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Unions

Auto Workers Charge Up The Power To Fight For An Electric Future

October 17, 2023 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. , , , ,
“I think organizing those [non-union] plants needs to be our number one priority after we get done organizing the Big 3,” says Ryan Ashley at Ford Cleveland Engine. “With how significant the gains are looking in this contract, they’ll see it. And it’ll help.”

Auto Workers Escalate: Surprise Strike At Massive Ford Truck Plant

October 12, 2023 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. , , , , , , ,
Every Friday for the past four weeks, Big 3 CEOs have waited fearfully for Auto Workers (UAW) President Shawn Fain to announce which plants will strike next. But without warning on Wednesday afternoon, the union threw a haymaker: within 10 minutes the UAW would be shutting down the vast Kentucky Truck Plant. This plant, on 500 acres outside Louisville, is one of Ford’s most profitable—cranking out full-size SUVs and the Superduty line of commercial trucks. “We make almost half of Ford’s U.S. revenue right here,” says James White, who has worked in the plant for a decade. These 8,700 strikers join the 25,000 already walking the lines at assembly plants and parts distribution centers across the country in the union’s escalating Stand-Up Strike.

NYC Transit Retirees Join Fight Against Medicare Advantage

October 12, 2023 Joe Maniscalco, Portside. , , ,
TWU Local 100 retiree Patricia Jewett put more than 30 years into the MTA New York City Transit. Now at 67, her knees are shot and bronchial asthma makes it hard to breathe. But Jewett says she remains proud of being the first woman to ever work in the East New York Bus Depot’s Maintenance Division — and she doesn’t understand why she and her fellow retirees are now being stripped of their traditional Medicare coverage and pushed into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage plan. “I spent years being the only woman in an all male atmosphere,” Jewett told Work-Bites this past Friday outside the Downtown Marriott in Brooklyn. “It wasn't easy, but I stuck it out."

On The Picket Line

October 11, 2023 Marie Kelly, Workers World. , , , , , ,
Registered nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, New Jersey, have taken action against corporate greed and exploitation as well as union-busting tactics. Their strike is into its third month. The 1,700 nurses, represented by United Steelworkers Local 4-200, are demanding safe staffing. Research has proven that adequate nurse to patient ratios save lives. The pandemic was the match that lit the fire around safe staffing. Nurses were pushed to the brink and were no longer willing to put their patients’ lives and their own well-being and professional licenses at risk. Since the strike, RWJU bosses have shown that they undervalue their nurses by suspending health benefits and limiting picket lines at hospital entrances.

United Campus Workers Rack Up Victories In ‘Right-To-Work’ Tennessee

October 7, 2023 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. , , , , , ,
In recent years, U.S. labor organizing has turned an exciting corner. National headlines have burst with workers putting pressure on far corners of the economy for fair wages and safe, secure jobs — from employees at major logistics corporations like Amazon and UPS to auto workers and Hollywood writers and actors. The world of higher education is no different, and colleges and universities across the country have seen their own wave of new labor campaigns. Last fall, for example, 48,000 workers at the University of California went on a 40-day strike — the largest higher ed strike in U.S. history.

Kaiser Permanente Workers In D.C. And Virginia Go On Strike

October 6, 2023 Danielle J. Brown, Maryland Matters. , , , ,
Thousands of Kaiser Permanente workers across the United States began a strike against contract negotiations that strikers say are not being done “in good faith” and fail to adequately address the “unsafe staffing levels” within the major medical organization. The contracts for several thousand Kaiser Permanente workers expired Sunday evening, including contracts for about 400 pharmacists and optometrists out of Virginia and Washington, D.C., kicking off the nationwide strike of Kaiser Permanente healthcare workers and technicians, according to a written statement from The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions.

Kaiser Permanente Workers Begin Largest Healthcare Strike In US History

October 5, 2023 Mike Pappas, Left Voice. , , , , ,
The largest health care strike in U.S. history has begun, as more than 75,000 workers at Kaiser Permanente walked off the job this morning. The scheduled three-day labor stoppage comes after Kaiser failed to meet the demands of workers, continuing to prioritize their profits over patient care. The striking coalition includes eight unions representing health care workers from a variety of job descriptions and covers Kaiser facilities in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Virginia, and Washington City. This represents about 40% of all Kaiser Permanente staff, according to spokeswoman Renee Saldana of the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare (SEIU-UHW)—the largest union in the coalition.

University Of Maine Graduate Students Win Union Recognition

October 5, 2023 Christopher Burns , Portside. , , , , ,
The Maine Labor Relations Board last week certified the Maine Graduate Workers Union-UAW after an independent arbitrator determined it had a majority support among graduate workers, according to the Maine AFL-CIO. The university system said in August it would recognize the union and began bargaining if an independent analysis found it had a majority support. The graduate workers union will represent about 1,000 graduate assistants, research assistants and teaching assistants who make up a large percentage of the teaching and research workforce across the system’s seven campuses, according to the Maine AFL-CIO, which announced the certification on Friday afternoon.

Where There Are Scabs, There Is Violence

October 4, 2023 Bill Cole, Labor Notes. , , , , , , ,
The province of Quebec was the first jurisdiction in North America to pass legislation banning replacement workers, in 1977, after significant increases in picket line violence across the province. One dispute was a 20-month-long strike involving UAW Local 510 and United Aircraft (later called Pratt & Whitney), which became one of the most violent strikes in Canadian history. In a blunt observation about replacement workers, Quebec’s Minister of Labour, Pierre-Marc Johnson, stated on the floor of the legislature that “where there are scabs there is violence.” Johnson said his government further supported a greater balance in the bargaining dynamic between labor and management.

File Under ‘S’ For Solidarity: Union Members Defend Local Library

October 3, 2023 Stephanie Luce , Portside. , , , ,
When teens and librarians planned a Drag Make-Up Hour at the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers, MA (a small town about 25 miles north of Boston) they drew fury from a handful of right-wingers—and heartfelt support from the community, including dozens of union members from the North Shore Labor Council. Holding rainbow signs that read “North Shore Labor Council: Where No Worker and No Union Stands Alone,” they joined hundreds of others from LBGTQ+, faith, peace, and environmental communities. Altogether, more than 350 counter-protestors formed a “wall of love” outside the library at the May 2023 event, greatly outnumbering the 10 protestors who held signs reading “Make America Great Again: Vote Republican” and “Straight Pride.”

Five Lessons From The North Hollywood Stripper Strike

October 3, 2023 Maria Esch, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
The successful formation of a union in an industry like stripping — defined by high turnover, irregular pay scales, a culture of competition fostered by employers and stigmatized labor – is incredibly rare. Before Star Garden and Magic Tavern, the feat had only been achieved once before, at the Lusty Lady Theatre in San Francisco in 1996, which has since closed its doors. The journey to unionization was not an easy one. Facing every union-busting tactic in the book, Equity Strippers Noho, formerly known as the North Hollywood Stripper Strike, was actively picketing outside of Star Garden for a whopping eight months before they officially read the results of their union election: a unanimous “yes.”

Automakers’ Electric Vehicle Lie

October 1, 2023 Lucy Dean Stockton, The Lever. , , , , ,
The United Auto Workers are entering their third week of the first-ever simultaneous strike against the three big automakers, and for the first time, a sitting US president, Joe Biden, joined them on the picket line. Executives at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis are pushing back on worker demands by invoking the climate crisis. They say it is impossible to give workers what they want while also making a swift transition to manufacturing electric vehicles. On September 14, Ford’s CEO Jim Farley said that the union’s demands — higher wages, better hours, an end to tiered employment, and guaranteed job security in a green energy transition — could send the company into bankruptcy.

With No Reform Caucus, Auto Workers Would Not Be On Strike

October 1, 2023 Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes. , , , , , ,
One lesson is that member power does not have to start from a supermajority; that’s unlikely. UAW members are on strike today, with inspiring levels of rank-and-file energy, because four years ago a small group of activists founded a new reform caucus. That caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), boldly took advantage of an unexpected opportunity, organized like crazy, and won elections. Its candidates are now leading the union. If UAWD had not existed and organized hard, this current fight that has potential to change the stakes for the entire labor movement would not be happening.

Negotiating With Hollywood: Writers’ Representatives Tell The Story

September 30, 2023 Jeremy Fuster, Portside. , , , ,
Writers are finally back to work in Hollywood after the WGA and studios reached a deal, which has left many in the industry asking, “What took so long?” Chris Keyser and David A. Goodman, the co-chairs of WGA’s negotiating committee, pin the blame on the stall tactics that the studios used alongside the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, one that was rendered ineffective by the solidarity built between the WGA and other unions throughout the summer. “The AMPTP was created in the 80s during the Reagan era, a very anti-labor time. Now, labor is reasserting itself over the last few years, and the AMPTP can’t use old tactics anymore of stalling and trying to squeeze the unions,” Keyser told TheWrap.

First Tire Workers To Organize In 40 Years Win First Contract

September 28, 2023 Finley Williams, Labor Notes. , , , ,
It was late summer 2017 at the Overtyme Bar and Grill, a hotspot off a busy highway in Macon, Georgia, and Kumho Tire plant worker Mario Smith had important questions for local United Steelworkers (USW) president Alex Perkins: he wanted to know how he could bring a union to the one-year-old factory. Now six years later—after two elections, many National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) cases, a virulent union-busting campaign, and the triumphant solidarity of the factory workers—that union has gained its first-ever collective bargaining agreement with Kumho Tire management, the first tire workers to unionize in the United States in 40 years.
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