Skip to content

Worker Rights and Jobs

Kaiser Permanente Contract Expires: 75,000 Workers To Go On Strike

October 2, 2023 Eva Rothenberg, CNN. , , , ,
A coalition of eight unions representing 75,000 employees of Kaiser Permanente said late Saturday that is has not reached an agreement with the company, setting the stage for the largest healthcare strike in US history on Wednesday. The Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, which has workers at hundreds of hospitals and medical offices in California, Oregon, Colorado, Virginia, Washington and Washington, D.C., said in a statement that it remains far apart with the company on important issues but still has had “good discussions with Kaiser.” The healthcare workers are seeking across-the-board pay raises and improvements to their pension plans, as well as protections against outsourcing.

Automakers’ Electric Vehicle Lie

October 1, 2023 Lucy Dean Stockton, The Lever. , , , , ,
The United Auto Workers are entering their third week of the first-ever simultaneous strike against the three big automakers, and for the first time, a sitting US president, Joe Biden, joined them on the picket line. Executives at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis are pushing back on worker demands by invoking the climate crisis. They say it is impossible to give workers what they want while also making a swift transition to manufacturing electric vehicles. On September 14, Ford’s CEO Jim Farley said that the union’s demands — higher wages, better hours, an end to tiered employment, and guaranteed job security in a green energy transition — could send the company into bankruptcy.

With No Reform Caucus, Auto Workers Would Not Be On Strike

October 1, 2023 Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes. , , , , , ,
One lesson is that member power does not have to start from a supermajority; that’s unlikely. UAW members are on strike today, with inspiring levels of rank-and-file energy, because four years ago a small group of activists founded a new reform caucus. That caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), boldly took advantage of an unexpected opportunity, organized like crazy, and won elections. Its candidates are now leading the union. If UAWD had not existed and organized hard, this current fight that has potential to change the stakes for the entire labor movement would not be happening.

Biden’s Picket Line Visit Doesn’t Mean He Is On Our Side

September 28, 2023 Tatiana Cozzarelli, Left Voice. , , , , ,
Yesterday, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to visit a picket line of striking workers. It is historic. A few hours later, Jacobin published an article entitled “The Militancy of the UAW Strike Forced Joe Biden to Take a Side and Walk the Picket Line,” by Nick French. Jacobin is right that Biden’s visit to the picket line results from the UAW strike’s strength. But Jacobin is dead wrong in its assessment that Biden is “on the side of the working class.” Instead, Biden’s visit is a product of the capitalist crisis in which both Trump and Biden are vying for influence over the working class in a tight presidential race.

Ford And GM Agree To End At Least One Tier; Stellantis Still Holding Out

September 27, 2023 Jane Slaughter, Labor Notes. , , , ,
The Auto Workers announced encouraging progress in their negotiations with Ford and General Motors September 22, including an end to one of the many concessionary tiers in the union’s contract. In 2015 workers at Chrysler (now Stellantis) voted down a tentative agreement 2 to 1 because it continued an onerous two-tier wage system—and even introduced new tiers. UAW President Dennis Williams (later jailed for corruption) was pissed. At a meeting of local officials called to present that deal, Williams spluttered, “Ending two-tier is bullshit.” The UAW still has other tiers to address, but it looks like Williams was wrong. Both Ford and GM have agreed to put workers at certain parts plants back on the same wage scale as assembly plant workers.

Workers Around The World Stand With Striking US Autoworkers

September 27, 2023 Jeff Schuhrke, In These Times. , , , , , , , , , , ,
As the first-ever simultaneous strike at General Motors, Ford and Stellantis continues, the United Auto Workers (UAW) union is being cheered on not only by a majority of Americans, but also by much of the international labor movement. Over the past two weeks, the UAW has received messages of solidarity from worker organizations in multiple countries, including a letter from the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa and an email from Malaysia’s National Union of Transport Equipment & Allied Industries Workers — both of which represent autoworkers in their respective countries. “The world is watching, and the people are on our side,” UAW President Shawn Fain said last Friday.

Scolding Striking Auto Workers In Advance For Wrecking Economy

September 27, 2023 Paige Oamek, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. , , , , , ,
The first person quoted in the New York Times’ rundown (9/19/23) on the United Auto Workers strike was a lawyer representing management from Littler Mendelson, the go-to firm for big corporations’ union avoidance. “Right now, unions are cool,” said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson. But they “have a risk of not being very cool if you have a five-month strike in LA and an X-month strike in how many other states.” The article, “Strike Is a High-Stakes Gamble for Autoworkers and the Labor Movement” highlights the “real pitfalls” of a so-called prolonged strike against the big three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (which absorbed Chrysler).

Scabs Deployed At GM Parts Distribution Centers

September 26, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Auto workers at the Big 3 expanded their strike last Friday to a key vulnerability: parts distribution centers that supply dealerships with everything from water pumps to brake drums and spark plugs to replacement bumpers. On Tuesday morning, General Motors began bringing in temps hired for $14 an hour to attempt to keep some of the parts and accessories flowing. Parts distribution centers ship after-sales spare parts and accessories to car dealerships on a just-in-time basis. “If there is anything that could possibly break down that you need to get replaced, it probably came from a Customer Care and Aftersales (CCA) facility,” said strike captain Devon McKenzie

Hollywood Writers Secure Tentative Deal After 146 Days Of Strike

September 26, 2023 People's Dispatch. , , , ,
After nearly five months, striking writers have secured a tentative agreement with Hollywood studio bosses. In a statement released on Sunday, September 24, the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA), which has been organizing the strike, announced that “an agreement in principle on all deal points” have been arrived at by the bargaining team. The deal comes after the latest round of talks between the bargaining team of the WGA and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), while writers completed 146 days on strike. As per reports, the latest round of talks reached a major impasse on Saturday, but the AMPTP relented on a mutually agreeable deal on Sunday.

Auto Workers Strike Spreads To 38 Parts Depots

September 23, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon and Lisa Xu, Labor Notes. , , , , ,
The clock has ticked and tocked for two of the Big 3 automakers. At noon 5,000 more members of the Auto Workers (UAW) at 38 parts distribution centers for Stellantis and General Motors walked off the job. The facilities are spread across 20 states. They join 13,000 workers at assembly plants in Ohio, Michigan, and Missouri who have been out for a week—for a total of 18,000 Big 3 auto workers on picket lines nationwide. (See a map of all struck facilities here.) The escalation adds a new type of facility to the mix. Parts distribution centers (PDCs) supply after-sales spare parts and accessories to dealerships, a very profitable part of the companies’ business.

Musician Cooperativism At Groupmuse

September 23, 2023 Mosa Tsay, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , ,
I am a cellist and worker-owner of a cooperative. As an ICDE fellow, I hop out of my usual action-oriented work to reflect on why cooperativism is an alternative to the status quo for freelancing musicians. As a professional cellist, I witnessed the infrastructural fractures that musicians in the United States have to navigate. In 2020, I returned to the U.S. from a year of studying in France, after contemplating during quarantine about the economics of working as an artist. One important question I wanted to solve: Rather than competing with my colleagues for limited paid gigs, how can I generate new opportunities and resources with them?

Mexican Auto Parts Workers Face Blacklist After Union Campaign

September 22, 2023 Charlie Saperstein and Dan DiMaggio, Labor Notes. , , ,
In August 2022, auto parts workers at VU Manufacturing won a landmark election to gain recognition for a new independent union, the Mexican Workers’ League (La Liga). A year later, after refusing to negotiate a new contract, the company has shut down, leaving 400 workers jobless—and 71 workers without their legally-mandated severance pay. VU is located in the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, where politicians brag about maintaining “labor peace” in the foreign-owned factories known as maquiladoras. This “peace” is largely mediated by the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), a powerful company-friendly union notorious for signing contracts behind workers’ backs and preventing them from organizing genuine, democratic unions.

Construction Companies Exploit Agricultural Visas To Underpay Workers

September 22, 2023 Sky Chadde and Ryan Murphy, In These Times. , , , ,
Jose Ageo Luna Vanegas first worked for Signet Builders in the early 2000s. Hired on a temporary labor visa, he traveled from Mexico to U.S. job sites. The hours were long, but he was paid overtime. Years later, around 2017, Signet hired him again. This time, he received no overtime pay. That’s when he ​“started asking questions,” his attorney, Jennifer Zimmermann, said.  The work was largely the same. His visa was different. Originally, Luna Vanegas was hired on an H-2B visa. Various industries use the visas to fill labor shortages. A hotel facing a busy summer might hire foreign maids, for instance. But, when Signet hired him for his second stint with the company, he was on an H-2A visa. It’s reserved for agriculture work.

Half A Million California Workers Get A Raise And A Seat At The Table

September 21, 2023 Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect. , , , , ,
In the realm of burgers and fries, California’s hot labor summer is sizzling. In a remarkable reversal of fortune, the state’s fast-food worker movement, created and steered by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has compelled the giants of the fast-food industry (both national stalwarts like McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King, and Starbucks and local legends like In-N-Out) to withdraw their opposition to raising their workers’ wages and establishing a statewide labor-business board to deal with industry issues. Last year, after the legislature and Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill that established such a council to raise those wages, the industry announced it would put $200 million behind a ballot measure it had devised to overturn that law.

To Beat The Heat, We Can’t Rely On Management

September 21, 2023 Alexandra Bradbury, Labor Notes. , , ,
The death of UPS driver Chris Begley, 57, who collapsed in August while making a delivery in 103-degree Texas heat, was no isolated incident. Monitoring co-workers for signs of heat exhaustion has become a routine feature of the job, says fellow driver Seth Pacic, a shop steward in Begley’s union, Teamsters Local 767. Pacic has learned to discern over the phone when a co-worker needs to find air conditioning ASAP—and when they’re deteriorating so badly that he should call paramedics and brave management’s wrath.
«12345678910»
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.

Donate Here

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.

Donate Here
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.