Inside Higher Ed: Lacking Collective Bargaining Rights, but Organizing Anyway
A union is fundamentally an organization of people.
In this piece in Inside Higher Ed, Ryan Quinn interviews UCW members Alex Young and Wendy Goldberg as well as UCW campaign lead Melanie Barron, who discuss how and why UCW is organizing in non-bargaining states: because workers need unions now, and we cannot afford to wait for the laws to catch up. Interviewees point out that wall to wall organizing is an old school form of labor organizing because collective bargaining wasn't always a tool that was available to the labor movement. Like any other tool or protection we enjoy as workers, it had to be won. While the bosses would like us to believe that "unions are illegal" because they've had some success in limiting our bargaining rights in certain contexts, the truth is our right to unionize is federally protected, and we have a ton of power when we come together as workers.