Tea Party obstruction and liberal hypocrisy, defied: NYU grad students poised to make history
Source: Salon.com
GOP senators and Obama's Treasury Secretary helped NYU shut out its grad students for 8 years. That's about to end
Josh Eidelson
A vote being held tomorrow and Wednesday could secure union recognition for New York University graduate students, which the administration withdrew and then withheld from them — with help from congressional Republicans and Obama’s now-Treasury Secretary — for the past eight years. If the United Auto Workers emerges victorious in the vote, NYU will become only private sector U.S. university to bargain collectively with graduate student teachers and researchers — though such workers will remain excluded from U.S. labor law.
“We are a critical part of the university,” said Matthew Canfield, a leader of the UAW’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee at NYU. By “recognizing our rights,” he argued, NYU was moving closer to becoming “a better and more inclusive place for everyone.” Canfield told Salon it had become “incredibly difficult” for grad student workers to support families, and that GSOC was “pretty confident” of victory in Wednesday’s vote count.
“We felt there was a middle ground,” NYU Executive Vice President Robert Berne told Salon. He said NYU expects “that if the union wins, we will start to bargain right away.”
Under the agreement, announced just before Thanksgiving, the UAW has agreed to the withdrawal of a legal case asking the National Labor Relations Board to recognize graduate student teachers and researchers as workers with union rights; NYU has agreed to recognize and bargain with most of the graduate student workers the UAW seeks to represent, if they vote union in an American Arbitration Association-supervised election in which NYU has pledged to remain neutral.
FULL story at link.
Read more: http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/tea_party_obstruction_and_liberal_hypocrisy_defied_nyu_grad_students_poised_to_make_history/
John Boehner, Jack Lew, Ted Cruz (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite)
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"getting to know you" with a Treasury Secretary in his 2nd term.
You do know that the incumbent in the position spoke with Obama every waking day of life in his previous position as WH Chief of Staff?
The man was familiar to him, he had the skills to do the job, he could pass the "Advise and Consent" drill in a skin-of-teeth (D) Senate, and he was ready to go to work immediately.
I swear, some people here think Obama has all damn day to micromanage shit. He doesn't. He's the Chief Executive, not the nanny. He doesn't have time to sit around coddling and exhorting and getting down in the weeds. He picks people who are politically loyal and can do the job, gives them general direction and tells them to let him know if anything comes up.
They don't have to pass some quirky little "purity test" that has nothing to do with the job they are undertaking. And they never will. That's just not how it works. I await the predictable excoriation for my truth-telling.
Bottom line--Obama had nothing to do with this story. It happened BEFORE the Treasury Secretary came to work for him. Inserting him into it was FauxSnoozian, at best. He's mentioned in the headline and the lead paragraph solely to pull people in, and he's not mentioned subsequently because he had nothing to do with the issues that were discussed.
That's a cheap shot, by any measure. It's "guilt by association" and it's some nasty "journalism."
