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Unions

Temple’s Grad Students Say ‘Hell No’ To Bad Deal From University Bosses

February 23, 2023 Jason Koslowski, Left Voice. , , , , , , ,
Grad workers in Philadelphia just decisively rejected an offer from Temple University’s administration. The vote was overwhelming: by a margin of 92 percent. TUGSA, a union of 750 teaching and research assistants at Temple University in Philadelphia, is entering the fourth week of its strike. TUGSA members make $19,500 a year in a city where annual rent alone runs about $23,000. The union is fighting for a 50 percent raise in wages. In earlier rounds of negotiating, the university’s offer was 2 percent, later raised to 3 percent. Just after the strike started, the administration escalated the fight in an unprecedented way, revoking the grad workers’ health insurance and their tuition remission.

Baseball Players Defeated Non-Competes To Build Union

February 21, 2023 Brian Callaci, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed to ban the non-compete clause—a type of coercive labor contract that prevents workers from leaving their employer to work for a competitor. One in five workers labors under a non-compete agreement, costing workers $300 billion annually. The AFL-CIO was part of a large coalition of organizations petitioning the FTC for a ban on non-competes in 2019. Now the FTC is considering banning them. The long struggle of Major League Baseball players shows how the fight against non-competes can be linked with increasing union strength.

USC Grad Workers Win Their Union, Join UAW

February 21, 2023 Graduate Student Workers At USC, Portside. , , , , ,
By a 93% margin, graduate workers at the University of Southern California have voted 1,599 to 122 in favor of joining the Graduate Student Workers Organizing Committee-United Auto Workers (GSWOC-UAW), according to ballots tallied today by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The victory caps a multi-year effort, with workers standing strong against USC administrators’ anti-union campaign. GSWOC-UAW will represent 3,000 Teaching Assistants, Research Assistants and Assistant Lecturers at USC. “We are so energized by this resounding vote in favor of our union,” said Stepp Mayes, a Graduate Student Worker in Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Labor Power And Strategy: Learning From The Garment Workers

February 16, 2023 Jeffery Hermanson, Labor Notes , , ,
John Womack Jr.’s new book, Labor Power and Strategy (PM Press, 2023), edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perusek and with responses from 10 organizers, labor activists, and educators, is a timely consideration of some basic strategic principles. Womack maintains that the primary power that workers have is structural power—that is, power based on their position in the production process. Associational power—developed via collective organizations like unions—derives from this structural power. My view is that whether associational power or structural power is primary is historically contingent, and that no matter which is primary at a given moment, they are closely linked in practice.

Union Kitchen Workers Win Back Pay In Labor Settlement

February 13, 2023 Margaret Barthel, DCist. , , , ,
Union organizers at Union Kitchen locations in the D.C. region have settled a dispute with the food accelerator and retailer, which officials said had engaged in union-busting tactics outlined in an extensive complaint last fall. The National Labor Relations Board settlement agreement requires the restaurant to pay nearly $25,000 in backpay and frontpay to five workers who were fired or faced discipline, apparently in retaliation for their participation in the union drive. The payments include interest, expenses, and relief from economic harm and adverse tax consequences to some of the named workers.

German Workers Across Sectors Protest Fall In Real Wages

February 12, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , , ,
On Thursday, February 9, public service workers from sectors, including health care, day-care, city administration, public transport, water distribution, universities, and municipal waste management, went on a warning strike protesting low wages and poor working conditions. The protest took place in the States of Berlin, North Rhine Westphalia (NRW), and Hesse, among others, Over 3,500 people, including professionals from the state-owned Vivantes Hospitals, Charite-Berlin University of Medicine, Berlin Waste Management (BSR), and other public sector enterprises demonstrated at Oranienplatz in Berlin on Thursday to protest the fall in real wages.

To Change The World, Our Unions Must Change

February 11, 2023 David Story, Labor Notes. , ,
Unionism has seen a resurgence in popularity the past few years. The problem is, it’s very difficult to get our members organizing in their communities when they hate the way our leadership (I use that word loosely) is operating. Our unions shouldn’t be, and I’d argue weren’t meant to be, transactional—yet by and large that is what they have grown to be. By transactional I mean: I pay dues, you provide a service, and my duty ends with my dues. Instead, our unions should be conduits for radically changing society and the economy as we know it. Even as conservative as my own union, the Machinists, is, the preamble to our union constitution begins, “Believing that the right of those who toil to enjoy to the full extent the wealth created by their labor is a natural right…” and goes on to say that worker organizations should use “the natural resources, means of production and distribution for the benefit of all the people.”

Fordham University’s Resident Assistants Unionize

February 10, 2023 Olivia Wood , Left Voice. , , , , ,
New York City, New York - Last Wednesday, resident assistants (RAs) at the Rose Hill campus of Fordham University announced the formation of their union with OPEIU Local 153. The announcement came just two days after Fordham Faculty United (SEIU Local 200 United), the contingent faculty union on campus, ratified their second contract. The establishment of the Fordham RA union is the latest instance of a new but rapidly growing trend in undergraduate worker organizing on college campuses. OPEIU Local 153 also represents RAs at Barnard College and most office workers at Fordham. Over three-quarters of the bargaining unit signed a union recognition petition that was delivered to Fordham president Tania Tetlow on February 1. The union gave Tetlow until end-of-day February 7 to voluntarily recognize the union, and now it is filing for an NLRB election.

At This Jersey Factory, Pension-Backed Private Equity Takes On Union Workers

February 9, 2023 Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Lever. , , ,
Wharton, New Jersey - At the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Refresco — a transnational corporation that produces and bottles soft drinks for major brands such as Tropicana and Gatorade — had a single response to its staff about the public health crisis unfolding at its Wharton, NJ plant an hour outside of New York City: show up to work. According to the workers at the plant and their union, employees exposed to the virus were denied time off, the factory remained open despite a broader economic shutdown, on top of the 12-hour shifts the company required. (Workers say the company used the pandemic to justify longer shifts, while Refresco claims the new policy went into place prior to the emergence of COVID-19). Outraged, the predominantly immigrant workforce formed a union, winning their first election in June 2021 in what was one of the largest blue-collar union victories during the pandemic.

Auto Glass Workers Withstand Threats To Form Independent Union

February 8, 2023 Alejandra Quintero, Labor Notes. , , ,
Workers who produce glass for automakers including Ford, Volkswagen, and Tesla at a big auto glass plant in Mexico are pushing for a new contract, after forming an independent union despite threats of violence from a powerful, employer-friendly union. The factory, owned by the French multinational Saint Gobain, employs 1,900 workers. It’s located in Cuautla, Morelos—the city in south-central Mexico where the revolutionary Emiliano Zapata is buried. Last September, workers there voted to join the new Independent Union of Free and Democratic Workers of Saint-Gobain Mexico and leave a union affiliated with the Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CTC). The CTC had held the contract since the plant opened in 1996. It’s one of the numerous, politically connected “employer-protection unions” that have long dominated Mexico’s labor scene.

How My Co-Workers Got Me Reinstated At Amazon’s San Bernardino Air Hub

February 7, 2023 Sara Fee, Labor Notes. , , , ,
San Bernardino, California - I’ve never organized before. What we’re doing at Amazon is all new to me. When I first started working at KSBD, the Amazon air hub in San Bernardino, it was the middle of the pandemic and they were hiring in mad numbers. No one else was. I needed a job fast and it seemed like the kind of place where I could move up. KSBD is brand new. It opened in April 2021, and I was among the first hired; depending on the season, there are about 1,200-1,600 workers there. It’s located at an airport, so a few hundred people work outside with the planes and the rest of us are inside. I work on the docks, unloading trailers. It operates 24/7. When I started at the warehouse, I was organizing—I just didn’t recognize it. But I was focused on the work process and making the warehouse run more smoothly. It seemed like Amazon had opened KSBD without a lot of planning; like we were testing the operation as we went. I was really hands-on.

What A Supreme Court Ruling Could Mean For Fast-Food Unions

February 7, 2023 Jaya Saxena, Eater. , , , ,
The strike is the worker’s most powerful tool. The action directly demonstrates the worker’s value — how hospitals don’t run without nurses, how websites don’t run without writers, how schools don’t run without adjunct professors. And with both the Red Cup Day strike and the Double Down strike in 2022, how Starbucks can’t run without its baristas. But the Supreme Court is currently hearing a case that could drastically affect workers’ ability to strike, and thus have huge ramifications for the wave of organizing within the food service industry. Glacier Northwest v. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters concerns the decision of 1959’s San Diego Building Trades Council v. Garmon, which protects unions from being sued for striking. In the case, which the Supreme Court began hearing on January 10, Glacier Northwest, a building material company, claims the Teamsters deliberately timed a 2017 strike so that mixing trucks would be filled with concrete, which could have resulted in damaged equipment and destroyed product. 

Railroads Offer Paid Sick Days, Schedule Changes To Retain Employees

February 7, 2023 Thomas Black, Boston Globe. , , ,
When railroad employees get sick, they’re usually faced with a tough choice: use one of their limited personal days, head into work anyway or, if neither of those is an option, risk their job by staying home. That may soon change. Railroads including Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and CSX are weighing offering paid sick days — or are already doing so — along with schedule changes and other steps to improve employees’ work-life balance. The sweeping efforts, coming alongside a revised union contract that raised pay, aim to improve worker relations in an industry that has struggled to hire and retain employees. ‘’We don’t consider our front-line workers as simply costs to the company’s bottom line,’’ Joe Hinrichs, chief executive of CSX, said via e-mail. ‘’Instead, they are the primary driver of our profitability.’’ Costs will still be a key consideration for the railroads — and their investors.

Largest First-Contract Wins In 25 Years At Two New Mexico Universities

February 4, 2023 Gauge Burnett, United Electrical. , , ,
New Mexico - Following ratification of first contracts by members of UE Local 1466-United Graduate Workers at the University of New Mexico and UE Local 1498-Graduate Workers United at New Mexico State University, thousands of graduate workers in the state are now covered by collective bargaining agreements. Both locals joined UE in historic “card check” drives at the beginning of the pandemic and have overwhelmingly ratified first contracts in mid-December, earning 7.12 percent and 6.8 percent raises, respectively, for their members. Covering more than 2,500 workers, these are the largest first contracts settled by UE in the last 25 years. The union organizing discussed for decades by UNM graduate workers finally took shape in the spring semester of 2020. A group of graduate workers reached out to UE and hit the ground running as the pandemic exacerbated the unfair treatment and poor working conditions that existed at UNM.

Non-Compete Agreement Leaves Workers Homeless And Jobless

February 3, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
Kevin Borowske is still mulling it over after being fired last week—and evicted as of February 28. Was he a scientist with the proprietary recipe for a cleaning solution? Was he the holder of a confidential blueprint concealing the secret rooms in the condo? Otherwise, he’s at a loss as to why the property management company FirstService Residential had him sign a non-compete agreement when he was hired as a caretaker—a job that blends janitorial and light housekeeping services—at a high-rise building in Minneapolis, Minnesota. A non-compete agreement bars the worker from taking a similar job with another company for a period of time. You might assume that such agreements would mainly be used to keep workers with proprietary information from being poached by a firm’s competitors. But now all kinds of employers require workers to sign them—so many that the Federal Trade Commission is considering outlawing the practice.
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