Posts tagged Amazon Labor Union
Did AFT Actually Add 30,000 New Members This Past Year? Well, Not Really
October 18, 2023 // In 2023, the union added more than 11,500 retired members, accounting for almost two-fifths of the reported gain in total membership. It now has 471,582 retired members — 27.5% of its total. The other major event for AFT in the fiscal year was the affiliation of the American Association of University Professors. The AAUP has 44,000 members. Previously, about 20,000 AAUP members also belonged to AFT. Now, they all do, accounting for a further increase of 24,000 members to AFT’s total this year. Mergers and new affiliations with existing unions are a fun way to pump up raw membership totals, but they do nothing to increase the share of the overall workforce that is unionized.
Popular Union-Busting Tactic Banned in New York in ‘Major Victory’
September 7, 2023 // New York has banned captive audience meetings, a popular union-busting tactic used by companies during organizing periods to disseminate anti-union information. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the bill on Wednesday morning, making the state the fifth in the U.S. to make such meetings illegal. “This legislation will help to ensure that all New Yorkers receive the benefits and protections that allow them to work with dignity,” Hochul said in a statement on Wednesday. “My administration is committed to making our state the most worker-friendly state in the nation, and I thank the bill sponsors for their partnership in our mission to establish the strongest and most robust protections right here in New York.”
STATEN ISLAND: Amazon Union Dissidents, in Challenge to Leader, Move to Force Vote
July 11, 2023 // On Friday, the reform caucus sent the union’s leadership a letter laying out its proposal to hold prompt elections, saying it would go to court Monday if the leadership didn’t embrace the proposal. The reform group is made of up more than 40 active organizers who are also plaintiffs in the legal complaint, including Connor Spence, a union co-founder and former treasurer; Brett Daniels, the union’s former organizing director; and Brima Sylla, a prominent organizer at the Staten Island warehouse. The group said in its letter that enacting the proposal could “mean the difference between an A.L.U. which is strong, effective, and a beacon of democracy in the labor movement” and “an A.L.U. which, in the end, became exactly what Amazon warned workers it would become: a business that takes away the workers’ voices.”
Sean O’Brien’s summer of the strike
June 26, 2023 // It’s the spark for the combative spirit that permeates Teamsters headquarters, where a whiteboard charts a long-term battle plan on a timeline — “practice picketing,” “CAT trainings” (for “contract action teams”), “identify strike teams” … and finally, on the July 31 spot that marks the end of the current contract: “STRIKE.” Why strike now? As O’Brien himself acknowledged in his Senate testimony, UPS already offers the most plum jobs in the logistics industry, with driver salaries starting at $93,000. But O’Brien argues that the pandemic gave UPS workers the greatest leverage they’ve had in decades. In 2020, union members risked their health to keep packages moving. UPS’s profits surged and have remained high, with customers still hooked on the online shopping habits they adopted during the lockdowns. “Our members are fed up” and remain convinced, he said, that “the only concern that was being addressed was UPS’s bottom line and their balance sheet.” No better time, O’Brien reasons, for workers to go to the mat to demand wages beginning at $20 an hour, tighter safety provisions and an end to the two-tier employment system ushered in by the last contract.
One Small Union Is Stoking Much of the Militant New Graduate Worker Organizing
May 30, 2023 // With around 35,000 members, the UE is not a huge union. It was once the third-largest — and arguably the most left-wing and democratic — member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, with around a half-million members in core industries, until it fell victim to postwar anti-communist purges, raids from other unions and plant shutdowns. But the union revived itself by the 1990s. Famously, UE workers at the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago occupied their plant in 2008, and today the union boasts a range of affiliated locals across sectors and industries from California to Vermont.
Senate looks at labor laws which unions say interfere with workers’ right to organize
April 6, 2023 // These days, you know, a lot of union organizers are young and social media savvy, and they're speaking out loudly when they feel their labor rights have been violated. And also, under the Biden administration, the federal agency that enforces labor law has been pursuing a lot of these cases against employers.
Unions are having a moment. So why isn’t union membership booming?
March 30, 2023 //
New York’s biggest labor actions of the past year
February 28, 2023 // Only one other state, Hawaii, has a unionization rate higher than New York’s 20.7%. In the public sector, just around two-thirds of New Yorkers are in a union. In 2022 alone, nearly 200 workplaces in the state filed for representation through the National Labor Relations Board. But, despite the hype and a 57-year high in Americans’ approval of labor unions, New York’s union participation (and the country’s as a whole) is still trending downward. In 2012, 23.2% of New York workers were union members, 2.5 points higher than it is today. CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies Labor Department Chair Ruth Milkman said that despite 2022’s historic union victories, many were with small firms. “So all this publicity and media attention to these iconic companies that have had some recent experience of successful unionization, it’s kind of a drop in the bucket in terms of the whole labor market in New York,” she said.
Union campaign at Tesla marks second attempt to organize workers
February 21, 2023 //