Worker Rights and Jobs

Workers Picket Game Awards Amid Industry Layoffs

December 15, 2023 Mel Buer, The Real News Network. Resist! Games, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

On the West Coast, game workers formed a working group called Game Workers of Southern California, whose chief aim is to coordinate direct actions, share information with new and existing game workers, and shed light on the workplace abuses in the game industry. Just last week, organizers formed a picket outside of the Video Game Awards, where they passed out leaflets about the rounds of layoffs in the industry and sought to educate attendees on the need for unions at their favorite studios. For this week’s episode, I sat down with a number of organizers from Game Workers of SoCal to discuss working conditions in the game industry, the need for organizing in tech, and the importance of white-collar unions in the wider US labor movement.

Starbucks’ Offer To Resume Contract Talks Comes With Serious Fine Print

December 13, 2023 Steven Greenhouse, In These Times. Educate! Collective bargaining, Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Starbucks received lots of favorable press when it told its workers’ union that it wanted to resume contract talks. The move was a much-needed PR boost for a company whose recent battles with the union have stirred bad press and contributed to sinking stock prices. A top Starbucks official wrote to the union’s president on Friday saying the company wanted to end the bargaining impasse — one caused by the coffee chain’s refusal to hold any negotiating sessions for more than six months. As a result of that refusal, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has repeatedly accused Starbucks of failing to bargain in good faith.

British Workers Organize To Defeat The Tory Anti-Strike Laws

December 12, 2023 People's Dispatch. Organize! Anti-Strike Law, Unions, United Kingdom (UK), Worker Rights and Jobs

Trade unions and left-wing sections in the UK are gearing up to challenge the anti-strike laws of the Tory government. The Strikes (Minimum Service Levels) Act 2023 passed on July 20 this year came into effect in some of the key sectors in the UK from December 8. Major trade unions in the country, including Unite Union, Fire Brigades Union, National Education Union, Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), UNISON, Communication Workers Union (CWU), and the National Union of Rail, and the Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) gathered at the special conference of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on December 9, Saturday, in London, and resolved to fight and defeat the anti-strike law.

They Clean After Holiday Shoppers But They Don’t Get To Celebrate

December 11, 2023 Sarah Lazare, In These Times. Organize! Christmas, Class Struggle, Health Care, Worker Rights and Jobs

For Elbida Gomez, the winter holiday season is not marked by cheer or family time, but by an exponential increase in her workload — cleaning bathrooms and store offices, taking out the trash, mopping entrances and wiping up food from the floor of the employee cafeteria. The 43-year-old mother of two says she is one of just two people whose primary job is to clean the Woodbury, Minn., location of Cabela’s, a big box store chain that sells hunting, fishing and camping goods. Foot traffic increases as patrons do their holiday shopping. Parents line up with their children to take a photograph with Santa Claus. The floor gets covered in chocolate, candy wrappers and footprints.

When Black And White Tenant Farmers Joined Together

December 9, 2023 David Griscom, The Real News Network. Organize! Farmers, History, Solidarity, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

It’s 1935 and class war is brewing in Arkansas. Standing before 1,500 black and white sharecroppers, the radical Methodist minister Ward Rodgers thunders, “I can lead a mob to lynch any planter in Poinsett County.” The crowd erupts with applause. These white and black sharecroppers who worked, lived, and died amid the vestiges of the Southern plantation system were no strangers to terror. The night before, a group of planters and deputy sheriffs had attacked an adult education class taught by Rodgers. The landowner class, the banks, the police, and an offshoot of the Ku Klux Klan called the Nightriders had been engaged in a brutal crackdown on the workers of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union.

Tesla Faces Scandinavian Labor Revolt

December 8, 2023 Elliot Smith, Portside. Resist! Scandinavia, Sweden, Tesla, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Tesla faces a growing revolt in Scandinavia after Danish dockworkers joined a sympathy strike with Swedish mechanics, heaping pressure on the electric vehicle giant to grant collective bargaining rights to employees. Members of Swedish trade union IF Metall have been at loggerheads with Tesla for six weeks, and have garnered support via a secondary strike action from fellow workers across a range of industries in Sweden, including postal workers, painters, dockworkers and electricians. Tesla CEO Elon Musk bemoaned the blockage of license plate deliveries by postal workers as “insane” and late last month filed lawsuits against both the Swedish Transport Agency and the postal service.

Call To Workers Of The World: Block The Ships Of Israeli Genocide!

December 6, 2023 Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, MasarBadil.org. Organize! Anti-War, Direct Action, Genocide, Israel, Palestine, Wars and Militarism, weapons, Worker Rights and Jobs

The Masar Badil, the Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement, calls on all labour activists, trade unionists and workers’ organizations to take action to block Israeli ships, refuse to load or unload them, and refuse to transport weapons of war to the Israeli occupation currently waging a genocide against the Palestinian people in the besieged Gaza Strip. We have already seen several important actions around the world, first and foremost the actions of the Yemeni military and people in blocking the use of Yemeni seas for the transportation and passage of Zionist ships and cargo.

Faculty Of Largest US Public University System Strikes, Demanding 12% Raise

December 4, 2023 Dani Anguiano, The Guardian. Resist! California, Higher Education, Income disparity, Strikes, Worker Rights and Jobs

California State University faculty at four campuses went on strike on Monday to demand higher pay and expanded parental leave for thousands of workers at the largest public university system in the US. The California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 workers, is staging one-day work stoppages at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; San Francisco State University; California State University, Los Angeles and California State University, Sacramento. The union is seeking a 12% salary raise and an increase in parental leave from six weeks to a full semester for professors, librarians and other workers. They also want more manageable workloads for faculty, better access to breastfeeding stations and more gender-inclusive restrooms.

Artisans Cooperative: An Etsy Alternative

December 2, 2023 Aaron Fernando, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Arts, Cooperative, Etsy, Worker Rights and Jobs

We have all experienced it: Some organization or service starts out good — or great, even — and then as time goes on, either costs and fees go up, or quality declines. In the context of a dominant economy that demands faster production, cheaper labor, and lower quality — all for the sake of channeling wealth upward to shareholders who have little to do with the real-world value created by a business — it is understandable that people may feel cynical about any type of retail organization. This is a story of how the makers who create a living off their hard-earned skills, banded together to challenge this dominant business ethic, and about the cooperative they built that’s just now getting off the ground.

Auto Workers Direct Momentum Toward Organizing Plants

December 1, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Auto Workers, Unions, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

“The company knows that Toyota workers are watching,” said Auto Workers President Shawn Fain on November 3. “And when the time comes, Toyota workers and all non-union auto workers are going to be ready to stand up.” That time has come—yesterday the UAW announced its plan, already in motion, to organize the whole auto sector. “Workers across the country, from the West to the Midwest and especially in the South, are reaching out to join our movement and to join the UAW,” said Fain in a new video. The union says thousands of workers have reached out asking for support in unionizing their auto plants. They’ve scoured the old websites from previous union drives and filled out forms to be put in touch with an organizer.

Harry Bridges And The ILWU; Then And Now

December 1, 2023 Peter Olney, The Stansbury Forum. Strategize! History, ILWU, Labor Movement, Worker Rights and Jobs

Soon after I finished writing my review for Social Policy magazine of the new Robert Cherny biography of Harry Bridges, I read in an October 1 memo to all International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members that the union had gone into court on September 30 and filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. A ten-day trial in Portland Oregon in 2019 determined that the ILWU had engaged in illegal tactics that operationally disrupted ICTSI and the Port of Portland. The jury awarded a Philippine owned stevedoring company, International Container Services Inc. (ICTSI), $93.6 million in damages. The union challenged that amount and in March of 2020, a judge determined the maximum amount owed by the union was just over $19 million.

Red Cup Rebellion Redux: An Interview With Starbucks Workers United

November 30, 2023 Bella DeVaan, Inequality.org. Resist! Red Cup Rebellion, Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The Starbucks Workers United are here to stay. After Buffalo-area stores organized in 2021, unionization caught on like wildfire at franchise locations across the nation. (That year, the median Starbucks employee made under $13,000 while the company’s then-CEO Kevin Johnson took home $20.4 million) Since then, the organizing workers haven’t let up, roasting former CEO Howard Schultz in a high-profile Senate hearing and escalating their campaign. President Biden’s National Labor Relations Board has issued landmark rulings in the union’s favor against the company’s cruel union busting. Now, over 9,000 workers constitute SBWU’s ranks at over 300 stores across America.

Laney Graduate Students Vote To Unionize

November 30, 2023 Ilah Ross, Portside. Organize! Georgia, Graduate Students, Higher Education, The South, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Laney Graduate School students have voted to unionize after years of advocacy, making Emory University the first private university to have a graduate-worker union in Georgia and the second in the South. EmoryUnite! is now officially recognized as a union under the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), meaning Emory administration is required to enter negotiations with graduate students. EmoryUnite! announced the results in a Nov. 28 Instagram post. In total, 909 students (92.6%) voted in favor of unionization while 73 students (7.4%) voted against unionization during the election on Oct. 17 and 18, according to the post. Of the approximately 1,700 Laney Ph.D. students eligible to vote in the election, 982 (57.8%) participated.

Next On UAW’s To-Do List: Adding Members At Nonunion Factories

November 29, 2023 Marick Masters and Raymond Gibney, Jr., Scheer Post. Organize! Auto Workers, Elon Musk, Labor Movement, Tesla, United Auto Workers (UAW), Worker Rights and Jobs

Having negotiated “record contracts” with the Big Three – and seen the bulk of its rank-and-file members approve them – the United Auto Workers says its work isn’t done. The union intends to try once more to persuade the rest of the U.S. auto industry’s workers to join the union. “We’re going to organize like we’ve never organized before,” said UAW President Shawn Fain. As labor scholars who have studied union finances, we believe this is a formidable objective. On top of the intense corporate resistance from the likes of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, there’s the high cost of waging expensive campaigns in states like Tennessee and Alabama, which have “right-to-work” laws designed to discourage labor organizing.

‘Subsidizing Abuse’ Investigates Affordable Housing Industry’s Record

November 29, 2023 Isabela Escalona, The Real News Network. Educate! Affordable Housing, Housing, Minnesota, Report, Worker Rights and Jobs

At least $84 Million in Minnesota state and municipal funds earmarked for affordable housing projects have gone towards contractors with records or accusations of worker exploitation, from wage theft to misclassification to labor trafficking to sexual abuse, according to a new report. Subsidizing Abuse: How Public Financing Fuels Exploitation in Affordable Housing Construction was published on November 14 by North Star Policy Action, which calls itself “an independent research and communications institute.” It was authored by Jake Schwitzer from North Star Policy Action and Lucas Franco from Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).

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