As reported in today’s Insidehighered.com, the for-profit firm Kaplan, Inc. has just inked a collective bargaining agreement with 65 English-as-a-second-language (ESOL) part-time instructors in New York City.  This is on the heels of several other recent adjunct collective bargaining victories over the past months.

Of course, there’s lots of work to do, and this particular deal was in a particularly union-friendly environment (New York), and that  this was not Kaplan’s higher education division.  SEIU organizer Malini Cadambi Daniel has suggested that for-profits might actually be more fertile ground for unionization than at non-profits or religious institutions, because for-profits would be less ideologically opposed to unionization and only see it as a “business decision.”  I must admit to being baffled by this line of reasoning: since when has for-profit American not been ideologically opposed to unionization?

Small steps, admittedly, but all steps in the right direction.

Whatcha thinkin'?

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