Faculty look to unionize
Tomo Chien
December 06, 2024
Good morning. It’s Friday, and this is the last newsletter of the semester. I’m wishing you luck on your finals and hope you have a wonderful winter break. Onto the five USC, Los Angeles, and California stories you need to know for today.
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1.
USC’s non-tenure track and adjunct professors reached a key milestone required to form a union, they said in a surprise announcement yesterday. This is significant. The majority of the group has formally indicated interest in unionizing, which all but guarantees a contentious hearing before the federal labor board.
2.
A federal agency that regulates automated driving technology is investigating how three college students, including a USC sophomore, died in a Tesla Cybertruck crash over the Thanksgiving break. It’s unclear if the driver was using the truck’s autopilot feature during the accident.
3.
A team of USC scientists will join a $46 million effort to pursue the first-ever successful eye transplant. The inner ear, brain, spinal cord, and eye are the only organ systems that’ve never been successfully transplanted, one scientist in the University of Colorado-led group said, adding that it’ll be a “monumental task.”
4.
LA developers are applying for fewer apartment building permits than they have over the last 10 years, raising red flags as the city looks to confront its housing and homelessness crisis. Experts blamed high interest rates, labor shortages, and restrictive zoning.
5.
A behemoth 7.0-magnitude earthquake jolted Northern California yesterday, briefly prompting widespread tsunami warnings — including across the entire San Francisco Bay Area. The surfers, as always, were stoked. “There’s no such thing as a tsunami,” one Santa Cruz dude said. “Just juicy waves.”
