Marathon Pundit: Union goonery against graduate assistants? Yep.

Readers of this blog are of course familiar with union goonery. But it's not just the factory floor--or the loading dock as in the film On the Waterfront where it occurs. Graduate assistants at the University of Michigan are targets.

An admitted liberal who supports workers' right to unionize, graduate student research assistant Mike Palazzolo writes about his unpleasant experience with the Graduate Employees Organization, a union, for Ann Arbor.com:

Some of the GEO's employees once paid me a visit. I asked them what sort of benefits the union would offer. They gave me a canned response about how they won’t know until a contract is negotiated. That's the best they can do -- ask me for hundreds of dollars and promise they'll try to make it worth my while. No thanks. I'm not a gambling man.

Worse, they tried to intimidate me. They warned me that there’s technically nothing stopping the university from taking away my benefits. But with the GEO’s protection, I would be safe from such dastardly maneuvers!

This is only one example of what I see as an alarmingly hypocritical (and disturbingly slick) PR campaign. Their modus operandi appears to be as follows: cry wolf about the university intimidating students while they try to do the same, claim the GEO only wants students to be heard and then attack or suppress the views of all students that oppose them. Let's recap the tactics the GEO has used against the students it claims to support. First, they regularly claim or insinuate that the university is attempting to intimidate students (something no GSRA I know believes to be true). The primary piece of "evidence" held up in support of the intimidation charges was the firing of one GSRA. The GEO claimed the firing was politically motivated. When a fellow student outed the fired GSRA's poor track record to prove the firing was academically motivated, the GEO blasted him for making "personal attacks" and insinuated the university put him up to it.

The GEO also attempted to ban students who don't want to unionize from being allowed to speak to Julia Stern, the administrative law judge assigned to the GSRAs' case. Notice, too, that many of the posts on the GEO's Facebook page and website are by individuals who aren't actually students at U-M. Some U-M students have attempted to post rebuttals, only to see their comments deleted. Are these actions representative of an organization that wants students to be heard?