My colleagues are into round one million two hundred thousand twelve of “I hate unions” correspondence. In the meanwhile, the email from HR telling us that collectors have started bothering people for unpaid medical bills as a result of our perennial lack of budget goes unnoticed and unmentioned.
5 responses to “Priorities”
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Wow. That’s unbelievable! The faculty at my institution desperately tried to unionize but were shut down by the administration and various legal bodies. (We are a private institution and it made our case more tenuous apparently.) But the faculty at my institution were and are passionately pro-union. The faculty at your university seem so surprisingly conservative!
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I honestly never met any other kind of faculty. ☺ I’d like to, if only for the sake of variety.
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How different is the faculty from the town in which the university is located?
Also some departments tend to be more conservative than others. I would not bet on the business school faculty being “liberal.”This is intensely idiotic. The very fact that health insurance is linked to jobs at all is because during World War II certain large manufacturers could not raise wages. To retain workers they took advantage of a loophole which said that certain benefits aren’t taxed as income. I bet if you go into your employee intranet it tells you your entire “compensation package” is worth XXXXXX including those health benefits you and your employer pay the premiums for. It’ll include health benefits as part of that package even if you never elect it.
So, why is it that so many people DO NOT see not getting health insurance benefits as their paycheck being short? Would these same people throw a fit if their paycheck was short the entire amount of their premium each pay period?
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I don’t think we have anybody who was born around here. Academics tend to be pretty nomadic.
It’s not just the health benefits either. It’s a constant barrage of “women who murder unborn babies”, “evil unions”, “my sacred gun rights”, “I hate big government”, “both sides do it”, etc. Years and years of this.
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I have been thinking about the anti-union professional topic since you first mentioned it. I now recall some “academic stars” who felt that a union would prevent them from getting high salaries, since they viewed unions as a force towards standardization of everything, making everyones salary more or less the same. I do not think this actually happens most places, but people did worry about the possibility.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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