AFT FACE - Anti-Union Mackinac Center – Shockingly – Takes Anti-Union Stance on Research Assistant Unionization

Anti-Union Mackinac Center – Shockingly – Takes Anti-Union Stance on Research Assistant Unionization

Friday, 29 July 2011

In unsurprising news, the far-right Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan has inserted itself into a campaign for union recognition for graduate research assistants at the University of Michigan. The center and a graduate research employee have filed a complaint with the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) in an effort to stop the recognition election.

The Mackinac Center is part of a nation-wide network of conservative think tanks, funded by the Koch brothers and other right-wing philanthropists, that have been pushing to dismantle the public sector in order to privatize public resources. They have advocated privatizing the University of Michigan and have harassed labor studies professors at the University of Michigan, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University by invoking the Michigan version of the Freedom of Information Act for email fishing expeditions. Given their anti-union and anti-public sector biases, it's hardly news that they'd try to wedge themselves into the research assistant unionization campaign in Ann Arbor.

What is significant is the exceedingly thin fig-leaf which the Mackinac Center hides their anti-worker proclivities behind: claiming that almost 30 years ago, MERC made a decision that research assistants are not employees, and the only thing that has changed in those 30 years is the Board of Regents. The claim is absurd on its face - universities are relying more and more upon the work of graduate assistants to provide the core work of teaching and research, work that oftentimes is only tangentially related to the academic interests of the graduate student. In addition, the Mackinac Center falls back on the lame anti-union talking point that we see wherever graduate employees organize - the "union will come between the graduate employee and their academic adviser/mentor," a claim which is easily refuted by talking to the tens of thousands of graduate teaching and research assistants who have been unionized going back forty years.

The decision to form a union belongs to the research assistants at the University of Michigan. It is their workplace. They should have the right to vote. But because the Mackinac Center knows that their anti-union views wouldn't hold sway, because they fear workplace democracy, they are attempting to deny UM research assistants that right.

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