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Unions

The French Working Class Organizes To Defeat Macron’s Pension Reforms

January 13, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , ,
On January 10, all the major trade unions in France gave a joint call for protests against the proposals for pension reforms announced by the Emmanuel Macron-led government. The unions, including the General Confederation of Labor (CGT), the French Democratic Confederation of Labor (CFDT), Workers’ Force (FO), the French Confederation of Christian Workers (CFTC), the French Confederation of Management—General Confederation of Executives (CFE-CGC), the National Union of Autonomous Trade Unions (UNSA), Fédération syndicale unitaire (FSU), and Solidaires, have called for a general strike and nationwide protest mobilization on January 19. The left-wing coalition Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale (NUPES) composed of the La France Insoumise (LFI), French Communist Party (PCF), and others also oppose the reforms and have extended support to the protests.

New Anti-Union Law In UK Takes Aim At Strike Wave

January 13, 2023 Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. , , ,
The Tory government in the UK under Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is mulling new anti-strike legislation that aims to crack down on the growing worker unrest spreading throughout the country. Faced with a historic cost-of-living crisis, workers across the UK made 2022 the busiest year for strikes and worker actions since the 1980s. The National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) have been at the forefront of Britain’s strike wave, as TRNN previously reported. They have been joined by countless workers across multiple industries, from university lecturers to mail carriers. The new anti-strike law in Parliament would force workers to cross their own picket lines to uphold a standard of “minimum service” while striking, effectively squashing the ability of workers to withhold their labor.

Fort Worth Journalists Win Only Newspaper Union Contract In Texas

January 12, 2023 Gus Bova, Portside. , , , , ,
On the heels of an unprecedented 24-day labor strike late last year, around 20 journalists at the 117-year-old Fort Worth Star-Telegram have ratified the only union contract at a Texas newspaper. The union victory comes after more than two years of difficult negotiations and forms part of a surge in nationwide newsroom organizing since the mid-2010s as journalists have increasingly fought back against corporate predation in a struggling industry. Workers at two other Texas papers, in Dallas and Austin, are still bargaining for union contracts after roughly two years. Before launching the labor strike on November 28—likely the first open-ended newsroom work stoppage in Texas history—Kaley Johnson, a justice reporter at the Star-Telegram and vice president of the paper’s union, the Fort Worth NewsGuild, said negotiations were largely stuck in the mud.

Yale Graduate And Professional Student Workers Vote To Unionize

January 11, 2023 Megan Vaz, Yale Daily News. , , ,
In a landslide victory, Yale’s graduate and professional student workers have voted to unionize, marking a historic first after decades of organizing on campus. According to the National Labor Relations Board’s final tally, 1,860 of 2,039 voters favored forming a collective bargaining unit under Local 33 – UNITE HERE, the graduate student union that has fought for University recognition since 1990. Daily Union Elections, which tracks NLRB records, listed Local 33’s election filing as the second largest in the nation in 2022, with 4,000 graduate and professional workers eligible for union representation. Including challenged ballots that went uncounted due to wide vote margin, about two-thirds of those eligible to vote showed up to the polls or mailed in ballots.

Strikes Are Stronger Than Laws

January 10, 2023 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. , , ,
When people get frustrated and petulant, they lash out. So too do governments. When labor unions are looking a little too powerful, governments often throw tantrums, like spoiled children momentarily denied their lollipops. The natural response of childish governments is to try to pass laws to deny workers the ability to strike, taking away their most powerful weapon. It is important, in the midst of these threats, to keep in mind a simple fact: Strikes are stronger than laws. As we speak, the UK is experiencing its most momentous strike wave since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the 1980s. Nurses, transit workers, postal workers, and a slew of other public employees have walked out of work in the past month, and the actions show no sign of letting up.

Bolivian Unions Mobilize For President Luis Arce

January 8, 2023 Kawsachun News. , , ,
Bolivia’s social movements have declared a state of emergency and permanent mobilization in support of President Luis Arce in response to riots in Santa Cruz by groups loyal to arrested coup leader, Luis Fernando Camacho. Social movements that made the declaration include the COB workers confederation, the campesino confederations (CSTUCB, Interculturales), and indigenous organizations (CONAMAQ, Bartolinas). Executive Secretary of the COB, Juan Carlos Huarachi, held a press conference late last night after a meeting President Luis Arce, he said, “Today, all the social movements agree to declare ourselves in a state of emergency for everything that is happening in the department of Santa Cruz.

What Message Does A ‘Vote No’ Campaign Send?

January 7, 2023 Helena Worthen and Joe Berry, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
In December, the contract bargaining team for Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865 brought back a tentative agreement with the University of California and presented it to its membership of teaching assistants, graders and tutors for ratification. A lively “vote no” campaign arose. A vote no campaign sends a very public message. Does it tell the boss that the union is divided, and therefore weak, or does it warn the boss that members are ready to fight for more? What does it say about the union and the union leadership? When members vote on ratification of a contract, the main issue is trust—whether in the contents of the deal, the process, or both.

This Construction Union Is Reaching Out To Undocumented And Non-union Workers

January 6, 2023 Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network. , , ,
New York City, New York - Many workplaces are marked by a real tension between different types of workers: undocumented vs. citizens, union vs. non-union, and more. New York City’s Construction and General Building Laborers’ Union Local 79 has been working to overcome these divides by intentionally reaching out to undocumented and non-union workers in the construction trades. And the bosses are taking notice. Recorded in the spring of 2022 from the Local 79 headquarters in Manhattan, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez conducts a Spanish-language interview with Alex Martinez, Walter Martinez, and José Rosas, who were all fired from their jobs at Alba Demolition after they were caught talking to Local 79 organizers on their break.

In 2022, Art Workers Continued To Unionize And Strike For Their Rights

January 5, 2023 Karen K. Ho, Portside. , , ,
Momentum for unions and unionization efforts in art museums, art institutions, and art schools continued in 2022, as workers bargained for better conditions, held strikes, and even ratified contracts. In the past decade, workers at large institutions like the New Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, have formed unions. They’ve often sought higher wages, better job security, and a voice in institutional policies like safety protocols, and have typically joined groups like the Local 2110 Union of Auto Workers (UAW) and local councils of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). The continued unionization movement now includes non-tenure track arts faculty at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Management Rights: A Pitfall When Negotiating Your First Contract

January 4, 2023 Robert M. Schwartz, Labor Notes. , , ,
Over the past year, impressive numbers of workers, especially in the retail and service sectors, have begun the process of organizing a union. Workers at Starbucks, Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, Amazon, and other establishments have won union elections. Many of these unions are now negotiating for their first contracts—always a difficult task. Employers can drag out the process for months or years. And employers may seek contract language that grievously weakens the union, now and for years to come. This article focuses on management rights. Future articles will discuss other pitfalls. First, a warning: Some members of the bargaining team may assume that if the union gives in to compromising language in the first contract, it will be able to revise the agreement the next time around.

Workers At Howard Brown Health Unionized – Now They’re On Strike

January 4, 2023 Peter Lucas, In These Times. , , , , ,
Chicago, Illinois - Recently unionized employees at Howard Brown Health, a nonprofit Chicago health clinic that caters particularly to LGBTQ people, went out on strike Tuesday. Management is also threatening to lay off 15 percent of their workforce, citing “financial concerns.” On December 30, the sixty employees — who had previously been told they would be laid off Tuesday — arrived at work to discover that they had been locked out of their emails and other work software, including at least one therapist who says that they lost access during a call with a patient. The workers were given no advance notice that this would happen, according to the union. A photo of the email from a manager informing the workers of their impending layoff circulated on social media and showed that he didn’t personalize the message, so each email addressed a given employee as “NAME.”

We’ve Reached Peak Zelensky – Now What?

December 29, 2022 Robert Freeman, Consortium News. , , , , , ,
When the president of the poorest, most corrupt nation in Europe is feted with multiple standing ovations by the combined Houses of Congress, and his name invoked in the same breath as Winston Churchill, you know we’ve reached Peak Zelensky. It’s a farcical, almost psychotic over-promotion, probably surpassed only by the media’s shameful, hyperbolic railroading of the country into war with Iraq, in 2003. Paraphrasing Gertrude from Hamlet, “Methinks the media doth hype too much.” Let’s remember that before ascending to his country’s presidency, Volodymyr Zelensky’s greatest claim to fame was that he could play the piano with his penis. I’m not joking. And he ran on a platform to unite his country for peace, and for making amends with Russia. Again, I’m not joking.

Learning From The Biden Strikebreaking

December 29, 2022 Chris Townsend, MLToday. , ,
The Biden regime’s shameful betrayal of the railroad workers unfolded in late November and early December as the possible railroad strike crisis slowly wound to its ending. The gang-up on the railroad workers and their desire to exercise the basic right to strike was practically all-encompassing. Politicians from both political parties – with only a handful of exceptions – all of the media, every single large corporation in the country, and even some liberals and so-called leftists all made the case why the strike must be stopped. Broken even before it had started. This chorus all echoed the same canard, that it was too important to allow a rail strike, no matter that it was in response to the refusal of the company barons to seriously negotiate in the first place.

Boston University Historic Union Win For Graduate Workers

December 26, 2022 Steve Gillis, Workers World. , , , , ,
Boston, Massachusetts - Over 3,000 new members of the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU), Service Employees (SEIU) Local 509, celebrated a 98.1% NLRB election victory Dec. 7, which was months in the organizing. To punctuate that 2022 has been a wildly successful year of rank-and-file union organizing in the U.S., some labor researchers have characterized the 1,414 to 28 vote as “the most lopsided NLRB election win ever by a bargaining unit [of] more than 1,000 people.” (@dskamper, @gradworkersofBU, Twitter) Speaking at a Dec. 9 Boston rally marking the one-year anniversary of the first victory for Starbucks Workers United, rank-and-file BUGWU organizer Wu Nairan credited “the inspiration and solidarity of [this summer’s 64-day] strike of Boston Starbucks Workers United on the BU campus” with propelling BUGWU’s win.

Military Budget Hike For 2023 Is 3,200 Times The NLRB Increase

December 24, 2022 Amy Livingston and Sarah Lazare , In These Times. , , , ,
Draft text of the congressional omnibus spending bill released this week reveals a proposed $25 million increase in funding to the National Labor Relations Board, which would bring the agency’s 2023 federal fiscal year budget to $299 million. Its funding has otherwise been frozen at $274 million for the past nine years; when inflation is taken into account, this effectively amounts to a budget decrease of 25% since 2014, according to calculations cited in an NLRB news release. The proposed hike is well below what leaders from unions like Communications Workers of America and Unite Here have been calling for, and falls short of the (already meager) $319 million President Joe Biden requested. Any failure to robustly fund the NLRB hurts workers’ attempts to win formal union recognition and protect their basic rights, a key reason why anti-union lawmakers have kept the NLRB’s budget slim.
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