UW Faculty Need to Unionize; March on Capitol

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has it right:

State employees do it. Teachers do it. Even cops who have beats do it. "It" is collective bargaining, negotiating with employers with the power of numbers behind them.

The state budget conference committee is considering a proposal that would extend this right to University of Wisconsin faculty and academic staff...

Having granted even police officers and firefighters the right to organize, it cannot reasonably be denied to UW faculty and academic staff, groups that include far more folks than tenured professors in any case.

If you go in the Capitol on any weekday in this no-budget season, you'll see a group of public employees circling inside the dome.  They are members of AFSCME and the AFT, wearing their union T-shirts and carrying signs.  The UW faculty should be there also, and our representatives should be working the offices and hearing rooms.  If only it were legal.

- Barry Orton

Comments

[Gina]

If by UW faculty, you mean those in Madison who could most easily do so -- have they finally come around to joining the other campuses' faculties for collective bargaining rights?

Or are the UW-Madison faculty still demanding their list of "conditions" that gut the bill? They have killed the bill's chances every time before this for faculty in the rest of the state, who need it most . . . and they teach more, too, so they don't have the time for the trek to Madison to see its separate faculty pseudo-union, PROFS, fight the bill and kill it again.

[Peter]

No, the Assembly GOP is what's preventing this.

I've heard that the Democratic caucuses in both houses will work to bring this up after the budget...whenever that is.