Posts tagged bargaining unit
‘Harder for All of Us’: Confusion Reigns After Harvard Excludes 900 Grad Students From Union
August 19, 2025 // Lindsey E. Adams, a Ph.D. student in Harvard’s virology program, opened her pay stub on July 1 to a strange sight: Her research stipend was no longer listed as a union stipend, and no union dues were deducted from her pay. But nothing about Adams’ job was different — not her hours, not her supervisor, not the lab where she works or the tasks she completes every day. “My work day-to-day has not changed at all,” she said. Adams was one of the more than 900 students on research-based stipends removed from Harvard’s graduate student union’s bargaining unit in July shortly after the union’s second contract with the University expired.
Penn Museum workers demand raises, protest Univ. pay proposals in picket after authorizing strike
July 10, 2025 // “The average annual salary in the bargaining unit is less than $45,000,” Shaw said. “We’re looking for raises that will not only allow workers to keep up with increases in the cost of living, but to do better over time.” Union leaders also handed out flyers that emphasized Penn’s continued “lowball pay proposals” despite the University’s “annual operating budget of $4.7 billion.” “It’s not so much to ask from the University of Pennsylvania, the largest private employer and one of the wealthiest in the city,” Shaw said.
Democracy in the Workplace Is Under Threat
June 30, 2025 // The National Labor Relations Board, which the NLRA created, initially agreed with the majority-of-a-unit standard. In a 1936 decision involving Chrysler, the board rejected a unionization election in which only 125 out of an eligible 700 workers had voted. While 97 percent of the voting workers supported organizing, the board rightly concluded that a mere 17 percent of workers didn’t represent the views of the majority. The law’s text required that ruling. But the NLRB reversed course within months, giving a minority of workers the power to determine the majority’s future in a case involving newspaper workers. In a separate decision, the board declared that it couldn’t require a majority of workers to vote in favor of unionization, nor could it require the lower bar of a quorum. The NLRB, in the 1930s, defended its rejection of the law’s plain text by saying that, with a majority requirement, “the purpose of the [NLRA] would be thwarted.” But the board itself is doing the thwarting of workers’ rights and workplace democracy.
Core Transit employees’ unionization effort stalls
June 21, 2025 // Core Transit management objected to the proposed community of interest because many facets of the customer service representatives and the fleet maintenance technicians, including compensation, supervisory structure, job duties and job location, differ from those of operators.
Do More Powerful Unions Generate Better Pro-Worker Outcomes?
May 15, 2025 // Unionization is generally associated with higher wages for lower-skilled unionized workers.[37] However, when unionized sectors set higher wages, excess workers shift to nonunionized sectors, increasing the labor supply and lowering wages for lower-skilled nonunion workers.
CDW Urges Support for Worker Enfranchisement Act
April 16, 2025 // “Current labor law allows unions to become the exclusive bargaining representative of a workforce with bare minimum support from the workers. This is possible, because there is no participation rate requirement in the National Labor Relations Act. The Worker Enfranchisement Act would fix this oversight by requiring at least two-thirds of a potential bargaining unit participate in a representation election before the results can be certified. By requiring real participation from the impacted workforce, Congress can guarantee that workers’ desires on union representation are both heard and carried out. Unions would have to have true majority support before they can obtain exclusive representation over those workers. CDW urges Congress to pass this common-sense bill.”
Commentary: Is bill a state-led worker’s board, or a gift to SEIU?
April 7, 2025 // A secret ballot election for unionization requires a certain percentage of the bargaining unit to sign so-called “showing of interest” cards. When an organization allegedly has resorted to forgery is tasked with gathering and submitting these cards, it calls the integrity of the process into question. SB 1138 and HB 3838 present themselves as measures to improve workforce standards for care providers, but they have but one purpose — growing SEIU 503’s membership and influence. By embedding the union into training programs, handing it access to personal contact information and placing itself in workforce oversight, SEIU is positioned to grow its ranks at the expense of worker autonomy.
Labor board denies union election for O’Connell Children’s Shelter residential staff
April 4, 2025 // “This campaign, it’s already been delayed by like six months, and at this point, if we were to appeal with all of the crazy stuff happening at the federal level and in the NLRB right now, due to the Trump administration, they’ve already got a backlog of appeals to go through, and we just don’t know how much time it could actually be and if it would be worth it,” she said. This was the fourth union campaign Smith said she’s worked and the first one where she’s seen supervisory taint stall unionization efforts. She and her colleagues were shocked by the decision.
U of Washington Research Coordinators, Consultants Unionize
April 4, 2025 // “They are responsible for running clinical trials, liaising with patients and scientists, and ensuring that research results are grounded in rigorous science,” the release said. “Despite the critical role they play at the university, many report job insecurity, a lack of transparency around career advancement and workload, low compensation relative to cost of living, and more as their reasons for forming a union.”
Pro-labor Republicans push Trump to rescind order busting most federal unions
April 3, 2025 // “This executive order, which ruthlessly strips collective bargaining agreements for over 1 million federal workers, is the most recent attack your administration has levied against our merit-based civil service in the effort to cut the workforce and replace them with political cronies,” they wrote. “While the CSRA does give the president the authority to limit collective bargaining agreements due to national security concerns, the executive order’s direction to terminate mass swaths of federal employee collective bargaining agreements is clearly intended to broadly dismantle the CSRA, which is specifically designed to grant federal employees the right to collective bargaining as a means to resolve workplace issues while maintaining the smooth functioning of government operations.”