon Employment Relations Board April 27, shortly after the university’s administration dropped legal objections it had filed against the proposed bargaining unit, which included tenure-related faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, adjunct instructors, and officers of research.
The new union is United Academics of the University of Oregon, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, and the independent American Association of University Professors. The union will include most faculty and research employees at the university.
It is the largest bargaining unit to win union certification through the card-check provisions of Oregon’s public sector labor law.
Part Time Faculty Apartheid Teach-in and Workshop, Green River Community College, April 20, 2012.
Presentations by Jack Longmate and Frank Cosco on part time college faculty working conditions that look at the differences between full and part time faculty pay, other issues and possible solutions to these problems. Moderated by Keith Hoeller.
from The Weblog of (a) David Jones
I’d like to argue – and yes it is perhaps a case of wishful thinking – that there are reasons to suspect that learning management systems (LMSs) will probably go away. Or at the very least, identify some forces that are pushing that way. The post is mostly in response to Tony Bates post “Why learning management systems are not going away”, but it is also inspired by this post from “Music of Deskchairs”. To some extent, as I’ll suggest below, this could become an argument about the definition of what an LMS is and just how long it, whatever it is, is going to stay. But first, a word from Chris Dede (a Harvard Prof of education no less) to lay the foundation for an aspect of my argument. In this 1m39s mp3 Dede argues that the assumptions about learning that underpin “our best learning environments” are severely flawed.
After months of research, meetings and debates, we have finally put together a first version of the resource pack “Training for exploitation? Towards an alternative curriculum” for use by students, teachers and cultural workers to address free and precarious labour in the arts, design, education and the creative industries.
Download it, read it, use it, spread the word and feed back to us! (click the image to be redirected to the document)
What is the story about Jack Longmate, Olympic College and the Olympic College faculty union? There have been pieces in the acadamic press and limited discussion on lists for over a year but not the coverage one might expect for something this newsworthy. It is not every day - more like not any day - that adjunct defy their unions. Just what did Jack do to earn such onus from his union? According to Inside HigherEd,
Longmate testified against House Bill 1631, in front of the House Education Committee of the Washington State House of Representatives. The bill would guarantee annual pay raises, known as increments, based on a tenured or tenure-track instructor’s years of service and, in some cases, level of education. The system resembles the traditional way of paying K-12 teachers. It does not guarantee raises for part-timer instructors.
Also In a Tacoma News Tribune op-ed in December (that has since mysteriously disappeared), Longmate complained that “overloading” by full-time faculty — teaching more than full-time — takes jobs from part-timers.
This led to Jack losing classes and more actions against him that have all the classic characteristics of workplace mobbing. Attempts to address the matter inhouse through union channels met with silence and increased hostility from the OC unit. The silence in the contingent faculty community, especially among union members, surrounding and union /admin (non and hostile) responses to these events is chilling and newsworthy. Refusing to relinquish his right to speak out, Jack took the next step: filing a harassment complaint against the union. The following is long but worth the read … and your time to comment and share.
The document below is our code of ethics, a kind of collectively edited compass that helps us orient, define and do our work as a group and network. This is a document that will always be in draft form, since our considerations on ethics evolve with time and different experiences. This is not law…
“It’s a Law.” So proclaimed Governor John Hickenlooper after signing HB 12-1144– the enforceable contracts for contingent instructors bill–this afternoon at the State Capitol. On hand were the bill’s primary sponsor Randy Fischer of Fort Collins, and three tireless champions of faculty rights in Colorado: Suzanne Hudson and Don Eron of CU-Boulder, and Sue Doe of CSU-Fort Collins. Dean Saitta was in attendance representing the Colorado Conference. Dean and Steve Mumme, Colorado Conference Co-Presidents, send profuse thanks on behalf of AAUP to Representative Fischer for his energetic and persuasive efforts to support adjunct faculty in Colorado public colleges and universities.
Pictures of the event on the AAUP Colorado website.
By Peter Schmidt
Jack Longmate, a part-time English instructor involved in a long-running battle with the faculty union at Olympic College in Washington State, is now challenging that community college’s accreditation based on a claim that it failed to protect him from union retaliation for his dissent from union positions.
In a letter submitted to the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, Mr. Longmate argues that Olympic College is violating the commission’s standards dealing with academic freedom because the college failed to act on his complaint that union leaders libeled him, may have conspired to reduce his teaching load, and have otherwise sought to make his life difficult.
