cohostunionnews

a Cohost account about unions

mirroring and keeping a pulse on cool union stuff around the english-speaking (and occasionally non-english-speaking) world. run by @alyaza


Workers of the world, awaken! Break your chains, demand your rights!


Cohost Union News website
alyaza.neocities.org/CohostUnionNews/

Yesterday saw another big academia union win as the Contract Faculty United of New York University carried their union election by a 553-72 margin! It took four years for CFU-NYU, but they have joined the likes of Barnard, BU, Tufts, and Fordham as "private schools that have seen faculty unionization".

I find this union especially interesting because while it's obviously motivated by bread-and-butter issues such as cost of living and job security, it's also motivated by concerns like academic freedom. In an interview with Jacobin for example, CFU-NYU union organizer Jacob Remes notes that:

[...]If somebody upsets a powerful donor, comes under the crosshairs of some scheming right-wing, scheming person, or gets doxxed or videotaped doing whatever, it won’t be an easy thing for the administration to fire that person. If there’s a vulnerable person, and the question is whether to fight to save that person’s job, most administrations are going to say we don’t want to have that fight. That person is gone.

And indeed we've seen a sharp uptick in attacks on campus freedom and outspoken social justice activists in the past few months, particularly in relation to what's happening in Palestine. This is definitely not an idle concern anymore (especially at a private university like NYU)—and it makes sense that faculty would want protections in this space.


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