In just the last three weeks of this new year, there have been 40 shootings. There were 647 mass shootings in 2022 alone. Firearms are now the No. 1 cause of death among American children.
To deliver transformational change, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urged everyone to act boldly and unapologetically to address student underperformance and decades of underinvestment.
A historic 30-year organizing effort was victorious on Jan. 13, adding 3,000 new union members at Yale University as graduate students who serve as teachers and researchers voted in a landslide to form a union with Local 33 of UNITE HERE.
The graduate teachers and researchers from all departments and professional schools went union 1,860–179—91%–9%—in the National Labor Relations Board-run election.
Their triumph continues a wave of union victories at private universities around the country, as well as organizing by workers at Starbucks, Amazon and other major corporations.
The United States had nearly 14.3 million union members in calendar 2022, 273,000 more than the year before, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in its annual survey.
All the gains came in the private sector, where union membership increased by 293,000, to 7.2 million. The public sector, which has yet to fully recover from job losses the virus-caused crash produced, reported 7.06 million members, plus 823,000 “free riders” who use union services but don’t pay for them.
The meeting was an outgrowth of a letter to President Biden from Pugliese after the release of National Assessment of Educational Progress data in October 2022.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
