Despite decades of Equal Opportunity legislation, gender inequality persists in Australian universities. This is largely due to the shaping of universities by new market principles, discourses of individualisation that render the asymmetry of gender relations invisible, and privileging masculine epistemologies. Concurrently, industrial relations…

Purpose: This paper aims to demonstrate how the Nordic model, featuring highly regulated trade union-employer collaboration, has enabled the building of learning organizations through a co-generative learning model involving both practitioners and action researchers. Design/methodology/approach: A literature search on the Nordic sociotechnical…

The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMA), a public research university, has demonstrated a long-standing commitment to improving working conditions for non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) with a 20-year track record of progressive policies to improve the support for them. This commitment is manifested through a series of improvements in policies,…

From February to April, New America conducted over 30 interviews with experts, care providers, and union representatives, focusing on three states. This report outlines key considerations for improving care worker job quality through organizing. We also include case studies on care worker organizing in California, Illinois, Washington, and the…

The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) represents 72,000 academic staff at universities and colleges across the country. CAUT strives for fair working conditions, compensation and benefits to foster quality teaching and innovative research while advancing equity and human rights within our profession. Many of the institutions where…

Welding is used to create many things, from cars, trucks, and motorcycles to rail cars, ships, aircraft, rockets, and space stations. Welding is huge in the construction industry, too. Skyscrapers, bridges, and highways would be impossible to build without welding, as would oil and natural-gas pipelines, offshore oil platforms, wind turbines, and…

Teacher unions are hard to miss in the news lately. Newspapers, blogs, social media posts, magazine articles, and political speeches abound with talk of them. Teacher unions are a hot topic and one that probably was not covered in college classes. The noisy back-and-forth among partisans can be both mind-numbing and confusing, often creating a…

Academic work has become increasingly fragmented. The horizontal fragmentation of the profession into disciplinary tribes has been accompanied by the increasing participation of student affairs and educational development professionals located outside the academic units but are actively engaged in academic work, such as supporting teaching and…

Charter schools see as many as one in four teachers leave annually, and recent evidence attributes much of this turnover to provisions affected by collective bargaining processes and state laws such as salary, benefits, job security, and working hours. There have been many recent efforts to improve teacher voice in charter schools (Kahlenberg…

During the last twenty-five years or more, administrative jobs have increased dramatically as colleges compete for students. Who could argue that academic professionals can get by without more admissions counselors or more technology experts to make sure e-mail and computers are promptly fixed, or more fundraisers in advancement to pursue needed…

A faculty member may be surprised to hear that the AAUP-affiliated United University Professions--one of the largest academic unions in the nation, with more than 33,000 members across New York State--includes a growing number of academic professionals who are not faculty members. Professionals at a public college or university range from the…

This brief article posits that the drive to privatize public services in the US (United States) coupled with growing economic inequality are now so extreme that they threaten a cornerstone of American liberal democracy--quality public education. The argument rests on the assumption that there is such a concept as "the public good". This idea of…

To receive School Improvement Grant (SIG) funding, districts must submit an application to the state that outlines their strategic plan to implement one of four intervention models in their persistently lowest-achieving schools. The four intervention models include: (1) School Closure; (2) Restart; (3) Turnaround; and (4) Transformation. The…

The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research "in complex organisations". Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an…

How people respond at work may have a critical part to play in how bereaved or terminally ill colleagues manage their grief and their lives. Although counselors, human resources, occupational health staff, and others may have an important back-up role to play, pivotal support needs to come from line managers, colleagues, and, where they exist,…