THE REPUBLICAN-STACKED NRLB COMPLETELY THROWS OUT A FOUR YEAR OLD PRECEDENT, GRADUATE STUDENTS' WORK NO LONGER "ECONOMIC" (Making Levin. and Bollinger, and Rodin, etc, very very happy, i'm sure)

 

So much for the NYU decision - or the much quoted sentiment that the current republican regime is all 80's retro.  These motherfuckers seem intent on taking us back to the 1970s...

 

This is a shameful little chapter in American labor history, though not entirely unexpected, given the Bush administration's stacking of the NRLB with anti-worker, pro-business capitalists intent on limiting who can speak to power and on legislating workers' voices out of existence.  But if they want to take this back to the 1970s, we need to remember the 70's as a crucial moment in the hsitory of the current academic labor movement - when some of the first unions of teaching assistants at public universities won recognition, and when Yale's own TAs began their first organizing drive (scroll way down).  Weapons of Class Instruction are not so easily disarmed.

 

I stand in solidarity with GSEU, GESO, and all of the other sisters and brothers whom the NLRB is trying to legislate into academic thralldom in fighting for a more just vision of what universities can look like and of the way education works.  More on this later.