US Politics

Thousands of workers at universities have gone on strike in 2023 amid new union contract negotiations in demand of pay increases that align with the effect high inflation rates have had on the cost of living.The strikes are a continuation of wave of industrial action in higher education in the US last year. In late 2022, 48,000 graduate workers and post-doctoral researchers went on strike throughout the University of California system, the largest strike in US higher education history. There were 15 academic strikes in the US in 2022, the highest number of strikes in academia in at least 20 years.This uptick in strikes coincides with a surge in union organizing at US academic institutions. Since early 2022, graduate and undergraduate workers at 20 private academic institutions, representing over 25,000 workers, have won union elections filed with the National Labor Relations Board.This strike surge has continued into 2023. Around 700 graduate workers at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, went on strike on 31 January before reaching a new union contract agreement in March 2023. And 1,500 faculty members at University of Illinois Chicago went on strike in January 2023, winning a new contract after several days on strike.Over 9,000 faculty staff, adjunct lecturers, and graduate workers represented by Rutgers AAUP-AFT, Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union and AAUP-BHSNJ went on strike at three campuses of Rutgers University in New Jersey starting on 10 April. The unions reached an agreement to end the strike on 15 April, which was the first strike in the school’s 257-year history as union contract negotiations stalled after 10 months of bargaining without a contract.The unions criticized Rutgers’ role in soaring rent costs in the area given the university is the largest landlord in the New Brunswick, New Jersey, area. The university system has also been criticized for poor investments of endowment funds and overspending on sports programs.“At the core of our fight is privileging just contracts for the most vulnerable workers and for us, this contract fight is the graduate students and the adjunct track, they are the lowest paid,” said Donna Murch, an associate professor of history and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.Murch estimated around 70% of the university had shut down due to the strike. She cited the strike and picket protests have received an outpouring of support from the community, students and local unions.“We’re committed to a vision of intersectional organizing, where we figure out how to bring together a broad spectrum of people that how to organize, come together to fight for a broad spectrum of the workforce,” added Murch.The Rutgers University administration threatened to take legal action in response to the strike through a court injunction over claims the strike was illegal but has held off on the action as the New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, has intervened and encouraged both sides to reach an agreement at the bargaining table. The president of Rutgers, Jonathan Holloway, called the strike “deeply disappointing”.An open letter from hundreds of scholars around the US was written in response to Holloway’s threat of an injunction to halt the strike and asking him to reconsider his support of David Cohen as the university’s lead negotiator, who has a poor relationship with labor unions following his tenure as former New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s head of labor relations.On 11 April, about 280 faculty and staff at Governors State University in Illinois went on strike, joining around 100 faculty at Chicago State University and 300 faculty at Eastern Illinois University who began striking earlier this month in demand for fair pay increases.The University of Michigan recently lost an attempt to obtain a court injunction against 2,300 graduate workers who began striking on 29 March, after a judge denied the request to issue an injunction to halt the strike.“We feel this a really precedent setting decision because public sector workers don’t have the right to strike in the state of Michigan, it’s illegal here, but the judge said injunctive relief is not appropriate and we hope it will strengthen the resolve for other workers and make them more willing to go on strike,” said Amir Fleischmann, contract committee chair for Graduate Employees’ Organization 3550, which represents graduate workers at the University of Michigan.The workers are pushing for wage increases to $38,000 a year for graduate workers, additional support services for international students, parents, and students with disabilities, and stronger sexual harassment protections.“Many of us are struggling,” added Fleischmann. “We are on strike for a better university. This is a public institution that is supposed to serve the public. We’re putting forward a vision of this university where no matter your economic class, no matter your social identity, you will come here and thrive as a graduate student.” More

The supreme court is poised to decide whether to preserve access to a widely used abortion medication, after extending its deadline to act until at least Friday.Less than a year after the court’s conservative majority overturned Roe v Wade and eliminated a constitutional right to an abortion, the justices are now weighing new legal questions in an escalating case in Texas with potentially sweeping implications for women’s reproductive health and the federal drug approval process.For now, the court is not weighing the merits of a legal challenge brought by abortion opponents seeking to suspend the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of mifepristone. At issue before the court is whether to allow restrictions on the drug imposed by a lower court that would sharply limit access to the drug, including in states where abortion remains legal.The justices had initially set a deadline of 11.59pm on Wednesday, but that afternoon, Justice Samuel Alito issued a brief order extending the court’s deadline by 48 hours. The one-sentence order provided no explanation for the delay but indicated the court expects to act before midnight on Friday.The legal clash began in Texas, with US district judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling to revoke the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, a drug first approved more than two decades ago and used by more than 5 million women to end their pregnancies.The Biden administration immediately appealed the decision, which it assailed as an unprecedented attack on the the FDA’s decision-making. The US court of appeals for the 5th circuit then temporarily blocked the Texas decision, preserving access to mifepristone while the legal case plays out, but reversed regulatory actions taken by the FDA since 2016 that expanded access to the pill. Those changes include allowing patients to receive the drug by mail, and extending its use from seven to 10 weeks of pregnancy.The Biden administration and drugmakers next asked the supreme court to pause the lower court’s ruling, arguing that reimposing the barriers would create chaos in the marketplace and cause confusion for providers and patients.Alliance Defending Freedom, a coalition of anti-abortion doctors and organizations, has argued that the FDA failed to follow proper protocols when it approved mifepristone and has since ignored safety risks of the medication. Medical experts have said the claims are dubious and not based on scientific evidence.Complicating the legal landscape around this case, a federal judge in Washington state, Thomas Rice, issued a contradictory ruling in a separate lawsuit brought by Democratic attorneys general in 17 states and the District of Columbia. The order, which Rice reaffirmed after the appeals ruling in the Texas case, blocked the FDA from limiting the availability of mifepristone in those states.Since the fall of Roe, more than a dozen US states have banned or severely restricted abortion. But many other states have moved in the opposite direction, approving legislation and ballot measures that protect abortion rights. Amid the patchwork legal landscape, attention has turned to medication abortion, which can be obtained by mail and administered at home.Mifepristone is the first pill in a two-drug regimen that is the most common method of ending a pregnancy, accounting for more than half of all abortions in the US. Decades of research and data from hundreds of medical studies have shown that it is both a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.The drug first won FDA approval in 2000, and over the years the agency has loosened restrictions on its use. Those changes include allowing the drug’s use from seven to 10 weeks of pregnancy, lowering the dosage of mifepristone needed to safely end a pregnancy, allowing the pills to be delivered by mail, eliminating the in-person doctors visit requirement and approving a generic version.Depending on how the justices rule, those changes could be reversed, at least while the case proceeds through the courts. On Wednesday, GenBioPro, the manufacturer of the generic form of mifepristone, sued the FDA to keep the drug on the market, setting up a new front in the legal battle over access to abortion medication. More

Scores of rightwing extremists were defeated in school board elections in April, in a victory for the left in the US and what Democrats hope could prove to be a playbook for running against Republicans in the year ahead.In Illinois, Democrats said more than 70% of the school board candidates it had endorsed won their races, often defeating the kind of anti-LGBTQ+ culture warrior candidates who have taken control of school boards across the country.Republican-backed candidates in Wisconsin also fared poorly. Moms for Liberty, a rightwing group linked to wealthy Republican donors which has been behind book-banning campaigns in the US, said only eight of its endorsed candidates won election to school boards, and other conservative groups also reported disappointing performances.The results come as education and free speech organizations have warned of a new surge in book bans in public schools in America. Over the past two years conservatives in states around the US have removed hundreds of books from school classrooms and libraries. The targeted books have largely been texts which address race and LGBTQ+ issues, or are written by people of color or LGBTQ+ authors.“Fortunately, the voters saw through the hidden extremists who were running for school board – across the [Chicago] suburbs especially,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, said after the results came in.“Really, the extremists got trounced yesterday.”Pritzker added: “I’m glad that those folks were shown up and, frankly, tossed out.”The Democratic party of Illinois spent $300,000 on races in Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reported, endorsing dozens of candidates. The party said 84 of 117 candidates it had recommended won their races.Teachers unions, including the Illinois Education Association, endorsed candidates in school board elections around the state. The IEA backed candidates in about 100 races, and around 90% of those candidates won, said Kathi Griffin, the organization’s president.“I would hope that the tide is turning, to make sure that people who want to have those [school board] positions because they want to do good for our kids, continue [to get elected],” Griffin said.“I think that oftentimes these fringe candidates are funded with dark money. That dark money comes from outside our state.”The results were disappointing for conservative groups, who had pumped money into races.The 1776 Project, a political action committee which received funding from Richard Uihlein, a billionaire GOP donor, said only a third of the 63 candidates it had backed in Illinois and Wisconsin had won their races. Politico first reported on the lackluster performances.Union-endorsed candidates won two-thirds of their school board races in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported, although Republican-supported candidates performed better in rural areas.Ben Hardin, executive director of the Democratic party of Illinois, said “values were on the line in these races”.“We knew this work wouldn’t be easy, especially given the organized movement from the far right to disguise their true agenda, but we’re grateful that voters saw through the falsehoods and turned out to support credible community advocates,” he said.“I’m proud that Illinoisans once again voted for fairness, equity and inclusion in our state.”With other states holding school board elections later this year – and a critical presidential election in 2024 – the successes offered some hope for Democrats.At the local level, at least, Griffin said the results “showed the value of having relationships within the community”.“When you have teachers who are part of the community, who have relationships with parents, with other community members who engage in community activities and support that community, there’s a level of trust that is built and that has happened across our state,” she said. More

Kathleen McLaughlin has a rare chronic illness and needs regular treatments using people’s blood plasma. She started researching the US blood plasma industry a decade ago and has written a book, Blood Money, about what it says about class, race and inequality.
This week, she speaks to Joan E Greve about what she’s learned about the for-profit blood plasma industry
• How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

The US president Joe Biden and his team may announce his re-election campaign by video next week, according to a source familiar with the matter on Thursday.An announcement on Tuesday by Biden, 80, would coincide with the anniversary of his 2020 campaign launch four years earlier, the source said, asking not to be identified.Biden aides have ramped up planning for the long-expected launch of the president’s bid for a second, four-year term in 2024. Last week, Biden said he would launch his campaign “relatively soon”.He has long said he intends to run again but the lack of a formal announcement had seeded doubt among supporters about whether one of the oldest world leaders would or should commit to another four-year term. He would be 86 at the end of a second term.In recent weeks, Biden has laid out the likely themes of a re-election bid in political speeches, secured a doctor’s note that he is “fit for duty”, told Democrats to re-order the party’s primary calendar in a manner favoring his nomination and picked Chicago as the city where he would ostensibly formally become the nominee next year. More

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Mike Lindell must make good on a promise and pay $5m to a software expert who debunked data the conspiracy theorist touted in advancing Donald Trump’s lie that his 2020 election defeat was the result of voting fraud, an arbitration panel decided.In its decision, the panel said: “The data Lindell LLC provided, and represented reflected information from the November 2020 election, unequivocally did not reflect November 2020 election data.”Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020 was conclusive: by more than 7m votes and a clear margin in the electoral college.But Lindell, chief executive of MyPillow, has spent millions in support of Trump’s lie.He announced his “Prove Mike Wrong Challenge” at a “cyber symposium” in South Dakota in 2021, saying he would give $5m to anyone who could disprove what he claimed was genuine election data he had obtained.On Thursday, CNN quoted from a deposition in which Lindell said: “The symposium was to get the big audience and have all the media there and … the cyber guys saying, ‘Yes this data is from the 2020 election and you better look at how they intruded into our machines, our computers,’ and that was the whole purpose.”If he put up $5m, he said, “it would get news, which it did”.On Wednesday, a panel of the American Arbitration Association ruled in a dispute between Lindell and Robert Zeidman, an expert who took up the challenge.Based on its analysis, the panel said, “Mr Zeidman performed under the contract … Failure to pay Mr Zeidman the $5m prized was a breach of the contract, entitling him to recover.”An attorney for Zeidman, Brian Glasser, told CNN: “The lawsuit and verdict mark another important moment in the ongoing proof that the 2020 election was legal and valid, and the role of cybersecurity in ensuring that integrity.“Lindell’s claim to have 2020 election data has been definitively disproved.”Lindell used “a brief phone interview” with CNN to “slam the media and profess the need to get rid of electronic voting machines”. He also said the arbitration decision would “end up in court”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCarl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, Virginia, told the Guardian: “The contest rules provided in the arbitration stated that disputes were to be ‘resolved exclusively by final and binding arbitration’ and observed that arbitration ‘is subject to very limited review by courts’. Thus, Lindell cannot directly appeal the arbitration panel ruling to a court.“Lindell can request that a federal court nullify the decision, if he can show that it reflected ‘manifest injustice’. Nevertheless, federal courts rarely rule that litigants satisfy that exceedingly high standard.”Lindell already faces lawsuits arising from his claims about electoral fraud, including a $1.3bn suit from Dominion Voter Systems, which this week reached a $787.5m settlement with Fox Corp over its broadcast of election-related lies.Lindell’s counter-suits against Dominion and another voting machine company, Smartmatic, were dismissed by a judge as “frivolous” and “groundless”.On Thursday, the law professor and former White House ethics tsar Richard Painter said: “Pay up, Pillow Man. People who don’t believe in objective truth are being told to write some big checks this week, and you’ll be one of them.” More

Donald Trump on Thursday was rebuked by the judge in his looming civil rape trial over a request for jurors to be told that if the former president did not testify, it would be out of concern that his presence would adversely affect New York City.This week, a lawyer for Trump, Joe Tacopina, first tried to delay the trial then requested the jury instruction.In a letter to federal judge Lewis A Kaplan on Wednesday, Tacopina said jurors should be told: “While no litigant is required to appear at a civil trial, the absence of the defendant in this matter, by design, avoids the logistical burdens that his presence, as the former president, would cause the courthouse and New York City.“Accordingly, his presence is excused unless and until he is called by either party to testify.”The next day, Kaplan responded: “The decision whether to attend or testify is [Trump’s] alone to make.”Noting that Trump’s accuser, the writer E Jean Carroll, has said she does not intend to call him, Kaplan said: “There is nothing for the court to excuse.”Kaplan also said he did not accept Trump’s claim about “alleged burdens on the courthouse or the city”, because he was confident the US Secret Service – which protects all former presidents – and the US Marshals Service, in charge of federal courthouse security, would cope.Trump, Kaplan said, “will speak at a campaign event in New Hampshire on 27 April, the third day of the scheduled trial in this case. If the Secret Service can protect him at that event, certainly the Secret Service, the Marshals Service, and the city of New York can see to his security in this very secure federal courthouse.”The case concerns an alleged rape in the changing rooms of a New York department store in the mid-1990s, a claim Carroll made in 2019.Trump denies it. Carroll sued him for defamation, then sued again, for defamation and battery, under New York state’s Adult Survivors Act, a law that eliminates civil filing deadlines for alleged victims of long-ago sexual assaults.The trial in the first suit has been delayed while lawyers wrangle over whether Trump’s remarks were part of his duties as president, and thus protected. The trial next week concerns the second suit.Kaplan said the start date had been known since early February.“There has been quite ample time within which to make whatever logistical arrangements should be made for [Trump’s] attendance,” he said, “and certainly quite a bit more time than the five or six days between recent indictment on state criminal charges and his arraignment on that indictment approximately one block from the site of this case.”In the other case mentioned by Kaplan, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsification of business records, related to his hush money payment to the adult film star Stormy Daniels, who claims an affair he denies.Since then, Trump has surged in the race for the Republican presidential nomination, notwithstanding the fact he also faces state and federal investigations of his 2020 election subversion, a federal investigation of his handling of classified material, and a civil suit in New York over his business and tax affairs.In the Carroll case, Kaplan stressed, “the question of the requested jury instruction is premature. Mr Trump is free to attend, testify or both. He is free also to do none of these things.”Trump’s attorneys, Kaplan said again, would not be allowed to tell the jury he wanted to testify but had chosen to spare court and city the “burdens” of his presence. More