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Unions

Strikes Shut Down Canada’s Container Ports From East To West Coast

November 6, 2024 Lori Ann LaRocco, CNBC. , , , ,
Key ports on Canada’s West Coast, including its largest container port in Vancouver and the Port of Prince Rupert, were shut down by a labor strike on Monday. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union Ship & Dock Foreman Local 514 began striking on Monday morning, stopping containers and cargo immediately. According to the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, $800 million in trade flows through West Coast ports every day. Approximately 20% of U.S. trade arrives in the Canadian ports of Vancouver and Prince Rupert, where strikes broke out after union leadership and industry representatives failed to reach a deal before a cooling-off period expired.

Boeing Machinists End 53-Day Strike With 38 Percent Raise

November 6, 2024 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. , , ,
Striking Boeing Machinists will start returning to work tomorrow after voting for a new contract with substantial wage increases. The 33,000 Seattle-area Machinists voted 59 percent to accept, just two weeks after two-thirds of them voted to reject a slightly worse contract. Voting was more subdued this time, workers said. “The big difference in this contract is that we're getting a lot of intimidation from our CEO now,” said striker Mylo Lang. He voted no. “We put in a long, hard fight. We achieved a lot,” said Jon Voss, a steward at the Renton factory, where they build the 737. “Boeing does not get to be the bully that they have been for the past 25 years.”

Autoworkers Face Massive Assault On Their Livelihoods

November 6, 2024 Martha Grevatt, Workers World. , , , ,
The U.S. economy only added 12,000 jobs in the month of October, a big drop from the 200,000 average monthly job gains previously in 2024 and just one-tenth of the predicted 120,000 added jobs for September. But whether October’s overall figures are a trend or a blip, workers in the auto industry are facing a massive crisis of job insecurity. Stellantis, formed by the 2021 merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and France’s PSA Peugeot, has put thousands of workers on indefinite or permanent layoff around the Midwest. Metro Detroit is particularly hard hit.

New York Times Tech Guild Walks Off The Job

November 4, 2024 The News Guild of New York. , , ,
New York - The Times Tech Guild – the union that powers the technology behind election coverage at The New York Times – has walked off the job in a ULP strike that threatens Election Day. The work stoppage began at 12:01 a.m. ET Monday despite multiple rounds of intense bargaining and a practice picket that drew more than 400 outside the headquarters of The Times and another 200 remotely on Wednesday. Tech Guild members will begin picketing at 9 a.m. outside the Eighth Avenue entrance of The New York Times. The picket line will run 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. daily.

Striking Hotel Workers Fight BlackRock

November 3, 2024 Will Hodgkinson, Workers World. , , , , , ,
Boston, Massachusetts - For almost two months, UNITE HERE! Local 26 hotel workers have been striking to demand the living wages and expanded benefits that management has denied them for years. The strike wave began on Sept. l when over 1,000 Boston and Greenwich, Connecticut, hotel workers walked off the job. Rolling strikes in nine other cities — including Baltimore, Honolulu and San Francisco — have followed. UNITE HERE! demands include: increased wages to offset rampant inflation, fair staffing schedules and an end to the staffing cuts made during the first wave of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Over 5,000 hotel workers have gone on strike across the U.S since September.

Portland Grocery Workers Strike Together

October 30, 2024 Paul Kirk-Davidoff, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
Over Labor Day weekend, 5,500 grocery workers in Portland, Oregon, went on strike across 38 stores—and two unions. A thousand workers at 10 New Seasons Markets, members of an independent union seeking a first contract, struck for one day on September 1, in their first union-wide strike. And 4,500 members of Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 555 walked out of 28 Fred Meyer supermarket-department stores August 28 on a seven-day strike. This month they reached and ratified a tentative agreement. Though the two unions did not coordinate their strike plans—both chose Labor Day because it’s a big grocery shopping weekend—workers at New Seasons donated leftover food from their one-day strike to Fred Meyer picket lines

Waffle House Workers, At The Front Lines Of Disasters, Demand More

October 30, 2024 Kim Kelly, In These Times. , , , , ,
Disaster preparedness is as much a part of the Waffle House brand as its all-day breakfast offerings. The 24-hour diner chain — home of a utilitarian menu of generously smothered, covered, scattered and peppered hash browns, among other quick-serve favorites — is omnipresent throughout the Midwest and Southeast. Its iconic butter-yellow letters have welcomed many a weary traveler since its founding in 1955, and its reputation for reliability is far more than a marketing tactic. In 2011, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator Craig Fugate created the ​“Waffle House Index” — a metric for measuring the severity of an oncoming storm.

Public Employees Pass Strong Resolution To Divest From Apartheid Israel

October 29, 2024 Drake Myers, Fight Back News!. , , , , , , ,
St. Paul, MN – MAPE, the Minnesota Association of Professional Employees, is an independent union representing approximately 15,000 employees of the State of Minnesota. At their October 26 delegate assembly, MAPE approved a resolution titled “Supporting a Ceasefire and Divestment in Israel-Palestine.” It included strong steps towards divesting both MAPE and Minnesota’s State Board of Investments (SBI) from apartheid Israel. The MAPE Ceasefire Caucus organizing team had conversations with nearly every delegate over the last six weeks in preparation for the vote, which ended up with 82 for, 49 against, with 17 abstaining.

Walmart Warehouse Workers Win First Union In Canada

October 26, 2024 Kari Thompson, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Eight hundred workers near Toronto have won the first Walmart warehouse union in Canada or the U.S. “Honestly I was pretty nervous at first because I didn’t want to lose my job,” said 29-year employee Rodolfo Pilozo, a member of “Team Red,” the organizing committee behind the September victory. The Walmart distribution center is in Mississauga, Ontario, an hour from the western New York border. Workers there began organizing last December to join Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union. Forty percent signed union cards over the summer. Pilozo cited low wages and pressure to work dangerously fast as the main concerns that pushed him and his co-workers to organize.

Chicago Teachers Are Fighting For A Historic Contract

October 26, 2024 Kari Lydersen, In These Times. , , , , ,
In 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), along with thousands of supporters, took to the streets in a historic battle with then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel over his corporate education reform and austerity plans for the city’s public school system. That strike helped define the increasingly popular concept of ​“bargaining for the common good,” an approach ​“where unions make demands that would benefit not just members but the larger communities,” as CTU Vice President Jackson Potter explained two years ago on the tenth anniversary of the walk out. Today, the union is in the midst of another struggle over the future of the country’s third-largest public education system.

Fellow Letter Carriers, Stand Together, Vote No On Sellout Contract!

October 25, 2024 Rob Darakjian, Labor Notes. , , , ,
City letter carriers finally got to see the headlines of the tentative agreement Letter Carriers (NALC) President Brian Renfroe has negotiated—after more than 500 days of working without a contract and being kept completely in the dark about the state of bargaining. In that time, a groundswell of enthusiasm and organizing for “Open Bargaining”—the right to be informed about the real state of negotiations—has swept through the union and became the Build a Fighting NALC movement. More than 40 union branches and a few state associations passed resolutions calling for this democratic right.

‘Not Good Enough’: Striking Machinists Reject New Boeing Offer

October 24, 2024 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. , , ,
After 40 days on strike, 33,000 Machinists rejected an improved contract offer from Boeing by 64 percent on Wednesday. The offer included a 35 percent wage increase over 4 years. Members of Machinists (IAM) District 751 and District W24 build passenger jets and and freighters, including the 737, 767, and 777. Most work at Boeing’s huge factories at Everett and Renton, Washington. “It’s a little bit better, but it still needs to go further,” said Ky Carlson, who was staffing a picket line at Everett on Tuesday, where she would normally be assembling the 777.

Why My Coworkers And I Unionized Our Architecture Firm

October 21, 2024 Je Siqueira, Jacobin. , , , ,
The first attempt to unionize a privately owned architecture firm since the 1970s started at SHoP Architects in New York City, where I was working at the time. This was part of a wave of nontraditional organizing efforts taking place around 2020 that included tech workers at Kickstarter and Google, baristas at various Starbucks locations, writers at Vice, and partners at Apple stores, just to name a few. During the summer of that same year, while most “nonessential workers” were working remotely under stay-at-home orders, some of us hit the streets of cities all over the country to protest police brutality and the assassinations of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor.

Peruvian Transport Workers Strike To Demand An End To Extortion

October 16, 2024 Pablo Meriguet, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , ,
On Thursday, October 10, several associations of transportation workers and companies in Peru began a work stoppage that lasted until Saturday, October 12, protesting rising crime and extortion by criminal groups in Peru’s major cities. In their industrial action, they were joined by hundreds of people from trade and business associations, as well as some citizen and student organizations. Why? The security crisis that Peruvians are experiencing is worsening significantly. In fact, this is the first time that protests of this type and for this reason have taken place in Peru, which shows the severity of the situation and the uncertain consequences that this type of demand could cause, politically speaking, in Peruvian society.

The Call Is Out For Mass, Simultaneous Strikes In 4 Years

October 16, 2024 Sarah Lazare, Workday Magazine. , , , , , , ,
There is a credible call for a general strike in the United States in four years. The call first came from the United Auto Workers after its fall 2023 stand-up strike, in which the union took on the Big Three carmakers simultaneously in rolling, surprise work stoppages. All three contracts that emerged are slated to expire on the same day: May 1, 2028, International Workers’ Day. This is not the first time UAW has aligned the Big Three contracts, but what the union did next is remarkable. It put out a challenge to the US labor movement: “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own so that together we can begin to flex our collective muscles,” UAW announced on October 29, 2023.
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