An Extraordinarily Hostile Move: New School Threatens to Withhold Pay in Strike | Hacker News Reader

An Extraordinarily Hostile Move: New School Threatens to Withhold Pay in Strike

chronicle.com

11 pointsetempleton18 comments

How is this special? The whole point of a strike is to stop working as a risky bartering chip. Why would they expect to get paid whilst not working?

Because many unions are coddled, and feel "not getting paid while not working" is an unreasonable and illegal action by their employer?

I'm getting downvoted for this comment, and I must confess this whole thread is off-topic.

But: there are a lot of unions that don't seem to understand that starting a strike is starting a fight. Their only response to somebody fighting back is whining to the press. Which might work once, but in the medium-term is certain to lead to massive defeats for the labor movement.

I thought the same thing. Are there examples of companies that paid workers while they're striking? Do I just not know how strikes normally work?

Yup this is non-news. Nobody ever gets paid during a strike.

At best, there may a union fund reserved for paying workers to some degree during a strike. But that's always funded by the union. It's not the employer paying.

"Extraordinarily hostile" makes sense in no universe.

> Yup this is non-news. Nobody ever gets paid during a strike.

Sounds like these people were paid while striking, for a few weeks:

> Nearly 1,800 part-time faculty members at the New School, who have been on strike since November 16 for better pay and working conditions, remained out of work and on the picket lines on Wednesday even as the university said it would start withholding their pay [emphasis mine].

I mean, with salaried employees who work relatively independently (as opposed to clocking in on a factory floor), it's genuinely going to take a couple of weeks to even figure out a process for determining who's striking and how to take them off of payroll (which often has to be submitted a couple of weeks in advance).

I wouldn't assume they were paying striking employees because they wanted to be doing so.

Umm... entitled much?

The point of going on strike is to forgo your pay to prove a point. You don't get paid and they get to experience how important you are.

If you can go on strike and expect to get paid no matter what, what would keep people at work? Everybody would be on strike all the time.

That's nothing. Here in Canada Ontario overrode our constitution to prevent an education strike. Public outcry forced them to back down, but still...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-notwithstandi...

Another article (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5515-we-are-the-new-school) mentions how administration is "a revolving door of administrators who seem accountable to no one."

This is a major problem in higher education right now. Administrators are often faculty or former faculty and may or may not have any real management experience but are expected to suddenly manage hundreds if not thousands of people. Once they realize they are in over their head they can easily retreat back to being faculty as they have tenure.

A lot of higher education now is pantomime to create value for a credential. I expect it to get even more ridiculous.

FWIW that article doesn't say the former-faculty-as-admin thing is a problem in this case, unless I overlooked that bit, and the usual complaint I see about higher ed is more about top-level admin being the opposite of that—part of the professional-administrator class without real teaching experience who don't understand or care to understand the front-line staff, look down on them, and who are creating vast new bureaucracies full of more of the same sorts of people.

How many administrators would the New School have to lay off to cover the pay demands of the workers?

Probably a lot. The New School appears to be about 80% adjuncts and so any across the board increase in pay would also dramatically increase operating costs.

Shame and Cancel culture is actually not as effective as a culture that is oriented toward addressing structural problems in society and in specific niches of society. Everyone skates on the surface and when things become really bad or intractable they resort to extreme measures, on both sides.

I thought New School was supposed to be leftist?

Economics, power, and human nature don't care about your political ideology... But New School might not be economically viable, given their location, reputation, expected level of amenities, and tuition. They are located in NYC, one of the highest priced areas in the country, but I've never heard of them before, so I expect they cannot charge the kind of tuition necessary to hire people at a competitive salary.

You were deeply misled

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