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Worker Rights and Jobs

Everywhere He Goes, Biden Is Haunted By The Martyrs Of Gaza

January 27, 2024 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. , , , , , , , , , ,
Biden is disrupted on the campaign trail at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in South Carolina by protesters shouting “ceasefire now!” and later gets on a flight to the Dallas airport, where more protesters are waiting for him. Biden’s speech at a Virginia campaign event is interrupted thirteen separate times, and as he leaves his motorcade is met with more protests. Biden, who brands himself as the “most pro-union president” is called out by union workers for his support for the genocide in Gaza as he is receiving the endorsement of one of the largest unions in the country. Biden’s staff attempt to hold a “morale-boosting party” as their boss’s approval rating tanks and more and more men, women, and children in Gaza die from US-made bombs, only to be yelled at by protesters shouting “quit your job!”

Another Hollywood Strike?

January 26, 2024 Elizabeth Wagmeister, CTVNews. , , , , ,
Los Angeles, CA - After a year in which both actors and writers hit the picket lines, another Hollywood strike may be on the horizon. The American Federation of Musicians (AFM), a union representing musicians across the entertainment industry, will begin negotiations Monday on a new contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The union said it is seeking a deal to better reflects the current state of streaming media. The AFM is also seeking AI protection, increased wages, health care improvements, improved working conditions and residual payments for streaming content.

How Solar Ironworkers Zapped Tiers

January 26, 2024 Keith Brower Brown, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
California’s solar power plants now rival the scale of any in the world. What stands out most is how they were built: under union contracts. Across the U.S., nearly 90 percent of solar workers had no union last year. In California, the situation was different—at least on paper. The vast majority of its solar power plants have been wrenched in place by unionized construction workers. But at first these were union jobs practically in name only, as thousands of unionized solar construction workers toiled on the underside of a two-tier system. Their wages, training, and job security lagged far behind their union siblings. Many questioned if they were members at all.

How Can Workers Organize Against Capital Today?

January 26, 2024 Benjamin Y. Fong, Catalyst. , , ,
Labor Power and Strategy, the new book edited by Peter Olney and Glenn Perušek, officially aims to provide “rational, radical, experience-based perspectives that help target and run smart, strategic, effective campaigns in the working class.” But by the end of it, it is difficult to avoid the sneaking suspicion that Olney and Perušek have a different goal: to make clear just how far organized labor is from having a strategic conversation about its present impasse. The book is organized around an interview with economist and historian John Womack about the twin needs for an analysis of the weak points (or “choke points”) in contemporary industrial technologies and for the labor movement to exploit that analysis to cause disruption and gain leverage.

‘The Country Is Not For Sale’: General Strike In Argentina Against Milei

January 25, 2024 Orinoco Tribune. , , ,
Thousands of people marched this Wednesday in Argentina to join the national strike called by the main unions in repudiation of the policies implemented by President Javier Milei. “The country is not for sale,” “No to the adjustment,” and “No to the labor reform,” were some of the main slogans of the demonstration that filled the Plaza del Congreso in the city of Buenos Aires. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took part in the massive general strike against Milei and his “libertarian” policies. Milei took office on December 10. Some outlets, such as Left Voice and Progressive International, reported that over a million demonstrators took to the streets.

Hawaii School Employees To Get Up To 25% In Pandemic Hazard Pay

January 25, 2024 Kevin Dayton, Portside. , , , , , ,
An arbitration decision has determined public school employees in five bargaining units of the state’s largest union are entitled to back pay of up to 25% of their total salaries for as much as two years, according to the state’s largest union. The Hawaii Government Employees Association said the decision covers up to 7,800 Department of Education employees, including school nurses, office employees, and classroom educational assistants. “Those working in the DOE were some of the most exposed among public service employees, putting their own health – as well as that of their loved ones – at substantial risk to keep services running in Hawaii’s schools,” HGEA Executive Director Randy Perreira said Tuesday in a written statement.

One In Ten US Workers Belong To Unions

January 24, 2024 Jake Rosenfeld, Scheer Post. , , ,
The share of U.S. workers who belong to a union fell slightly to 10% in 2023, from 10.1% a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As a scholar of organized labor, I’m not shocked by this slight decline, although if there was ever a year to expect the unionization rate to increase, it was 2023. Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation that unites 60 unions, has proclaimed 2023 “the year of labor.” She wasn’t exaggerating. Successful walkouts by Hollywood actors and screenwriters, autoworkers and health care professionals demonstrated how effective strikes can be in achieving union gains.

Grocery Workers Make Waves In The Land Of Lakes

January 23, 2024 Lisa Xu, Labor Notes. , , ,
It wasn’t such a merry Christmas for grocery store management in central Minnesota. Five hundred grocery workers in the Brainerd Lakes area walked out on an unfair labor practice strike, deserting five stores between December 22 and 25. Management tried to keep the stores running, but workers said they turned into disaster zones. Why did two Cub Foods stores, two Super Ones, and a SuperValu find themselves on Santa’s naughty list last year? Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 663 charges management with interrogation, surveillance, intimidation, and bargaining in bad faith.

The Unionization Wave Is Hitting Costco

January 23, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon , Jacobin. , ,
Costco’s executives are eyeballing the number 18,238 and plastering letters of contrition in break rooms after workers at the wholesale retail chain’s Norfolk, Virginia, store voted to join Teamsters Local 822 in late December. “We’re not disappointed in our employees; we’re disappointed in ourselves as managers and leaders,” wrote outgoing CEO Craig Jelinek and then president and now CEO Ron Vachris in a memo on December 29. “The fact that a majority of Norfolk employees felt that they wanted or needed a union constitutes a failure on our part.” This pattern — contrition, apology, vows to do better — is nothing new in the union-busting playbook.

Milei Threatens Argentina’s Public Sector Workers

January 22, 2024 Ana Perdigón, Orinoco Tribune. , , , ,
The president of Argentina, Javier Milei, lashed out at Argentina’s public sector workers, threatening to deduct their salary if they join the upcoming national strike that was called by the General Confederation of Workers (CGT) for January 24. In a statement to the press, presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni announced that the government made the decision to deduct the working day from public sector workers who go on strike. “The salary is a consideration and whoever does not work, it is reasonable that he/she does not get paid,” Adorni said. He further stated that in his opinion there is no reason for the strike. He even described as “childish” the reasons given by the groups of workers for adopting the measure in protest.

Our Union Called For A Cease-Fire; It’s About Our Students

January 21, 2024 Dave Stieber, In These Times. , , , , , , ,
If you teach, your absolute worst nightmare is that something tragic happens to your students. Teachers don’t just think about students when they are in front of us; we think about them throughout each day and night. They are a central part of our lives. When a young person steps into our classroom, the first thing we do is work to connect. That’s the best way students learn. When a student doesn’t live up to their own potential, we take it personally. We obsess about what went wrong. Caring about students also means deliberately caring about the world we are helping them grow into. It has never been enough to only teach students when they are in the classroom; we have to advocate for them all the time.

Hospital Workers Fired After Protesting Short Staffing Sue

January 20, 2024 Mark Kreidler, Scheer Post. , , ,
Scott Byington got fired a few days before Christmas, but that’s not the half of it. Prior to being terminated over the phone, Byington, a registered nurse at St. Francis Medical Center just south of Los Angeles in Lynwood, had persevered through more than three years of wage freezes and drastic staff cuts imposed by his new employer. St. Francis has said Byington was among a group of workers who violated company policy when they hand-delivered a protest letter to the Ontario headquarters of the hospital’s owner, Prime Healthcare. In an interview with Capital & Main, Byington laughed while describing the number of ways in which the company’s claim can be disproved.

We Threw Out The Old Playbook: The New Union Drive At Mercedes

January 20, 2024 Jeremy Kimbrell, Labor Notes. , , ,
Auto workers have had several organizing campaigns at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama. They all follow a similar pattern: Frustrated workers decide there’s enough energy for change in the plant and start talking about organizing. We reach out to a union, the Auto Workers (UAW), and meet with a staff organizer. They lead us through the steps they’ve all been taught for decades—a playbook that hasn’t worked for us at Mercedes. Over the years we got frustrated—not only with the company, but also with the ways that past organizers told us union campaigns had to operate. We would often say to UAW reps, “We don’t know how to win, but we know how to lose, and you do too.”

When Arab Workers Stood Against Zionism

January 19, 2024 Essam Elkorghli, Black Agenda Report. , , , ,
When the whole world is watching genocide taking place against a population of more than 2 million, only a few nations and entities decided to rise and challenge imperialism, Zionism, and reactionism. While reactionary regimes in the region are engulfed in fruitless discussions about the efficacy of boycotting products complicit in arming and funding the genocide, the Axis of Resistance  (Hezbollah, Yemen, and Islamic Resistance in Iraq) took it upon itself to target the economic and military capabilities of the Zionist Entity as a downright direct challenge against imperialism, Zionism, and reactionism in the region.

A Working Class Victory On Colombia’s Horizon

January 19, 2024 Omar Ocampo, Inequality.org. , , ,
A working-class victory is on the horizon in Colombia. The Seventh Committee of the House of Representatives voted to approve 16 of the 98 articles of the landmark Labor Reform bill right before the start of winter recess. The bill will now advance to a second round of legislative debates that will resume next month. This is great news for the workers movement: Labor reform represents one of the three flagship policy proposals of the Petro-Márquez administration that seeks to equitably transform society. The bill will not only restore the labor rights that were rescinded a little over twenty years ago by a far-right government — it will go a step further and expand these rights.
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