Labor Movement

Nigeria: National Strike Underway; President Tinubu Meets With Labor

August 4, 2023 Al Jazeera. Resist! Fuel Prices, Labor Movement, National Strike, Nigeria, Wages

Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu met union leaders on the first day of a nationwide strike called by unions to protest against a fuel subsidy removal that has led to higher pump price of petrol, the head of the main labour federation has said. Since being sworn into office on May 29, President Tinubu has embarked on a series of economic reforms, scrapping the popular but expensive subsidy, which cost $10bn last year, and relaxing the foreign exchange regime. While the reforms have been welcomed by investors, unions say they have led to soaring costs at a time when Nigerians are already grappling with the highest inflation in nearly two decades.

A New Idea For New Union Organizing

August 3, 2023 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Strategize! Labor Movement, Labor Unions, Worker Rights

Why is it that unions, the only things that exist to do new union organizing, do not organize enough new union members? Unions will tell you that there are many reasons — hostile labor laws, corporate union-busting, difficult political climates. There is some truth to all of these explanations, but they are also a bit like stopping and sitting down while a wild dog is chasing you, because running is tiring. Sure it is, but that’s not much consolation when you’re dead. There always have been, and always will be, political and corporate forces hostile to unions. That does not change the fact that unions must find a way to organize, or else die.

UPS Teamsters Union Struggle Is Critical For All Workers

June 28, 2023 Gavrielle Gemma, Orinoco Tribune. Strategize! Labor Movement, Militancy, Strikes, Unions, UPS, Worker Rights and Jobs

340,000 workers, members of the Teamsters Union, worked tirelessly during the worst of the COVID pandemic. Despite exhaustion from overwork, disease, and family tragedies, they saved lives by delivering packages to those quarantined. Meanwhile, bosses at UPS lived in luxury as profits soared to $56.3 billion from 2019 to 2023. In 2023 alone, UPS says it will spend $3 billion in stock buybacks and $5.4 billion in dividends. Every penny of that profit is due to the labor of the workers. The current contract expires in less than five weeks. Every day the company delays making a realistic offer to the union, the closer workers come to a strike authorized by 97% of the rank-and-file who voted.

How The Labor Movement Is Showing Up For LGBTQ+ Rights

June 28, 2023 Sam Carliner, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! Labor Movement, LGBTQ Rights, Solidarity, Starbucks, Unions

At any march for rights there’s no shortage of creative chants. This year in New York City at the annual Queer Liberation March, a new one debuted. Playing on the lyrics to RuPaul’s “Cover Girl,” queer rights activists chanted “Socialists, put that bass in your walk! Unionize, let the whole workplace drop!” This was one of several labor-themed chants from a Left and Labor contingent which formed to amplify a labor movement that increasingly represents the LGBTQ+ community and is organizing for LGBTQ+ rights. Left Voice, an all-volunteer socialist publication, initiated the contingent. Around two dozen unions and politically left organizations joined the initiative, endorsing it, bringing out their members and publicizing the march.

Why The Fight To Unionize Starbucks Matters To Us All

June 14, 2023 Andrew Moss, Counterpunch. Educate! Labor Movement, Starbucks, union busting, Unions

For good reason, the fight to unionize Starbucks has drawn considerable public attention since workers at a Buffalo, New York store voted to unionize in December of 2021. Since that time, workers at more than 300 stores, representing more than 8000 workers, have so voted. The campaign has been met with strong company resistance, resulting in legal rulings that found Starbucks violating federal labor law by (among other things) illegally surveilling workers, firing workers involved in union organizing, and adding workers at specific workplaces to dilute union strength. In an eventful year-and-a-half, the company has failed to negotiate a single contract.

Winning Is Only The Start: Jane McAlevey On Building Worker Power

June 10, 2023 Paige Oamek, In These Times. Strategize! Labor Movement, Negotiations, Unions, Worker Rights

In April 2022, Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to form a union. But a year after that historic victory, union members at the JFK8 warehouse still don’t have a contract, thanks largely to Amazon spending $14 million on union avoidance consultants. That may be shocking but it’s not unusual. When workers vote to form a union, it takes an average of 465 additional days to sign a contract with their employer. Meanwhile this spring in Buffalo, where the first Starbucks Workers United election was won in 2021, a new decertification petition attempted to extinguish the spark that inspired hundreds of other locations to follow suit.

Three Decades Ago, There Was A Deadly Attack On Mexican Autoworkers

June 2, 2023 Isabela Escalona, Workday Magazine. Strategize! Auto Workers, History, Labor Movement, Mexico, Violence, Worker Rights and Jobs

Rob McKenzie is a writer and former auto worker at the Ford Twin Cities Assembly Plant in St. Paul, Minn., where he worked as an assembler, industrial electrician, and then as a full-time union representative for the United Auto Workers (UAW) until the plant closed in 2011. During his time as a steward at the Twin Cities plant in 1990, news hit of a deadly attack on a Ford plant in Cuautitlán, Mexico, a town just outside of Mexico City. The autoworkers in Cuautitlán were part of a radicalizing union reform movement due to their union’s management colluding with the company to undermine them.

Organizing Despite The Churn

May 23, 2023 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. Organize! Amazon, Labor Movement, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

When the Amazon Labor Union first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over 1,000 of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.” The sky-high turnover at the 8,000-worker fulfillment center on New York's Staten Island, made collecting cards “a race against Amazon firing everyone,” she said. Amazon has annual turnover of 150 percent. “They design the productivity quota, the rates system, to be a constant speedup situation, and that makes it hard to keep the job,” said Medina, who still works at the warehouse. Several ALU leaders have been fired.

Labor’s Uptick Isn’t Just Hype

May 22, 2023 Eric Blanc, Labor Politics. Organize! Labor Movement, Strikes, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Is the current labor uptick just more hype than reality? Numerous articles have recently made this case, pointing to the continued decline in union density in 2022. This skepticism also appears to be the prevailing view among most national union leaders. Though rarely stated publicly, labor’s continued routinism suggests that few people up top see our moment as particularly novel or urgent. But contrary to these skeptics, there is compelling data indicating that things really are changing — and, therefore, that unions should immediately make a major turn to new organizing.

Labor Organizers Launch New Model For The Fight Against Private Equity

May 13, 2023 Derek Seidman, Truthout. Create! Labor Movement, Private Equity, Wall Street, Worker Rights

On May Day, a small group of labor advocates and workers weaved through midtown Manhattan, stopping at the shiny corporate headquarters of several firms with names like KKR, Sycamore Partners, Apollo Global Management, BC Partners and Roark Capital Group. Most people don’t recognize these names, or if they do, know very little about them. But these are some of the wealthiest and most influential firms on Wall Street, behemoths within the ultra-powerful but opaque financial sector known as private equity — the arm of Wall Street that oversees trillions in assets and specializes in buying out, restructuring and selling off privately owned businesses to turn a big profit.

At UFCW, A Reform Movement Rises

May 6, 2023 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Organize! Democracy, Grocery Workers, Labor Movement, Worker Rights

Las Vegas — It was 7:30 on a Monday morning on the Las Vegas Strip, early enough to stand outside without sunscreen. A group of people — first a trickle, then dozens — wearing matching blue T-shirts that read “Organizing & Bargaining & The Right to Strike & A Voice in Our Union,” flooded the patio of the Mirage Resort & Casino pool, overwhelming the early morning smokers who had sought refuge there. This group was smiling, energized, far too wholesome for their garish surroundings. Like a team of underdogs before a critical game, they seethed with nervous excitement. These were the reformers.

We Are All Salts

May 5, 2023 Chris Townsend, Labor Notes. Organize! Labor Movement, Unions, Worker Rights

Today’s revival of union “salting” could not be more welcome or more urgently needed. A tactic as old as the labor movement itself, salting describes going to work in an unorganized workplace where there may be a chance to help initiate new union organizing. It’s also a label for taking jobs at already unionized employers, hoping to play a positive role. But here I will deal with the former: taking jobs to help spur new organizing. Whatever amount of salting is underway today—it’s impossible to precisely measure—it cannot come soon enough. The U.S. labor movement is mired in a crisis that threatens its very existence.

Largest May Day Turnout Since Pandemic, Workers March Worldwide

May 2, 2023 Olivia Rosane, Common Dreams. Resist! International Workers Day, Labor Movement, May Day, Worker Rights and Jobs

Workers from Japan to France took to the street on Monday for the largest May Day demonstrations since Covid-19 restrictions pushed people inside three years ago. Marchers expressed frustration with both their nations' policies—such as French President Emmanuel Macron's raising of the retirement age in March—and global issues like the rising cost of living and the climate crisis. "The price of everything has increased except for our wages. Increase our minimum wages!" one activist speaking in Seoul told the crowd, as The Associated Press reported. "Reduce our working hours!" "The price of everything has increased except for our wages."

Southern Worker School Charts Path For Building Workers Movement

April 30, 2023 Southern Workers Assembly. Strategize! Labor Movement, People's Assembly, The South, Worker Rights

“We heard from the rail workers. We heard from the truckers. We’ve got the longshoremen in the house, too,” said Leonard Riley, a longshore worker with the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA) Local 1422 and member of the SWA Coordinating Committee, addressing a packed house at the Teamsters Local 71 union hall during the opening program of the 2023 Southern Worker School. “The reason I bring that up is because of the power that’s in this room. We’ve got bus drivers over there, teachers over here. There’s power in this room. It’s going to take strategy, planning, coming together, and finding out where the power connectors are to mobilize and exercise it.”

Striking Workers At U. Michigan Are Building Powerful Solidarity

April 30, 2023 Ryan McCarty, Left Voice. Organize! Higher Education, Labor Movement, Solidarity, Strikes

The morning of April 28, I was stumbling around making coffee, checking the strike news on Twitter. It’s been about a month now since my graduate student instructor colleagues voted overwhelmingly to strike, facing down the legal and financial powerhouses at the University of Michigan. I only had to scroll for a second, then I just sorta had to sit down. There was a picture of about 20-30 people in a beer garden on a gray springy afternoon, fists raised and smiling. The message was from grad students, lecturers, and faculty from UC Santa-Cruz; they had held a fundraiser and were donating $600 to the University of Michigan grad student strike fund.

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