Thousands of Higher-Education Workers Urgently Need Your Help

This is of such high importance that it is being posted a second time with another urgent message to take actions

Dear Jon,

Thousands of higher-education workers are asking for your help.

Graduate employees at Columbia and Yale universities are
fighting to have their union recognized. More than 4,000 workers
at CUNY and SUNY research foundations in New York are trying to
form a union. CUNY faculty members are struggling to win a fair
contract. But everywhere, higher-education employers and their
subcontractors run anti-worker campaigns and flagrantly violate
the spirit and letter of our labor laws.

The use of fear and intimidation by higher-education employers
is unacceptable, objectionable and hypocritical - think of the
union movement's long record of support for education and the
social mission of higher education. It is time institutions of
higher education adopt a core set of principles that allow
workers to freely decide for themselves whether to form unions.

Please click on the link below to sign the Declaration of
Principles and tell these schools to uphold strict standards
that respect the will of the majority of workers and honor their
decision to have a union.

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/
GradEmployees/wnw3af7bme7t

Employers' coercive tactics and legal delays deny
higher-education workers a free and fair choice, and our system
of labor laws no longer protects the freedom to form unions. In
fact, the Republican-controlled National Labor Relations Board
(NLRB) is part of the problem. Recently the Board denied Brown
University graduate student employees the protections to form
unions under the National Labor Relations Act.

But the NLRB's ruling in Brown in no way bans graduate employees
from organizing or universities from recognizing their unions.
And their rights are recognized by the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948), the International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (1966), the International Labor Organization's
Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work (1988),
and all the other leading human rights charters.

So graduate employees at Columbia, Yale and elsewhere continue
to form unions despite the NLRB's lack of support, and it would
be perfectly legal and appropriate for university leaders to
recognize their democratic longings. Click on the link below
right now and urge the Yale and Columbia university presidents
and the chancellors at SUNY and CUNY to respect the decision of
workers to form a union - without harassment, intimidation or
coercion.

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/
GradEmployees/wnw3af7bme7t

Please ask 10 friends right now to tell these institutions of
higher learning to adopt clear sets of standards that respects
the basic and fundamental human rights of freedom of association
and collective bargaining.

Click below to ask your friends to take action:

http://www.unionvoice.org/campaign/
GradEmployees/forward/wnw3af7bme7t

Together we will win.

In Solidarity,

Andy Levin
Director, Voice@Work Campaign
AFL-CIO