Belabored Podcast #78: The Union and the University

Subscribe to the Belabored RSS feed here. Subscribe and rate on iTunes here or on Stitcher here. Check out the full Belabored archive here. Tweet at @dissentmag with #belabored to share your thoughts, or join the conversation on Facebook. Belabored is produced by Natasha Lewis. In light of an unprecedented wave of labor organizing among graduate students, you might think the American college campus is being radicalized by an insurgency of revolutionary grad assistants. Actually, it’s more like graduate students are finding it harder and harder to survive on meager stipends under exploitative working conditions, and are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the commercialization of higher education in general. In response, many are finding creative ways to organize for fair pay and working conditions and more rights on a job that, until recently, many didn’t even consider a real job. This week, we bring you a live recording of Dissent’s recent forum on graduate student organizing, with Ella Wind of NYU, Kelly Goodman of Yale, Andrea Crow and Lindsey Dayton of Columbia, Cristina Groeger of Harvard, and Eli Nadeau of the New School for Social Research. They discuss the prospects for building an academic labor movement and, more specifically, the campaign to reverse a longstanding National Labor Relations Board precedent that bars graduate students from unionizing. In other news, we look at minimum wage hikes from coast to coast, growing inequality around the world, and adjunct labor in the classroom.   News Michelle: LA’s Minimum Wage Workers Just Won $15 an Hour—How Many Will Actually Be Paid That? (The Nation) #LARaiseTheWage Report: Global inequality continues to rise (Al Jazeera America) Original OECD report   Conversation: Michelle: Could Yale Graduate Students Be the Next to Unionize? (The Nation) NYU Victory: A Catalyst for University Organizing? (Dissent) GSOC-UAW Local 2110 Graduate Employees and Students Organization (GESO) GWC-UAW Local 2110 Graduate Workers of Columbia Hearings begin in New School grad-union recognition case (Capital New York)   Argh, I Wish I’d Written That! Laura McKenna, The Cost of an Adjunct (The Atlantic) The post Belabored Podcast #78: The Union and the University appeared first on Dissent Magazine.