University of California workers are striking. Josh Eidelson
explains why:
Four months after former Obama Homeland Security head Janet Napolitano took the helm of the massive University of California system, unions representing 35,000 U.C. employees are staging a one-day strike over alleged illegal intimidation. [...]
At issue in today’s walkout is AFSCME’s allegation that U.C. management repeatedly violated state labor law in efforts to discourage the union’s members — patient care technical and service workers employed in medical centers – from mounting an unprecedented work stoppage last May. In charges filed with the government, AFSCME charges that administrators violated the state Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act through a battery of fear tactics: repeated statements by top officials promising or implying potential punishment for strikes; threatening postings and letters; and interrogations by individual managers.
And more:
- Macy's has some unionized workers, but apparently it's engaging in a campaign to avoid having any more. Erik Loomis has an anti-union handout from Macy's, which he describes as:
... while such a pamphlet is legal, it’s brimming with half-truths about unions that are intended to do a combination of scaring workers and making them think a union is a waste of their time and money. The highlight for me is when Macy’s says a union can’t guarantee workers benefits; technically true but what it really shows is just that Macy’s is going to refuse to negotiate for higher wages with a union.
- Education Secretary Arne Duncan's slam at "white suburban moms" was ... just plain wrong on the merits. Sabrina Joy Stevens explains:
In reality, tests scores have never exclusively reflected a child’s knowledge or skills. They reflect what a given set of test-makers and a given set of public officials decide should count as having knowledge and skills. They can’t possibly capture all of the different ways different people display their skills and knowledge, and that’s to say nothing of the many ways in which test-makers unintentionally create test items that reflect cultural and other forms of bias (hence the tight correlation with family background and income). Likewise, public officials can and do raise and lower passing scores as needed to satisfy different goals, including political ones.
The difference now is that, while the old tests used to align fairly closely with what middle- and upper-class students and schools do, the new tests subject these students and schools to a kind of mismatch similar to what low-income students and schools have always dealt with.
- Um, go Ashton Kutcher? (That was weird to type.)
- A New York City waitress says she was fired for not paying a bill her customers walked out on.