Link: UC Workers on Strike

Workers on strike at a University of California campus, May 7, 2018. 

Photo Credit Meagan Day

Megan Day at Jacobin delves into how the UC Strike is a fight against privatization of the university and the education system:

One of the main battles AFSCME workers face is the constant threat of seeing their jobs outsourced to nonunion workers employed by for-profit companies. As the university increasingly privatizes aspects of its operations, workers employed by the institution are always looking over their shoulder, fearful that their jobs will evaporate overnight and they’ll be replaced by workers who answer to a different boss. “Every day we’re paying attention to when we see new faces on board,” said [UC Berkeley custodian Maricruz] Manzanares. “Suddenly we see a new group of workers and we don’t even know who they are, until we talk to each other and the union and we find out they belong to a company. Lately the university has developed shady techniques. They used to do it openly, but now they’re finding ways to do it in the dark.” Either way, she said, “the university does not behave as a public institution.”

The three day strike ended Wednesday, but UC's response and the question of further action are up in the air.

Read more...

Teachers in other states are striking. Texas teachers can't do that.

Source: Texas Tribune

Texas statute says any employees who "strike or engage in an organized work stoppage against the state or a political subdivision of the state" will lose all their "civil service rights, reemployment rights, and any other rights, benefits, and privileges the employee enjoys as a result of public employment or former public employment."

That’s us -- we’re state employees and community colleges are “political subdivisions of the state.” This, while the State of Texas is persistently decreasing funding of community colleges while increasing regulation and control over curriculum.

Read more from the Texas Tribune.

Considering Our Profession as a Death Sentence

In light of recent violence in Florida, Maine, Austin, and elsewhere, educators and staff must be aware of how education has shifted over decades from a respite of intellectual conversations to a politicized (and often silenced) rhetoric of violence -- physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Managers (politicians, including very local elected or “selected” politicians in the guise of educator administrators) respond to violence as policy and police without the systemic critique how society sees educators and students as threats.

Educator P. L. Thomas addresses this is part of his blog critique of the neoliberal educational complex:

For decades now, many of us in education who believe in the possibility of universal public education have feared the death of teaching and learning, but we have imagined that coming from policy, free market and accountability approaches to so-called reform.

But something more sinister is happening: Schools have always labored under the weight of the communities they serve, and teaching and learning is now dying a slow and horrible death because of America’s gun culture combined with those bureaucratic monsters many of us were mostly pointing to.

To read more, see Thomas’s “The Death of Teaching and Learning in America.”

Link: Portrait of a Budget Cut

"My office mate once pointed out that there’s no such thing as a budget cut. There are only resource cuts, class cuts, people cuts. Budgets don’t hurt when they get cut. I do."

Last month at Inside Higher Ed, Adjunct Professor Sara Tatyana Bernstein wrote about her experience being a "budget cut" and the subtle dehumanization brought about not just by having her job and livelihood cut, but getting an email informing her of the cut titled "2017-2018 Budget Cuts."

It's an important reminder of the need for solidarity between full time and adjunct faculty, and of the ways that rhetorical choices made by administration can rub salt in a wound.

Read her account, "Portrait of a Budget Cut," here.