Georgetown University agrees to arbitration. More than three months after refusing to negotiate with graduate students seeking to unionize, Georgetown University on April 2 notified the Georgetown Alliance of Graduate Employees (GAGE) and the American Federation of Teachers that the school agreed to a vote supervised by the American Arbitration Association on whether a majority of the staff favors union representation. Many in GAGE are teaching assistants, researchers and other workers in addition to being students.

The Community Word in February reported that Georgetown has refused to voluntarily recognize AFT after about a year of workers organizing.

Georgetown history professor Joseph McCartin, who directs the university’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, told National Catholic Reporter that the school’s reversal is a “deeply-important precedent for labor relations in private colleges and universities.”

Coalition-building between the labor, civil rights and faith communities took center stage at April’s “I Am A Man 2018” commemoration of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, courage and commitments, in Memphis, Tenn.

A parade of union leaders plus the Rev. Jesse Jackson urged the crowd to get involved, unite around causes, and marshal people to register and vote.

The object, they said, is to elect pro-worker progressive lawmakers and governors, at the state and federal levels, to turn back forces of reaction scheming to destroy Americans’ rights.

Unionists’ calls drew enthusiastic responses from the event, organized and hosted by AFSCME, including Teachers and Service Employees, hundreds of Unite Here members and dozens of Government Employees members.

There’s a challenge, Jackson conceded: “Today, there are four million blacks unregistered to vote in the South, two and half million registered who did not vote [last year], and one and a half million high school seniors. If we register and vote, we can put in our own ‘trump card’ and retire ‘fake news’’,” he said.

Most unions are silent, but the nation’s two big teachers’ unions support the gun-control campaign which brought at least 500,000 people into the streets of Washington in March.

Exceptions to the general lack of a labor response included the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (which tweeted, “Student activists and supporters are using their collective voice to demand their lives and safety become a priority and that we end gun violence in our schools”) and National Nurses United (which linked violence at schools to patient violence against caregivers).

The March For Our Lives, organized by the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, saw historic Pennsylvania Avenue crowded wall-to-wall and almost end-to-end with 500,000-1 million people demanding a ban on weapons of war in the nation’s schools, churches and other public places.

“Standing together, using the power of our collective voice, we must demand better,” NNU said about comprehensive gun control.

“In our shared struggle, we see a demand for greater public health and safety,” NNU continued, arguing for an anti-violence bill they’re pushing: HR5223.”

Over union protests, the Trump administration’s Agriculture Department wants no limits on processing lines at the nation’s pork production plants. That could put workers at increased risk of injury or death, says the National Employment Law Project and the workers’ union, the United Food and Commercial Workers. Apparently, nobody at the top of USDA has ever heard of – or read – Upton Sinclair’s classic book on what happens inside poultry, pork and beef processing plants, “The Jungle.”

The proposal envisions an average pork line speed of 1,200 carcasses per hour, but with no overall speed limit. The top line speed now is just over 1,100 per hour. In a large pork plant, each pork processing line now has seven inspectors. The agency’s proposal says there could be as few as three.

In chicken production, the inspectors’ union, Government Employees (AFGE) took Democratic President Barack Obama’s USDA to court over the safety risk to workers and the health risk to the public. It ultimately got the speedup modified.

Modernization of food safety systems “should not occur at the expense of public health, worker safety or animal welfare,” said U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLaurwo (D-Ct.) “We must improve swine inspection and reduce contamination from pathogens associated with pork such as Salmonella and Campylobacter. However, FSIS has not demonstrated through its hog slaughter pilot program that contamination — and therefore illness rates — are actually reduced. To the contrary, the available evidence suggests these changes will undermine food safety.”

Author Adam Winkler traces rise of corporate rights above citizens’ rights. U.S. corporations now have equal or more constitutional rights than U.S. citizens, a prominent professor of business, the law and history says, and depending on the ruling in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, it could get worse.

Corporations have gained their “rights” by posing as groups of persons, each of whom has individual political rights, and claiming those personal rights in the aggregate, says UCLA constitutional law and history professor Adam Winkler, author of “We The Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights.”

And if the court sides with corporations in a case involving a Colorado bakery’s right to refuse to sell goods to gay couples, corporations will gain more power. That’s because current law prohibits businesses from discriminating against gays, and if the court rules for Masterpiece Bakeshop and, by inference, all corporations, they could gain the right to discriminate, Winkler said.

Rights of corporations are a key issue now for workers and their allies, because the justices vastly expanded them in politics.

Seriously, workers at The Onion unionized. An overwhelming majority of workers at Onion Inc. – home of The Onion newspaper, A.V. Club and ClickHole – signed cards to unionize and requested formal recognition from management. Creative staffs there (also including The Takeout, Onion Labs, and Onion Inc.’s video and art departments) are represented by the Writers Guild of America, East. Other digital media shops that have unionized in recent years under WGAE are Gizmodo Media (Deadspin, Jezebel, Lifehacker), Vice, Vox, HuffPost and Salon, plus writers at comedy shows such as “Saturday Night Live,” “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” and “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.”

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper