[xmca] Fwd: petition to support graduate student labor - please sign!

[Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>]

XMCA'rs,
Please take a couple seconds to sign the petition and circulate widely at
local institutions (details on the website and below).
http://gradlaborcounts.org

-greg

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Anne Ch'ien <amchien@uchicago.edu>
Date: Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 10:53 AM
Subject: petition to support graduate student labor - please sign!
To:
Dear Friends,

This week, Graduate Students United at the University of Chicago launched a
national campaign calling on the National Labor Relations Board to rule on
a case brought by NYU Graduate Student Organizing Committee that would
likely determine the employment status of graduate student teaching and
research assistants at private universities.

We’re calling the campaign “Grad Labor Counts!” and have created a petition
hosted at http://gradlaborcounts.org that has already received over 600
signatures. To support the campaign, please sign the petition and have
your friends, classmates, and colleagues do the same. Please help spread
the word via email, Facebook, and Twitter. As this campaign has national
scope, we encourage you to  circulate the petition as widely as possible.
All signatures are welcome, not just those of graduate students!

Below is background (also available at the site).

Grad Students United
University of Chicago

----------------------------------------------------------------------
BACKGROUND

In 2004, under the influence of the Bush administration, the National
Labor Relations Board (NLRB) revoked their earlier, unanimous decision to
legally define graduate student teaching and research assistants at
private universities as employees. As a consequence of this decision,
private university administrations were no longer legally required to
recognize graduate student employee unions, or to negotiate with them over
the terms of graduate employment (i.e., wages, benefits, and working
conditions). A year and a half ago, the graduate employee union at NYU—the
Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC)—submitted a new petition to
the NLRB asking them to once again define graduate students as employees
and to order an election in which grad employees would vote on whether or
not to formally unionize.

The current NLRB, which consists only of three members, has yet to rule on
the GSOC petition. Craig Becker, one of the three members of the NLRB and
an Obama appointee, will step down from his position on the Board when his
term ends on December 31, 2011. Additionally, it is highly likely that
President Obama will not appoint a replacement for Becker until after the
November 2012 election in order to avoid political controversy that might
jeopardize his reelection. With only two members, the NLRB will be unable
to form a quorum and therefore unable to pass rulings on any issue that
comes before it.

Graduate Students United (GSU) is launching a two-phase campaign to
address this situation. In Phase One, GSU will coordinate with other
graduate student employee unions across the country in order to put
pressure on the NLRB to rule on the GSOC petition before the end of
Becker’s term. In Phase Two, beginning in the new year, GSU will expand
the scope of its critique, highlighting the attack on labor constituted by
the politically-motivated dysfunctionality of the NLRB and the broken
political process that has facilitated this dysfunction.




-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego




-- 
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
Sanford I. Berman Post-Doctoral Scholar
Department of Communication
University of California, San Diego
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