Labor Union

UAW Work Stoppage On Juneteenth To End Racism

June 18, 2020 Rory L. Gamble, United Auto Workers. Resist! General Strike, Labor Union, Racism, Rebellion2020

As trade unionists and as Americans, we were outraged and heartsick at the horror of George Floyd’s death on May 25. It was yet another tragedy in a long and sorrowful history of the divisiveness of racism in this nation. Since that day in communities from coast to coast, we have seen Americans from all walks of life, black, brown and white, stand together to demand change. To demand – finally – that we address the systemic racial divide that has plagued our nation since its inception. On Friday, June 19, at 8:46 a.m. in each time zone, UAW members and allies across the globe will pause for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the agonizing amount of time that George Floyd lay on an American street begging for his life. We do this in support of the millions who are demanding an end to racism and hate and calling for real reforms.

Pitchfork Union On Strike Over Racist Power Structures

June 18, 2020 Pitchfork Union, Popular Resistance. Resist! Labor Union, Media, Racism, Strike, Worker Rights and Jobs

Today, the Pitchfork Union is engaging in a half-day work stoppage. From 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. EST, union members will not publish or promote any new content on the website in protest of a blatant act of union-busting by Condé Nast and Pitchfork management. On May 13, Condé Nast engaged in company-wide layoffs. The only person in our union targeted was our Unit Chair and only Senior Editor of color, Stacey Anderson, illustrating the larger pattern of employees of color being targeted throughout the company. We categorically opposed her layoff. We immediately began looking into alternatives, like those implemented at BuzzFeed News and The Los Angeles Times.

NYC Bus Drivers Union Refuses To Transport Protesters For NYPD

May 30, 2020 Jason Koebler, Vice. Resist! Bus Driver, George Floyd, Labor Union, Ungovernable

Workers for New York City’s MTA are refusing to transport people arrested during protests against police brutality in the aftermath of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. A video of a bus driver refusing to transport people arrested during protests in front of Brooklyn’s Barclays Center went viral Friday night. In the video, a crowd cheers a bus driver who appears to be refusing to sit behind the wheel: “the NYPD is using a bus to transfer arrested protesters at the Barclays Center,” @berniebromanny, who shared the video, tweeted. “However, the bus driver refused to drive it.” The video was viewed more than a million times in just over an hour.

Amazon Will Not Change Without A Union

April 28, 2020 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Organize! Amazon, Labor Union, Worker Rights

Since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis, Jeff Bezos has gotten $24 billion richer. Amazon’s stock price has risen more than 40% since mid-March. This explosive creation of corporate wealth has coincided with an unprecedented level of labor activism against Amazon, including multiple well-publicized workplace walkouts, protests, and a growing drumbeat of negative PR about the company’s handling of the pandemic, particularly regarding the workplace safety of warehouse workers. There has never been as much coordinated labor action against Amazon. And Amazon has never been more successful. If the goal is to truly change Amazon, it’s time to make the strategy sharper. Yes, Amazon is a behemoth. It is not just a trillion-dollar company run by the world’s richest man; it is a machine that is slowly eradicating the traditional retail industry in America and changing the entire landscape of work.

San Francisco Labor Council Resolves: Abolish U.S.-Imposed Economic Sanctions

February 16, 2020 Workers World. Resist! economic sanctions, economic war, Labor Union, US Sanctions

The following resolution was passed unanimously on Feb. 10, 2020. Whereas sanctions and economic blockades are being imposed by the United States and its allies — in violation of international law — against countries that resist Washington’s neoliberal policies and regime change efforts; and Whereas U.S. imposed sanctions are a form of economic warfare, causing death and suffering in some 39 countries with one-third of the world’s population as of 2019; and Whereas U.S. imposed economic sanctions block access to fuel, raw materials and replacement parts interfering with the functioning of critical infrastructure, i.e., electrical grids, water treatment and distribution facilities and hospitals; Whereas in every country facing U.S. imposed economic sanctions, the most vulnerable — infants, children, the chronically ill and the elderly — suffer the most;

UPS Worker Challenged Powerful Union Leaders And Won

January 26, 2020 By Juliana Feliciano Reyes, The Philadelphia Inquirer. Organize! Labor Union, UPS, Workers Rights and Jobs

When the meeting was called to order, some UPS workers who had been with the company for decades could barely believe their eyes. Membership meetings like these are mostly empty. But on this snowy Saturday morning in Bridesburg, a sea of black-and-yellow satin Teamsters Local 623 jackets buzzed around a packed hall. For the first time in more than two decades, there’s a new crew running the shop. And at the top of the elected slate is an African American man — the first to lead the 101-year-old local — and one who’s spent his entire adult life doing the backbreaking work of a package handler at UPS’s massive East Coast facility by the Philadelphia airport. The rise of Richard Hooker Jr., 40, and his slate, dubbed #623livesmatter, marks the culmination of a grassroots effort to revitalize a 4,500-member shop at a major corporation during a time when legacy unions have languished.

Rank And File Journalist Wins Presidency Of CWA NewsGuild

December 12, 2019 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. Educate! CWA, Democracy, Labor Union, Media

After a much-contested election process, the largest union of journalists in North America has chosen a 32-year old reporter at the Los Angeles Times to be its new leader, in the U.S. and Canada. Jon Schleuss helped win union recognition and a historic first contract at The Times (a non-union paper for 136 years) before ousting NewsGuild President Bernie Lunzer, a three-term incumbent twice his age. In the first round of balloting last Spring, Lunzer beat Schleuss by a margin of 261 votes out of 2,300 cast. With backing from many upset members, Schleuss challenged those results, based on election irregularities. To avoid a further appeal to the U.S. Department of Labor, the NewsGuild ordered a re-run, with voting overseen by the American Arbitration Association, a neutral third party.

Labor Struggles Unite Students And Workers

May 28, 2018 Arvind Dilawar, Pacific Standard Magazine. Strategize! Education, Labor Union, Worker Rights

New York City - Students making their way into the New School's University Center on May 8th passed through a gauntlet of labor demonstrations. Reaching the center on 5th Avenue between East 13th and 14th streets in Manhattan, they were confronted by posters affixed to the building from ground level up to the windows of the second-story cafeteria: some excoriating University President David Van Zandt; some inviting students to join the ongoing occupation of the cafeteria; and still others expressing solidarity with the university workers' labor struggles.

The Outcome In Arizona

May 6, 2018 Eric Blanc, Jacobin Magazine. Resist! Arizona, Education, Labor Union, Teachers

After an all-night encampment of striking educators, the Arizona state government passed a budget bill early this morning. To assess the strike and the settlement, Jacobin’s Eric Blanc spoke with Rebecca Garelli, Noah Karvelis, and Dylan Wegela. All three are teachers and leaders of Arizona Educators United, the rank-and-file organization responsible for initiating and leading the state’s Red for Ed movement. - The main positive is that eight weeks ago we weren’t going to get this much in funding from the state. In these eight weeks we’ve moved the needle on a government that didn’t want to give us anything. We’ve increased the added education revenue from $65 million to more than $400 million.

Chicago Teacher’s Strike Vote: Union Democracy In Action

March 27, 2016 Michelle Strater Gunderson, www.livingindialogue.com Resist! Chicago Teachers Union, Education, Labor Union, Strike, Worker Rights

By Michelle Strater Gunderson for Living in Dialogue. Chicago, IL - I sat in the House of Delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union on Wednesday night waiting to be counted as a yes vote for our April first strike. I was number 39 out of 486. It is not common to be called out individually to vote at our union. Most of our motions are passed through open outcry – we are usually that united. But this night was different. A division of the house was called and voting members of the union were asked to go to opposite ends of the hall in order to physically represent their vote. At the beginning of our debate on whether or not to strike on April 1, I was the first to speak. I called for the strike to be approved by a two-thirds vote – not the usual 50% plus 1 per our union rules. It was imperative that the CTU walk out of the meeting with a super majority yes vote. There is no way to build a successful strike with a divided house.

Labor Should Shift Its Focus To Organizing Black Workers

May 16, 2015 Andrew Elrod, www.inthesetimes.com Strategize! History, Labor Union, Racial Justice, Worker Rights and Jobs

In 1956, as Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin struggled to sustain the historic boycott of segregated public transit in Montgomery, Alabama, Rustin turned to the union leader A. Phillip Randolph for advice. The carpool for black workers was faltering. “Go up to Birmingham,” Randolph told them, “where the steel workers are making enough to afford two cars. Ask them to donate their second car.” According to historian Judith Stein, King reported the steel workers saved the boycott. At their height, American labor unions proved an invaluable resource to the civil rights movement—through both financial security, which helped enable private activism, and the institutional funding of organizations like SNCC and events like the 1964 March on Washington.

The Largest Union Vote In The United States This Year

October 16, 2014 Jenny Brown, www.labornotes.org Organize! Labor Union

After many close votes against unionization, American Airlines passenger service agents scored an overwhelming victory September 16, voting 86 percent to unionize. The win covers 14,500 workers, the largest union-representation vote in the U.S. this year. The election was a result of the merger between American and US Airways, which created the largest airline in the world. Over half of the new union members are in the South, with large groups in Dallas-Fort Worth, Miami, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “We feel stronger now with this vote,” said Eula Smith, a customer service agent in Charlotte, North Carolina. “I’m a 60-year-old woman with 42 years with this employer. You can’t live in the South and make a decent wage unless you are in senior management in a corporation or belong to a union.”

Labor Almost Invisible On TV Talk

September 1, 2014 FAIR, www.fair.org Educate! Conservative, Labor, Labor Union, Media

As the Labor Day holiday approaches, ask yourself how often you see unions represented on corporate-owned television. On the highest-profile public affairs shows, the answer is basically never. According to a search of the Sunday morning talkshows for this year (January-August), not a single representative of a labor union appeared on any of the four network programs (NBC's Meet the Press, ABC's This Week, Fox News Sunday and CBS's Face the Nation). Ironically, the one union leader discussed substantively on any of the programs was Ronald Reagan, the famously anti-union former president. He came up as an answer in an ABC "Powerhouse Puzzlers" quiz (3/2/14) as the only president to have headed a labor union, the Screen Actors Guild. And it's not that the shows couldn't have used a voice for working people. While normally preoccupied with Beltway politics, these shows touched on issues like poverty, jobs and workers' rights. There were even discussions of efforts to organize college athletes (Meet the Press, 3/23/14; Face the Nation, 3/30/14). But representatives of organized labor were not part of these conversations. The closest labor came to the Sunday chat show circuit was when Meet the Press (6/29/14) aired an excerpt of a Clinton Foundation event that included two quotes from Sara Horowitz of the Freelancers Union, which is not a certified union but a nonprofit organization that brokers health insurance for independent workers.

«1 2 3 »

Daily movement news and resources