CT Blue

The following is adapted from an email I, along with others, received from my son today.

Please sign this petition.

There is a bill introduced by Ted Kennedy and co-sponsored by our buddy Obama which will allow Teaching Assistants like myself to organize a union. It’s really important to me and will only take a second of your time.

Thanks to George Bush, people like myself who serve as teaching assistants at private universities have no legal rights as workers. Even the UN thinks this is violation of our human rights. This is a matter of basic social justice- with a union we will be able to bargain better wages and health care. But it is also about democracy in the Academy. Having a union will give us a voice.

Teaching Assistants won this right some time ago, but lost it as soon as Bush had appointed enough members of the NLRB to form a majority. (If memory serves, there are five members, with one member’s term expiring each year).