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Worker Rights

The Fake Debate Over A Minimum Wage

February 24, 2021 Richard D. Wolff, Counterpunch. , , ,
Capitalism’s “conservative” defenders yet again oppose raising the minimum wage. They fought raising it in the past much as they tried to prevent the Fair Labor Standards Act (1938) that first mandated a U.S. minimum wage. The major argument opponents have used is this: setting or raising a minimum wage threatens small employers. They may collapse or else fire employees; either way, jobs are lost. What is conveniently assumed here is a necessary contradiction between minimum wages and small business jobs. That assumption enables opponents to claim that not setting a legal minimum wage, like not raising it, saves jobs. The system thus presents very poorly paid workers with this choice: low wages or no wages.

Higher Education Workers Are Organizing For Their Own Safety

February 22, 2021 Brian Wakamo, Inequality.org. , , ,
President Biden included $35 billion in funding for higher education in his American Rescue Plan. If this aid makes it into the final Covid relief law, college and university employees across the country will no doubt applaud. The pandemic has hit this sector hard. Around 260,100 university employees (14.6 percent of the total workforce) have lost their jobs since February 2020. Staff also make up most of the Covid-19 deaths on college campuses. But while federal funding is welcome, it is no guarantee of equitable treatment for higher education workers. Economic disparities and unsafe working conditions are motivating staff on a growing number of college campuses to build power through union organizing. One of the most ambitious university organizing efforts is taking place in Arizona. Late last year, staff at two schools — the University of Arizona and Arizona State University — formed United Campus Workers Arizona Local 7065, a “wall-to-wall” union representing all of the schools’ employees.

UK Top Court Gives Uber Drivers Benefits In Landmark Ruling

February 19, 2021 Kelvin Chan, AP News. , , ,
London - Uber drivers in Britain should be classed as “workers” and not self-employed, the U.K. Supreme Court ruled Friday, in a decision that threatens the company’s business model and holds broader implications for the so-called gig economy. The ruling paves the way for Uber drivers to get benefits such as paid holidays and the minimum wage, handing defeat to the ride-hailing giant in the culmination of a long-running legal battle. The Supreme Court’s seven judges unanimously rejected Uber’s appeal against an employment tribunal ruling, which had found that two Uber drivers were “workers” under British law. Yaseen Aslam and James Farrar, the two drivers, cheered the outcome.

Uber And Lyft Are Preparing To Block Labor Rights For Gig Economy Workers

February 18, 2021 Rob Galbraith, Public Accountability. , , ,
After California passed a law extending labor protections to gig economy workers, Uber, Lyft, and other gig economy employers overturned it on election day 2020 with a $200 million ballot referendum campaign. Over the past year, the same companies have been setting up infrastructure to ensure that app-based drivers and other gig economy workers do not win labor rights in New York. Tactics used by Uber and Lyft in their campaign to deny workers protections included threatening to shut down their apps entirely in California if forced to comply with the law giving drivers employment status and flooding drivers’ apps with misleading pop-up messages about the initiative – called Proposition 22  – in the run-up to the November election.

Argentine Vegetable Oil Workers Win Big Raises With Coordinated Strike

February 17, 2021 Julia Soul and Ernesto Torres, Labor Notes. , , ,
Argentina’s vegetable oil workers ended 2020 on a high note, with a triumphant 21-day national strike for higher wages. They were pushing to make the minimum wage a living wage, as the constitution mandates. It was the country’s longest national strike of the year, and it ended in total victory: the unions won a 35 percent increase in wages for all of the workers, not just those earning the minimum. More than 20,000 working-class families won a decent wage for 2021. (In Argentina wages are negotiated in annual rounds of collective bargaining.) Vegetable oil workers mainly work in factories and on docks, processing, classifying, and storing seeds and making oil.

February 20: Day Of Action In Solidarity With Alabama Amazon Workers

February 17, 2021 Support Alabama Amazon Workers, Popular Resistance. , , ,
From Mississippi to Connecticut, North Carolina to California, workers, labor and community activists have resoundingly responded to the call for a National Day of Solidarity with Alabama Amazon Workers issued by the Southern Workers Assembly. More than 40 actions (and counting!) are now planned to mobilize solidarity with the workers in Bessemer and to tell Amazon:  Victory to the workers! Union-busting has got to go! The full list of actions can be found below. Amazon is spending tens of thousands of dollars each day on the most vile union busters around - Morgan Lewis - because they know this historic struggle being waged by the workers in Bessemer is inspiring Amazon and other workers to organize on their jobs, and they know that when workers build power, that means less profit for them.

Surveillance, Stress, And No Bathrooms

February 16, 2021 Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Labor Notes. , , ,
The Amazonification of logistics has created a new group of highly exploited workers: delivery drivers. Amazon itself increasingly relies on an expanding network of subcontracted drivers and independent contractors to deliver packages to customers’ doors. The working conditions facing Amazon’s last-mile drivers are defined by a frantic pace, low wages, and relentless pressure to meet tight delivery deadlines. Workers of color and immigrants are overrepresented, as they are in all the lowest-paying segments of last-mile logistics. When an Amazon Prime member orders an item, the first step in the delivery process begins at an Amazon Fulfillment Center, where the item is picked by a worker and put into a box, and an address label is created.

Striking Workers Halt Construction At Future Amazon Warehouse

February 9, 2021 Lauren Kaori Gurley, Vice. , , , ,
Roughly 75 workers walked off the job on Thursday at the construction site of a future Amazon fulfillment center in southern California—forcing most of the construction operations, including a large crane, to come to a halt.  Workers are striking at the future Amazon fulfillment center in Oxnard, California, because an Amazon contractor at the site, Building Zone Industries, has hired non-union, out-of-state workers to work on the project. This comes amid high rates of unemployment stemming from the COVID-19 in the predominantly agricultural, working-class Latinx community. 

Alabama Amazon Employees Pushing For Union

February 8, 2021 William Thornton, AL.com. , , ,
Looking at employees at Amazon’s fulfillment center on breaks outside the building last summer, Jennifer Bates said the sight reminded her of a football sideline. Employees with bad knees, aching feet, limping around after making the trek around the company’s four-story, 855,000-square-foot center, looking for a few minutes rest before heading back in to resume their shifts. “On our breaks outside, there was a lot of complaining,” Bates remembered. She works as a Blue Badge Learning Ambassador, who prepares and trains employees. “You would hear people talking about mistreatment. They were saying, ‘They need to change.’”

On Contact: People’s History Of West Virginia

February 7, 2021 Chris Hedges, RT. , , ,
On the show this week, Chris Hedges talks to filmmaker and journalist, Eleanor Goldfield about her documentary, "Hard Road of Hope". Goldfield’s documentary, "Hard Road of Hope", revisits West Virginia’s long tradition of radicalism and militant unionism, including the famed 1921 armed uprising, the largest since the Civil War, by some 10,000 coal miners at Blair Mountain who fought the repressive coal owners and their hired coal company gun thugs and militias. In 2018, the state’s 20,000 public school teachers and employees carried out a strike over low pay and high health-care costs, shutting down every public school in West Virginia until their demands were met.

The Failings Of Unemployment Insurance Are By Design

February 4, 2021 Marty Hart-Landsberg, Reports From the Economic Front. , , ,
Our unemployment insurance system has failed the country at a moment of great need.  With tens of millions of workers struggling just to pay rent and buy food, Congress was forced to pass two emergency spending bills, providing one-time stimulus payments, special weekly unemployment insurance payments, and temporary unemployment benefits to those not covered by the system.  And, because of their limited short-term nature, President Biden must now advocate for a third. The system’s shortcomings have been obvious for some time, but little effort has been made to improve it.  In fact, those shortcomings were baked into the system at the beginning, as President Roosevelt wanted, not by accident.

In A Six-Day Strike, Bronx Produce Workers Inspired New York

February 4, 2021 Bianca Cunningham, Labor Notes. , , ,
New York City - Drivers and warehouse workers who feed New York City have won their strike. After six days off the job, the strikers at Hunts Point Produce Market in the Bronx ratified a contract that doubled management’s wage offer and defeated a health care cost increase. The 1,400 workers at the world’s largest wholesale produce market, members of Teamsters Local 202, are responsible for packing and delivering 60 percent of the fruits and vegetables that go to restaurants and grocery stores in New York City. The unit is comprised of 14 different companies that bargain a contract together. Before the strike, the employers were offering a raise of just 32 cents an hour, and wanted to pass on to workers an increase in health care costs.

‘What I Want For Me, I Want For You’

February 4, 2021 Amba Guerguerian, The Indypendent. , , ,
The 1,400 workers at Hunts Point Market, the largest produce distribution market in the country, went on strike the night of Sunday, January 17. They walked out of the warehouse to win a better contract after risking their lives as essential workers since the beginning of the pandemic.  Management offered them a minimal $0.32 per hour raise. Their demands? Bring members who are making $18.75 an hour up to $20 an hour, give everyone else a $1 an hour raise, and maintain their healthcare coverage at no additional costs to the workers. This was the first time the union, Teamsters Local 202, went on strike since at Hunts Point 1986. 

Amazon Is Using AI-Equipped Cameras In Delivery Vans

February 4, 2021 Annie Palmer, CNBC. , ,
Amazon drivers at some U.S. facilities will soon have an extra set of eyes watching them when they hit the road to make their daily deliveries. The company recently began testing AI-equipped cameras in vehicles to monitor contracted delivery drivers while they’re on the job, with the aim of improving safety. Amazon has deployed the cameras in Amazon-branded cargo vans used by a handful of companies that are part of its delivery service partner program, which are largely responsible for last-mile deliveries. The cameras could be rolled out to additional DSPs over time, and Amazon has already distributed an instructional video to DSPs, informing them of how the cameras work.

Alabama Workers Fight To Form First US Amazon Union

February 1, 2021 Brandon Stout, Liberation News. , , ,
Some 5,800 workers from an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, will vote in February on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The workers are upset with algorithms that track productivity as well as unfair disciplinary processes. According to the union drive’s website, “Amazon warehouse workers face outrageous work quotas that have left many with illnesses and lifetime injuries.” Despite the warehouse only opening in March 2020, these conditions have caused the workers to rapidly move toward unionizing. By the end of last summer, the workers met with RWDSU representatives at a hotel to discuss joining the union.
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