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Unions

Starbucks Ordered To Reopen 23 Stores

December 17, 2023 Julia Conley, Commondreams. , , , ,
Like its alleged intimidation tactics and firing of workers who have led unionization efforts, Starbucks' closure of at least 23 stores amid a nationwide workers' rights push last year did not go unnoticed by federal regulators, who ordered the global coffee chain to reopen the locations on Wednesday. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) issued a complaint saying that eight of the shuttered stores were among the more than 360 Starbucks locations that have voted to unionize, and that executives did not notify the union, Starbucks Workers United, about the closures ahead of time—robbing organizers of an opportunity to bargain over the decision.

Largest Health Workers Union In United States Calls For Ceasefire

December 16, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , ,
The largest health workers’ union in the United States, Service Employees International Union Local 1199, just joined the global movement for a ceasefire. Representing over 450,000 working and retired healthcare industry workers, SEIU 1199 is now the second largest union in the US to call for a ceasefire, behind the United Auto Workers. “We reject the notion that Israel’s attacks on hospitals filled with patients, apartment blocks filled with families, and the deaths of 11,000+ Palestinian women and children are acceptable collateral damage,” reads 1199’s statement. “We urge an immediate ceasefire.” With this statement, the local builds on an anti-war legacy.

Unionists Around The World Block Weapons Bound For Israel

December 15, 2023 Rafeef Ziadah and Katy Fox-Hodess, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
An appeal from Palestinian unions for global solidarity has elicited unprecedented worker-led actions in Italy, Canada, India, Belgium, Spain, and the U.K. Israel’s military attack on Gaza has killed more than 18,000 people, injured nearly 50,000, and displaced 1.9 million, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. In an urgent call on October 16, Palestinian unions and professional associations asked unions abroad to “Stop Arming Israel,” given the military and diplomatic support for Israel coming from the U.S. and the European Union. They appealed to unions and workers to refrain from manufacturing, transporting, and handling weapons and surveillance technology destined for Israel.

European Trade Unions March To Protest The EU-Imposed Austerity

December 15, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , , , ,
On December 12, trade unionists, political parties, and other working-class sections from around 30 countries participated in a major demonstration led by the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) protesting the EU-imposed austerity in the region. The march was organized against the backdrop of the summit of EU leaders in Brussels on December 14 and 15 to find a consensus over a controversial reform of the EU’s economic governance rules called the ‘Stability and Growth Pact.’ Around 15,000 people marched in Brussels behind the banner Together Against Austerity sending a clear message to leaders that there must be no return to austerity.

Why Labor Unions Should Join The Housing Fight

December 15, 2023 Zoe Tucker, Law and Political Economy Project. , , ,
Brenda Mendoza, a worker at the Ritz-Carlton Los Angeles, begins her daily commute at 3 a.m. To save gas, she carpools with family members, and they arrive back home around 9 p.m., at which point she’s lucky to catch three hours of sleep. Some days, she can sneak a nap during her 30-minute lunch break. This extended journey was not always Brenda’s fate, as she once commuted only ten minutes to and from her union job as a uniform attendant. However, increasing rental costs have pushed her and her family so far from downtown LA that she now drives four hours roundtrip every day she works at the hotel, where the cheapest room would cost you more than $800 tonight.

Workers Picket Game Awards Amid Industry Layoffs

December 15, 2023 Mel Buer, The Real News Network. , ,
On the West Coast, game workers formed a working group called Game Workers of Southern California, whose chief aim is to coordinate direct actions, share information with new and existing game workers, and shed light on the workplace abuses in the game industry. Just last week, organizers formed a picket outside of the Video Game Awards, where they passed out leaflets about the rounds of layoffs in the industry and sought to educate attendees on the need for unions at their favorite studios. For this week’s episode, I sat down with a number of organizers from Game Workers of SoCal to discuss working conditions in the game industry, the need for organizing in tech, and the importance of white-collar unions in the wider US labor movement.

Starbucks’ Offer To Resume Contract Talks Comes With Serious Fine Print

December 13, 2023 Steven Greenhouse, In These Times. , , ,
Starbucks received lots of favorable press when it told its workers’ union that it wanted to resume contract talks. The move was a much-needed PR boost for a company whose recent battles with the union have stirred bad press and contributed to sinking stock prices. A top Starbucks official wrote to the union’s president on Friday saying the company wanted to end the bargaining impasse — one caused by the coffee chain’s refusal to hold any negotiating sessions for more than six months. As a result of that refusal, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has repeatedly accused Starbucks of failing to bargain in good faith.

British Workers Organize To Defeat The Tory Anti-Strike Laws

December 12, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
Trade unions and left-wing sections in the UK are gearing up to challenge the anti-strike laws of the Tory government. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 passed on July 20 this year came into effect in some of the key sectors in the UK from December 8. Major trade unions in the country, including Unite Union, Fire Brigades Union, National Education Union, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), UNISON, Communication Workers Union (CWU), and the National Union of Rail, and the Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) gathered at the special conference of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on December 9, Saturday, in London, and resolved to fight and defeat the anti-strike law.

When Black And White Tenant Farmers Joined Together

December 9, 2023 David Griscom, The Real News Network. , , , , ,
It’s 1935 and class war is brewing in Arkansas. Standing before 1,500 black and white sharecroppers, the radical Methodist minister Ward Rodgers thunders, “I can lead a mob to lynch any planter in Poinsett County.” The crowd erupts with applause. These white and black sharecroppers who worked, lived, and died amid the vestiges of the Southern plantation system were no strangers to terror. The night before, a group of planters and deputy sheriffs had attacked an adult education class taught by Rodgers. The landowner class, the banks, the police, and an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan called the Nightriders had been engaged in a brutal crackdown on the workers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

NIH Researchers Vote To Form A Union For The First Time

December 9, 2023 Max Kozlov, Portside. , , , ,
Hundreds of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have voted overwhelmingly to form a union, nearly completing the official process required to do so. They plan to call on the agency — the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research — to improve pay and working conditions, and to bolster its policies and procedures for dealing with harassment and excessive workloads. About 98% of the research fellows who participated in the ballot voted on 6 December to form the union, with 1,601 voting in favour and just 36 against. Barring any objections, the result will be certified by the US Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) after five business days, and the union will become the first ever to represent fellows at a federal research agency and the largest union to form in the US government in more than a decade.

Inspired By Strike Wins, 1,000 Volkswagen Workers Sign Union Cards

December 9, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
Today workers at Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tennessee, assembly plant announced their third bid to unionize plant-wide with the Auto Workers (UAW). Riding the momentum of its strike of the Big 3 automakers, the UAW now wants to double its numbers in the auto industry by adding 150,000 workers at companies that have long avoided unionization. Thirteen non-union automakers are on notice: Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Mercedes, Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, and electric vehicle producers Rivian, Tesla, and Lucid. The union says it has been inundated with calls and online sign-ups by workers at these firms. The Volkswagen drive is the first to go public, after 1,000 workers signed union cards.

Tesla Faces Scandinavian Labor Revolt

December 8, 2023 Elliot Smith, Portside. , , , ,
Tesla faces a growing revolt in Scandinavia after Danish dockworkers joined a sympathy strike with Swedish mechanics, heaping pressure on the electric vehicle giant to grant collective bargaining rights to employees. Members of Swedish trade union IF Metall have been at loggerheads with Tesla for six weeks, and have garnered support via a secondary strike action from fellow workers across a range of industries in Sweden, including postal workers, painters, dockworkers and electricians. Tesla CEO Elon Musk bemoaned the blockage of license plate deliveries by postal workers as “insane” and late last month filed lawsuits against both the Swedish Transport Agency and the postal service.

Direct-Action Targets UK Firms Arming Israel

December 2, 2023 Sam Perlo-Freeman, Khem Rogaly and Anna Stavrianakis, Consortium News. , , , , , ,
U.K. arms sales are in the spotlight again because of the ferocity and genocidal intent of the Israeli assault on Palestinians and the reliance of Israeli forces on British military hardware. While the U.S. is far and away Israel’s biggest and most important arms supplier and military-diplomatic advocate, the U.K. is also a leading military and political ally of Israel. From the Balfour Declaration of 1917 [expressing British support for the establishment of a national home in Palestine for the Jewish people] to the recent failure of the British Parliament to back a ceasefire, Westminster policy has had detrimental consequences for Palestinians across generations.

UAW Is Largest US Union To Call For An Immediate End To The Violence

December 2, 2023 Mindy Isser, In These Times. , , , , , ,
The United Auto Workers have endorsed a cease-fire, making them the largest national union to do so in a major development for labor and the larger movement for peace and justice in Palestine and Israel. Brandon Mancilla, Director of United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A, which represents 50,000 active and retired workers within the larger UAW, announced the union’s call for a cease-fire publicly on Friday at a news conference outside of the White House where organizers and activists have been on a hunger strike. “We opposed fascism in World War II, we opposed the Vietnam war, we opposed apartheid South Africa and we mobilized union resources in that fight,” Mancilla says.

Auto Workers Direct Momentum Toward Organizing Plants

December 1, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
“The company knows that Toyota workers are watching,” said Auto Workers President Shawn Fain on November 3. “And when the time comes, Toyota workers and all non-union auto workers are going to be ready to stand up.” That time has come—yesterday the UAW announced its plan, already in motion, to organize the whole auto sector. “Workers across the country, from the West to the Midwest and especially in the South, are reaching out to join our movement and to join the UAW,” said Fain in a new video. The union says thousands of workers have reached out asking for support in unionizing their auto plants. They’ve scoured the old websites from previous union drives and filled out forms to be put in touch with an organizer.
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