How a Small Liberal Arts College in Iowa Could Hand Trump a Big Win Against Labor Rights
Grinnell College has decided to fight its growing undergraduate student worker union.
TONYA RILEY
DECEMBER 14, 2018 12:36 PM
Update (12/14/18, 5:10 pm): Late on Friday, Grinnell College’s undergraduate union announced that it had decided to withdraw its petition seeking broader recognition from the National Labor Relations Board. A Grinnell College spokesperson tells Mother Jones it will not oppose the union’s request. Mother Jones has reached out the NLRB for more information.
While the majority of America’s undergraduates are squirreled away in campus libraries preparing for finals, student workers at Grinnell College are preparing for a union showdown that could have serious implications for the future of organizing in the Trump era.
The previously friendly relationship between the small, private Iowa college’s administrators and its undergraduate student worker union began to sour in 2017, when the union announced its intentions to expand representation from roughly 300 dining workers to potentially 1,200 student workers campuswide. The school’s efforts to block the vote were rejected by the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board, and in November, 274 of 366 voting members passed a motion to expand the union. The college is now appealing to the full NLRB to block the union based on its “potential to interfere with Grinnell’s role in its undergraduates’ ‘academic or personal development.'”
“Expanding the union could effectively insert a third party whose priorities are economic, not educational, into learning outside of the classroom and alter the relationship between students and faculty,” administrators wrote in explaining the college’s anti-union stance. “These are consequences that we believe will chip away at the College’s core mission and culture, impede learning, and ultimately diminish educational opportunities for students.” According to Grinnell’s NLRB complaint, roughly 70 percent of the school’s population receives financial aid that includes work study, but the award “supports their overall academic education.” The school argues that “funding is not pay for a job.”
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/12/grinnell-college-union-nlrb-national-labor-relations-board/
Amazing, when you go to college you are taught the virtues of majority rule, and when people decide to exercise that right, while at the same time taking dollars from the very students that want to be represented..................well its a basic fuck you, we now can intimidate..................you and others................we like slave labor .......................
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