So, yours truly and 56 other people spent some time in jail yesterday for peacefully blocking a road near the campus of New York University. You may remember that NYU, one of the richest private universities in the country, has been refusing to recognize and negotiate with the graduate students’ union–even though it had already recognized the union and negotiated a contract in the past. Huh?

This is a fairly disgraceful story. Under a pre-Bush Administration National Labor Relations Board ruling, the grad students had won the right to be considered employees in 2000–and they also won a majority of the vote in the representation election. But, then, a Bush NLRB board reversed the ruling giving grad students the same legal rights as employees–so NYU said, well, we’re not going to negotiate with you.

Full stop. This is how bad a place we’re at in our country. A so-called place of higher learning, which is supposed to be imparting knowledge and in theory turning out future leaders in society, reveals itself as a promoter of one of the worst characteristics of our world–union-busting. Beneath the veneer of those fine buildings, paid for by extremely rich trustees and their long list of supporters from the elites, is the awful smell of the powerful stepping on the bodies of the powerless. And some of these university leaders view themselves as liberals, some of whom served in the Clinton Administration.

The graduate students hooked up with the American Arbitration Association, which declared that a majority of the more than 900 teaching and research assistants had signed a petition asserting that they wanted to continue to be represented by the union (which is a Local of my international union, the UAW).

In a small shout out to the NY Police Department, as far as I could tell, we were all treated respectfully…kudos to Officer Trinadad. And we’ll be back if necessary to the doors of NYU if this institution does not make things right.