The theme song for this week’s Labor Blog Roundup is brought to you by BareNaked Ladies and Ezra Klein.

While Kevin Carey is blogging about Roger Clemens, let’s point to Ken Rosenthal on players’ union’s opposition to testing: “The union does not trust the owners to administer such programs honestly…” I think that’s a good answer to why unions oppose a lot of manager-centered reform. To underline the point, the owners are still busy punishing Marvin Miller and letting flunkies into the Hall of Fame. It’s easy to say “unions don’t want to change, and we should empower managers to do what’s right.”  But the answer is often in finding ways to change that acknowledge that management is at least as much a part of the problem as anyone.

Union Review has a nice piece on GOP presidential candidates answering a debate question on unions.  No one wanted to actually say “our goal is to make unions as few and as weak as possible.” But that’s what the head of the National Labor Relations Board basically said when he told Congress that “the pendulum has moved from the left to the right” in a recent hearing. “Left” here means the policy that people should have a union if they want, regardless of what the boss wants. Chris Bowers, writing for the AFL, has some awesome blogging on this referencing his work as an AFT organizer.  And AFL has links to video

In long strikes, people, ironically trained by t.v. writers to expect half hour conflict resolution, become impatient.  No matter how much they support the strikers, a “pox on both their houses” attitude develops, and management works this angle. The Writers Guild has done an awesome job in getting out their message, but we are heading for a crunch time. This is when real solidarity tells.  The Ben Franklin line about hanging together, lest you hang separately is right on here. For educators, the strike’s lesson is that if you become divided you are weaker and poorer for it, and your craft will suffer. 

As we head into the holiday season, adjunct faculty members at Pace University in NYC are still without a first contract.  Kids who were in their intro courses four years ago now have college degrees, and management still tries to delay.  It’s my fervent holiday wish for the ghost of Christmas present to pay the board a visit.  I suspect posting will be light around here until the new year, so for those of you not on the boards of organizations that are sticking it to the working people, I wanted to wish you a good holiday season and happy new year.