John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social

Advocating for education workers and great public schools in the Hawkeye state. Alabama expat and recovering academic. Book FOOT SOLDIERS FOR DEMOCRACY.

[Zachary Oren Smith @ZacharyOS]

‘A TROUBLING TREND’ - New data paints a stark picture Gov. Reynolds’ private school voucher program:

In 2 years, 36 private schools sprung up—24 opening this year. Meanwhile, 16 public schools closed.

#iapolitics #education

[jayson m porter @RogueChieftan]

Disappointed doesn’t even cut it. Academia is aggressively disappointing.

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

"The heart of the labor movement--the reason that, with all its failings, the labor movement still in some sense represents a new society within the shell of the old--is the experience, forced on working people by necessity, that 'an injury to one is an injury to all.'" SL & DG

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

@kelticwai17 Assuming it’s at Grinnell, support the students’ labor union.

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

Just a reminder: There is NO scenario in which an employer’s imposed changes to wages or benefits will exceed what an informed and engaged union bargaining team can do. The boss’s solution is always best for the boss.

[UGSDW @UGSDW]

After almost 1.5 years of bargaining, we have come to a tentative agreement on a contract with the College! This contract would be the first wall-to-wall undergraduate contract in US history if passed!

[UAW Archivist @UAW_Archivist]

The union posters here at the @ReutherLibrary are an amazing resource, and I love that the @UAW is letting the world know about them.
Also, did their video team add a Wilhelm scream to the "Fight Automation Fallout" poster?!? Proof they are the best in the biz.

[Zachary Oren Smith @ZacharyOS]

GROWING CONCERN - Democratic candidate Christina Bohannan was in Burlington today joining others from her party calling for regulators to take a close look at a Koch Industries subsidiary's multi-billion-dollar acquisition of a Lee County fertilizer plant. 1/6

[Elie Mystal @ElieNYC]

There is *nothing* you care about that survives a 6-3 Republican court for a generation. Nothing.
I don’t know how many times the Court has to prove that to people before liberals unify and act.

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

@keithdorejel @HerecomesDrBob We need yet another new synthesis of post emancipation politics, which is already starting to take shape, led in part by some of the same folks who did pioneering work in the late 1990s/early 00s: https://t.co/pdlvNIe4Ao

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

@keithdorejel @HerecomesDrBob One of the great losses for southern/US historiography is that we don't have a profession that could support a generation of grad students going out to test Gender and Jim Crow in states across the South, like Woodward was tested by earlier gen.

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

@HerecomesDrBob @keithdorejel Maybe not entirely wrong. Those same folks (me: PhD 2008) were writing in the wake of some perhaps necessary but ultimately very unhelpful and distorting legacies of the cultural turn on US political history.

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

@keithdorejel And the profoundly uneven development. Used to be you’d have one or two unionized factories in rural Iowa towns of almost any size. Now, we have silos of union strength. Biggest rural union shops are public schools, which is why they are targets.

[David Laurence @DLaurence401]

@dan_sinykin Surely it cannot be a coincidence that since 2014 so much of the most interesting writing and criticism is being produced by PhDs who are pointedly not writing to achieve tenure because they had to or chose to create an intellectual life outside the academy?

[John McKerley speakingwork.bsky.social @SpeakingWork]

Privatization, deindustrialization, and financialization are all the same system. They rob us of wages and public services, force us to pay more for less (if we can get it at all), and then make us pay interest on money that was ours to begin with.