In the spring of 2019, workers at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) organized after a controversial university Presidential search highlighted campus-wide dissatisfaction with the Board of Trustees (BoT). This cultivated a feeling among workers that we lacked a voice in campus affairs.
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Last month, the National Labor Relations Board proposed a new rule that would reclassify graduate workers at private institutions as students, not workers, and therefore rescind their collective bargaining rights. By claiming graduate workers’ relationship to their university is primarily educational and not economic, the majority-Trump-appointed NLRB threatens to undermine decades of labor organizing.
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2019 marks the 150th anniversary of the Knights of Labor, the most important labor movement of the Gilded Age. It is worth thinking anew about that organization and not just because of that anniversary. We are now deep in the second Gilded Age and if we look back to that earlier age of plutocrats, it becomes clear that we are repeating more than a label.
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The attacks on labor these days take many forms. Some are straight-forward and brutally confrontational—the Janus ruling or the state legislation in Iowa and Wisconsin and elsewhere that follow a similar script in their attack on labor’s position of strength in the public sector.
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In 1988, the Labor Education Program (a labor studies extension school) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s School of Labor and Employment Relations established the Regina V. Polk Women’s Labor Leadership Conference (Polk School). Funding through an annual grant established in honor of International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) Local 743 organizer Regina V.
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A new LAWCHA initiative to develop classroom and public knowledge of labor history
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Other than Hillary Clinton’s adoption of Bernie Sanders’s proposal to make college tuition free for most Americans, we haven’t heard much about education in this year’s election. The focus has been on economic inequality, immigration, trade, and national security – all important issues, of course.
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Readers of this blog are probably aware of what has been going on in the state of Wisconsin over the past couple of months. To recap: back in early February, Governor Scott Walker proposed a massive cut to the state education system of about $300 million, with the promise of reducing the state’s system of higher education to a “public authority.”
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