Donna Murch: What's exciting about Rutgers is that we all know about the incredible social inequality in the US and how it's getting worse day by day. The only solution I see for this is greater labor organizing period, she says. "Real left labor unions are really important for economic gains and also as political opposition"
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute.
Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.
