Skip to content

Worker Rights

UC Faculty Announce Work Stoppage

Hundreds of faculty across the system have committed to solidarity with the UAW strike against Unfair Labor Practices by the University of California, recognized by the Public Employment Relations Board. We support the four striking units’ demands for wages adequate to their cost of living, workplace and community safety, disability justice, and other fundamental issues. We recognize that, while education should be the University’s main mission, its core product is accreditation, which means degrees, which means grades. 48,000 academic workers across the UC have been on strike since November 14th, 2022. This includes UAW 5810, UAW2865, and SRU-UAW, representing Postdocs, Academic Researchers, Graduate Student Researchers, Trainees, Fellows, Graduate Student Instructors, Readers, and Tutors.

Over 100,000 Education Workers Strike In The United Kingdom

Tens of thousands of university workers at 150 universities began three days of strikes on Thursday against low pay, intolerable workloads, insecure contacts and pensions cuts. A 48-hour strike by the University and College Union (UCU) members finished Friday, to be followed by a 24-hour strike and day of action on November 30. The strikes are the largest in history of higher education, with workers out at every UK institution. Also striking are support staff, members of the Unison and Unite unions, demanding better pay and conditions. Thursday’s strike was held the same day that up to 50,000 teachers in Scotland walked out in their first national strike since the 1980s against pay restraint by the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and Scottish National Party devolved government. Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) members rejected—with inflation now running at 14.2 percent—an initial 5 percent pay offer and a revised offer of 6.85 percent for the lowest-paid teachers.

‘Labor Shortage’ Is Being Used As A Pretext To Harm Workers

A so-called ​“labor shortage” in the United States has quickly become a catch-all justification for policies that prevent workers from gaining too much power on the job, or collectively organizing by forming unions.  Not enough applicants for low-paid jobs packing meat, or working the cash register at Dairy Queen? Better crank up the Federal Reserve’s interest rates (a policy explicitly aimed at spurring a recession and putting people out of work), so that we have a larger reserve of the desperate unemployed. Pandemic-era social programs ever-so-slightly redistributing wealth downward? Better shut them down, lest we eliminate the supposed precarity needed to incentivize work.

Michigan Nurses Just Won A Groundbreaking Contract

In the spring of 2021, as the national COVID-19 vaccine rollout promised to lift the burden of overwhelmed hospitals, nurses at the University of Michigan were working harder than ever. Understaffing has been a problem for University of Michigan nurses since the 1980s, but it worsened during the pandemic, as patient surges met with hospital-wide cost containment measures that further thinned staff and resources. Over the first year of the pandemic, University of Michigan nurses filled gaps in staffing mainly by volunteering for overtime. As elective procedures resumed, management turned to mandatory overtime — a mechanism written into the union’s 2018 contract as an emergency measure — to staff the hospital. If a unit was short-staffed, supervisors called off-duty nurses.

Chris Hedges Report: Dystopia, Octopus Intelligence And What Makes Us Human

Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea asks the kinds of questions about us, our future and our interaction with other living beings that are raised by many great works of science fiction. In his book the marine habitat of a hyperintelligent species of octopus, endowed with its own language and culture, is seized by a global tech corporation determined to harness this non-human intelligence for profit in new systems of artificial intelligence. This dystopian future world is one of total surveillance, vast polluted dead zones, climate breakdown, a pervasive alienation, frequent targeted assassinations by governments and corporations against those who resist bondage as well as the brutal enslavement of workers, especially those from the Global South.

Coal Workers In Australia Are Taking Their Destiny Into Their Own Hands

The coal industry is to Australia what the Second Amendment of the US Constitution (granting citizens the right to bear arms) is to the United States: it would be hard to imagine the country without it. With fossil fuels still accounting for 92 per cent of Australia’s energy mix, including 29 per cent for coal in 2021, the industry is still vigorously defended by lobbies, even in parliamentary circles and the corridors of ministries. Australia’s conservative former prime minister Scott Morrison famously held up a piece of coal in Parliament in 2017, when he was finance minister, admonishing his colleagues not to be afraid of it. When he became prime minister, he also directly surrounded himself with lobbyists like John Kunkel, former vice-chairman of the Minerals Council of Australia, who he appointed chief of staff in 2018.

Labor Against Empire: Voices From The Honduran US Embassy Strike

For the last 3 months, more than 1,000 Honduran construction workers building the new United States embassy in Tegucigalpa have been striking against Alabama-based mega-prison contractor B.L. Harbert and their ultimate employer, the U.S. State Department, to demand safe working conditions, job security and fair compensation in compliance with Honduran labor law. Join the DSA International Committee and DSA Labor for a bilingual webinar to hear directly from the striking workers in Honduras, co-sponsored by US- and Honduras-based solidarity organizations. We seek to create opportunities for relationships to grow between the striking workers, Honduran civil society, and solidarity organizations around the Americas, and for workers in Honduras and the United States to hear directly from each other.

Workers Strike In The US And Honduras Against Capitalist Exploitation

Last week, more than 1,000 fast food workers at San Francisco International Airport went on strike for three days over low wages, health benefits and pensions. They had not received a raise in more than three years and many worked multiple jobs. Workers building the new US embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras have been on strike off and on since early July over a new contract that deprives them of fair compensation and violates Honduran labor laws. They are being fired and police are violently repressing their pickets. Clearing the FOG speaks with Ted Waechter of UNITE-HERE Local 2 in San Francisco and Honduras expert Adrienne Pine about worker struggles in the US and abroad and the need for solidarity and greater militancy to fight an economic system that values profits more than people.

Modeling The New USPS Delivery Network

This month the Postal Service will begin implementing a massive initiative to change how the mail is delivered. Instead of working out of the back of post offices, letter carriers will be relocated to large, centralized facilities called Sorting & Delivery Centers. These S&DCs will be housed in currently operating processing centers, large post offices, and eventually one of the new multi-functional mega-plants the Postal Service plans to create over the next few years. Spaces are already being prepared in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and Charlotte, where the Postal Service has leased a 620,000 square foot facility almost adjacent to a large Amazon warehouse. The effects on postal employees will be significant, as discussed in this previous post.

Nurses At LGBTQ-Affirming Healthcare Provider Are Planning To Strike

Unionized nurses at Howard Brown Health, a Chicago network of LGBTQ-affirming healthcare clinics, are set to go on strike Monday, Oct. 3 after what workers say are months of stalled contract bargaining negotiations.  The union is comprised of 30 nurses across 10 clinics, who are bargaining for their second contract, the first of which expired in August. The nurses’ union, the Illinois Nurses Association, says that since June they have been negotiating with management on a weekly basis and have reached tentative agreements on more than 30 items, including staffing levels and a commitment to vaccinate workers against monkeypox. But, the union alleges, these conversations — now daily — have failed to progress to securing workers’ chief demands: Increased pay competitive with other nurses in the city, and retention bonuses. 

New Rail Deal May Still Be Doomed Over Scheduling Issues

Does this seem like a good way to attract loyal, dedicated, satisfied workers? Come work for the railroad. It’s a great job, decent pay. Hours may be a bit long. You’ll spend weeks at a time away from home in cheap motels and miss important family events, kids sports games, birthdays, recitals and vacations, weddings and funerals. You can get called up at any time, so don’t even try to make plans. Stay healthy because you’ll be punished or even fired for an unexpected medical event. Also, great pension…if you live that long. Aaron Hiles, a locomotive engineer, for BNSF didn’t live that long. Aaron Hiles, a locomotive engineer, told his wife he “felt different,” though he couldn’t say exactly how. He made an appointment to see a doctor, his family said. But then his employer, BNSF, one of the largest freight rail carriers in the nation, unexpectedly called him into work.

New ‘Striketober’ Looms As US Walkouts Increase

Thousands of workers around the US are going on strike or threatening to do so heading into October, amid a recent surge of labor action activity in America and just one month before crucial midterm elections. Support for labor unions in the US has grown over the past year, as a surge in organizing has resulted in workers winning union elections at major corporations including Starbucks, Amazon, Apple, Chipotle, Trader Joe’s, Google, REI and Verizon. Union election petitions increased 58% in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2022, compared with 2021. Public support for labor unions is at its highest point since 1965, according to the most recent Gallup poll, with a 71% approval of labor unions in the US. According to the labor action tracker at Cornell University, strikes in 2022 so far have significantly outpaced strike activity in 2021, with 180 strikes involving 78,000 workers in the first six months of 2022, compared with 102 strikes involving 26,500 workers in the first six months of 2021.

1,000 SFO Restaurant Workers Go On Strike

Restaurant workers at San Francisco International Airport declared a general strike early Monday morning after more than nine months of negotiations with their employers.  Unite Here Local 2, the union representing SFO's food service workers, announced in a press release that 1,000 of SFO's cashiers, cooks, baristas, bartenders, servers and dishwashers are participating in the strike. The workers are employed by 84 airport restaurant outlets, all of whom are represented by the SFO Airport Restaurant Employer Council.  "The workers' compensation is currently not enough to live on," Anand Singh, president of Unite Here Local 2, told SFGATE. "[The employers] have not moved nearly enough to get to the place where we can make a deal on a new contract. And that's why we've had to go down this road."

Frontier Strikes Get First Aid Kits Updated, Win Back Work

“Safety first” is a principle you’ll always hear on the job. And it’s true—safety can save your life, if it’s taken seriously. But if action isn’t taken, it’s just an empty phrase. When my co-workers and I took action over safety in our workplace, we were retaliated against. This triggered the most useful tool that we have as workers: a strike. A little background: 2,000 telecom workers from eight locals of the Communications Workers (CWA) at Frontier in California have been working without a contract since last September. We’re fighting for our first non-concessionary contract in 17 years! While bargaining goes on, we’re working under the terms of a contract that Verizon and CWA agreed to in 2016. (When Frontier acquired the areas of California, Texas, and Florida, it agreed to uphold the same contract.)

Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library Workers Move To Unionize

Employees of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Free Library system have announced their intention to unionize, citing better pay, benefits for all, and greater employee input into working conditions as their chief motivations. Seeking voluntary recognition from Pratt leadership, Pratt Workers United hopes to join AFSCME Council 67, where workers from Walters Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art are also seeking representation. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez interviews Pratt Workers United organizers Marti Dirscheri and Antoinette Wilson on the unionization campaign.
assetto corsa mods

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.