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Labor Unions

Don’t Cross This Virtual Picket Line

March 7, 2021 Kris LaGrange, Ucomm Blog. , , ,
Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama have been voting on joining RWDSU for the last month. If they are successful, they would be the first Amazon employees in the United States to join a union. Their campaign has garnered support from across the country. UCOMM previously reported on Teamsters driving from Boston to support the effort. The NFLPA has released a video supporting the organizing effort, actor Danny Glover came down to Bessemer to meet with the workers, and even President Joe Biden has weighed in. Josh Brewer, the lead organizer on the campaign, told the Prospect that many people in the community are extremely supportive of the organizing effort. “Everyone in the community is cheering us on. It’s been that way since we got here. We’ve had local people bring food and chocolate and coffee to the organizers. When I look at the notes that organizers send me, they tell me that workers are telling them, ‘It’s my grandfather I’m hearing from.

Right To Work Defeated In Montana and Colorado

March 5, 2021 Brian Young, UcommBlog. , , ,
Montana and Colorado have both stopped attempts to pass Right to Work laws and will continue to be free bargaining states. In Montana, Republicans have control over the entire state government, a first in over 16 years. Yet, over the past month, union members and employers have successfully pushed legislators to vote against Right to Work. On Tuesday, with union members filling the gallery and lining the hallways, legislators voted down the bill by a vote of 38 in favor to 62 opposed. In a show of bipartisanship, 29 Republicans joined with 33 Democrats in opposing the bill. In speaking in opposition to the bill Rep. Derek Harvey, a Democrat from Butte spoke about the role that unions played in his city producing the copper that fueled the industrial revolution, electrified the nation, and supplied ammunition during both World Wars.

Amazon Workers On Why They Need To Unionize

March 4, 2021 Left Voice. , , ,
In the biggest unionizing struggle in Amazon’s history, nearly 6,000 workers at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama are voting on whether to join a union. The union drive has met fierce resistance from the company, desperate to stop it. Last month, the union talk radio show The Valley Labor report interviewed union organizing committee members Darryl Richardson, a picker at the fulfillment center, and Jennifer Bates, a Learning Ambassador, about working conditions at Amazon, the union drive, the response from bosses, and why they need a union. The union drive at Bessemer deserves support and solidarity from workers everywhere. If the workers win the union, it would be an inspiration for workers around the world, in addition to the 1.2 million workers currently being exploited by Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

US Journalists Form Unions To Survive ‘Hedge Fund Vampires’ And COVID-19

March 4, 2021 Billy Anania, Shadowproof. , , ,
Many of these unions have sought representation from the NewsGuild, a branch of the Communications Workers of America (CWA). They include editorial staff, who recognize the shared working conditions of an industry in crisis. By forming regional guilds, workers are able to form a network separate from their publications’ overly corporate culture, allowing them to establish shared demands and speak candidly about dwindling job opportunities, racist hiring practices, shrinking newsrooms, and scarcity myths promoted by fat-cat executives. Much of this activity is unreported at the national level, but workers have publicized their actions on social media. Members of the New Yorker Union, for example, have detailed their negotiations with Condé Nast since their January 21 work stoppage. Management has been slow to propose methods of achieving a better work-life balance, and weeks of bargaining sessions have become public record on Twitter.

Amazon Workers: ‘Everyone In The Community Is Cheering Us On’

March 3, 2021 Steven Greenhouse, The American Prospect. , , ,
As lead organizer in the potentially historic effort to unionize 5,800 Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, Josh Brewer heads a small army of organizers for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. Brewer recognizes that it’s a high-stakes campaign—it’s the first time a union has sought to unionize all the workers at an Amazon warehouse in the United States. Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, was once a thriving union community, with steel mills, coal mines, and a Pullman railcar factory. Brewer, 33, is an ordained minister who gravitated from the pulpit to union organizing because he saw it as a more effective way to lift struggling Americans. The National Labor Relations Board mailed out the unionization ballots on February 8; they are due on March 29, and only then will the ballots be counted.

Build New Infrastructure For A Broader Movement

February 25, 2021 Jeff Ordower, Organizing Upgrade. , , ,
The huge upswing in worker organizing in 2020 often had union support, but with an experimental twist. Over the first few months of the COVID-19 epidemic, workers from bridal shops to pizza places to supermarkets were organizing to get Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), and winning. They used tools like the coworker.org site, which helps anyone start up a petition in their workplace and make demands. Groups like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), a project of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) supported those workers taking independent action. EWOC provides a sophisticated intake system combined with veteran labor movement coaches to support workers winning their demands.

Silicon Valley Bus Drivers Restored Community Rides For Free

February 24, 2021 Richard Marcantonio, Labor Notes. , , ,
With Covid cases surging in their ranks, bus drivers in Santa Clara, California, demanded to resume rear-door boarding, which is proven to reduce the risk of infection. Management of the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) balked, even blaming the workers for getting sick. Pressure mounted from the leadership of Transit (ATU) Local 265, and from rider and community groups. But it was rank-and-file bus drivers who forced management’s hand when they started planning to stop boarding at the front door whether the agency agreed or not. Bosses prefer anything to allowing workers to run the company. On February 3, the agency announced that it would resume rear-door boarding.

Striking Workers Halt Construction At Future Amazon Warehouse

February 9, 2021 Lauren Kaori Gurley, Vice. , , , ,
Roughly 75 workers walked off the job on Thursday at the construction site of a future Amazon fulfillment center in southern California—forcing most of the construction operations, including a large crane, to come to a halt.  Workers are striking at the future Amazon fulfillment center in Oxnard, California, because an Amazon contractor at the site, Building Zone Industries, has hired non-union, out-of-state workers to work on the project. This comes amid high rates of unemployment stemming from the COVID-19 in the predominantly agricultural, working-class Latinx community. 

Alabama Amazon Employees Pushing For Union

February 8, 2021 William Thornton, AL.com. , , ,
Looking at employees at Amazon’s fulfillment center on breaks outside the building last summer, Jennifer Bates said the sight reminded her of a football sideline. Employees with bad knees, aching feet, limping around after making the trek around the company’s four-story, 855,000-square-foot center, looking for a few minutes rest before heading back in to resume their shifts. “On our breaks outside, there was a lot of complaining,” Bates remembered. She works as a Blue Badge Learning Ambassador, who prepares and trains employees. “You would hear people talking about mistreatment. They were saying, ‘They need to change.’”

In A Six-Day Strike, Bronx Produce Workers Inspired New York

February 4, 2021 Bianca Cunningham, Labor Notes. , , ,
New York City - Drivers and warehouse workers who feed New York City have won their strike. After six days off the job, the strikers at Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx ratified a contract that doubled management’s wage offer and defeated a health care cost increase. The 1,400 workers at the world’s largest wholesale produce market, members of Teamsters Local 202, are responsible for packing and delivering 60 percent of the fruits and vegetables that go to restaurants and grocery stores in New York City. The unit is comprised of 14 different companies that bargain a contract together. Before the strike, the employers were offering a raise of just 32 cents an hour, and wanted to pass on to workers an increase in health care costs.

‘What I Want For Me, I Want For You’

February 4, 2021 Amba Guerguerian, The Indypendent. , , ,
The 1,400 workers at Hunts Point Market, the largest produce distribution market in the country, went on strike the night of Sunday, January 17. They walked out of the warehouse to win a better contract after risking their lives as essential workers since the beginning of the pandemic.  Management offered them a minimal $0.32 per hour raise. Their demands? Bring members who are making $18.75 an hour up to $20 an hour, give everyone else a $1 an hour raise, and maintain their healthcare coverage at no additional costs to the workers. This was the first time the union, Teamsters Local 202, went on strike since at Hunts Point 1986. 

Alabama Workers Fight To Form First US Amazon Union

February 1, 2021 Brandon Stout, Liberation News. , , ,
Some 5,800 workers from an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, will vote in February on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The workers are upset with algorithms that track productivity as well as unfair disciplinary processes. According to the union drive’s website, “Amazon warehouse workers face outrageous work quotas that have left many with illnesses and lifetime injuries.” Despite the warehouse only opening in March 2020, these conditions have caused the workers to rapidly move toward unionizing. By the end of last summer, the workers met with RWDSU representatives at a hotel to discuss joining the union.

Google Workers To Form Global Union Alliance

January 26, 2021 Sommer Brokaw, UPI.com. , , ,
The new alliance called Alpha Global, in recognition of Google's parent company Alphabet, was formed in coordination with Union Network International Global Union, a global union that brings together 20 million workers from various sectors in the service economy, according to a UNI Global Union post. Alpha Global comprises 13 different unions representing workers in 10 countries, with the United States, Britain and Switzerland, being among them, The Verge reported. It seeks to make Google live up to its ideals. "[Google] is a place where many workers came to change the world -- to make it more democratic -- only to find Alphabet suppressing speech and cracking down on worker organizing while consolidating monopolistic power," a joint statement announcing the alliance said.

Book Review: Love, Labor, Lost

January 26, 2021 Lauren Kaori Gurley, Prospect.org. , , ,
In her sweeping new book, Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone, veteran labor journalist Sarah Jaffe argues that it’s not just at Google or in Silicon Valley where there’s a startling dissonance between the passion, love, and care society tells workers to devote to their jobs and the exploitative realities they face at work. “We’re expected to enjoy work for its own sake,” Jaffe writes. “[T]he things we used to keep for ourselves—indeed, the things the industrial workplace wanted to minimize—are suddenly in demand on the job, including our friendships, our feelings, and our love.”

Opening The Door To A More Democratic UAW

January 26, 2021 Nelson Lichtenstein, Labor Notes. , , ,
In December the leadership of the United Auto Workers reached a settlement with the Justice Department that opens the door to election of top union officers by referendum vote of the membership. That might well end more than 70 years of one-party control and help democratize a union once known for animated internal debate and competitive leadership contests. The settlement provides for six years of oversight by a court-appointed monitor with extensive powers, including the authority to veto new UAW staff hires and block candidates for office who do not meet an anti-corruption standard. More important, the agreement calls for a vote of all 400,000 members to decide whether they want direct election of...
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