Student organizers pissed at SEIU/UNITE HERE coalition; are SEIU & UNITE HERE company unions?

Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which has been at the centre of several controversies within the U.S. labour movement in the past few years (Change to Win Coalition, SEIU vs California Nurses Union, et cetera), has been accused of abusing the trust of some student volunteer organizers on several U.S. university campuses. Jack Stripling wrote an article about the students concerns for Inside Higher Ed that’s pretty interesting; I would encourage you to check it out. The students, who had been helping SEIU organize service workers (mostly food services + janitorial), feel SEIU has treated them as ‘pawns’. They have released an open letter detailing their problems with SEIU at several campuses and listing a series of demands for SEIU to do: improving internal union democracy, fight for better contracts with Aramark, stop using students and campus workers as pawns in corporate campaigns.

Liberals vs Conservatives on Education Fiscal Accountability: The Futility of Choosing Sides for the Left

This shows the danger in arguing for increased ‘fiscal accountability’ for post-secondary institutions without having a proper analysis of what fiscal accountability entails and who (and what political projects) you may be implicitly supporting by doing so.William Durden¹, President of Dickinson College in the US, argues against the current push in the US on ‘fiscal accountability’ for universities.

Newsflash: Tuition bad!

I came across this article from the Ottawa Citizen (via Inside Higher Ed) on what is (at first blush) an attempt by Maritime universities to respond to the ubiquitous ‘market forces’ and drop their tuition fees (i.e. price) to attract Ontario students. While I wish I could state that student mobilization was the sole cause of these developments, I can’t, but I also find it irritating that the article treats it merely as a something to be determined by the market.

What is more important, and what the article doesn’t really discuss, is that the maritime provinces saw some of the most punishing tuition increases in the 1990s, and as a result are more ‘coming into line’ with the rest of the country than anything else.

Although I did enjoy this humorous quote at the end of the article:

“Tuition fees seem to influence students’ choice of institution,” a commission report concludes.

Quite shocking, really.