Posts tagged benefit
CHICAGO: Mayor Brandon Johnson Asks CPS CEO Pedro Martinez To Resign. Martinez Says No, Sources Say
September 26, 2024 // ohnson’s desire to replace Martinez comes after he pushed school district leaders to take out a short-term loan to cover a pension payment for non-teaching staff and new costs related to the yet-to-be-settled Chicago Teachers Union contract. It also comes as school district leaders are in tense contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union. The mayor is also struggling to address looming deficits to the city budget he now oversees. Those deficits are driven, in part, by the CPS administration and school board’s refusal to take out the short-term loan.
The Accidental Success of the NLRA: How a Law about Unions Achieved Its Goals by Giving Us Fewer Unions
August 30, 2024 // The Wagner Act was passed to promote labor peace. It aimed to keep commerce flowing by promoting collective bargaining, and thus unionism. Taft-Hartley reversed one part of that policy: it helped make unionism, and thus collective bargaining, less common. But by doing so, it finally achieved labor law’s original goal. The labor market today is more peaceful than at any time in the last century. And that peace owes in large part to the relative scarcity of unions. That lesson is worth keeping in mind in contemporary debates. Today, voices on both sides of the aisle laud the benefits of unionism. They speak of unions as vehicles of workplace democracy—a productive way for workers to express their collective discontent. But unions have not always funneled discontent through peaceful channels: when given too much power, they have disrupted the avenues of commerce.
UAW demands cost-of-living salary adjustment as Americans feel pinch of inflation
September 26, 2023 // COLA, or cost-of-living adjustments to paychecks, are well-known by Social Security recipients, millions of whom live on a fixed income and carefully track the yearly, inflation-adjusted tweaks to their benefits. But for anyone else, the pay bumps that were baked into many union contracts for decades have fallen away over the last half-century. The government has even stopped tracking data on them. The prominence of unions in the 1970s and '80s also helped COLA numbers. Data from the BLS shows that 20% of American workers were union members in 1983 ‒ the first year for which comparable data are available ‒ versus 10% in 2022.
Va. firefighters, medics press city for union rights
August 2, 2023 // Virginia Beach is considering collective bargaining for its employees and officers. In 2020, Portsmouth was the first Hampton Roads city to authorize collective bargaining for city employees thanks to a unanimous City Council vote. The resolution at the time called for a working group of city leaders and subject matter experts to explore procedures on how to make it happen when the law became effective the following year. But City Council reversed course when that time came after then-Chief Financial Officer Mimi Terry, now interim city manager, informed members that such efforts would likely cost the city $2 million to begin the process while limiting expansion of other services. The council then adopted a resolution to no longer grant employees the ability to collectively bargain.
What to know about the potential UPS Teamsters strike
July 10, 2023 // UPS is among the largest shipping companies in the U.S. According to Pitney Bowes, UPS shipped 5.2 billion U.S. parcels in 2022, representing nearly a quarter of all parcels shipped in the country. Should the UPS Teamsters go on strike, there's "no doubt" the economy would be impacted, from businesses to individual households, Thomas Goldsby, a professor in logistics at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville's Haslam College of Business, told ABC News. "You just don't take a player the size of UPS out of the market or largely out of the market without people having to take notice," Goldsby said.
New Stanford subcontractor threatens union jobs, workers say
April 19, 2023 // In late March, Stanford decided to switch from UG2—a maintenance service company used by the University to subcontract workers—to a new custodial provider, Service by Medallion, at its Redwood City campus. This shift is scheduled to take place this Friday, April 14—a change that the union claims will violate the existing union master contract and may impact the employment of 25 UG2 janitorial workers in Redwood City, with potential implications to all 7,000 union members. On Wednesday, a dozen Stanford students drove to Redwood City at noon to show support for the workers advocating for their employment. Students and around ten workers who were on lunch break at the time also sought to present Executive Director of Operations Laura Di Mario with a petition which received over 500 signatures from Stanford affiliates in 24 hours. The petition demanded that “Stanford honor its contract” by not switching to Medallion and not requiring workers to go through the “rehiring” process.
PNC Park ushers, ticket takers, ticket sellers go on strike, announce plans to picket outside Pirates’ next home game
April 19, 2023 // The Pittsburgh Stadium Independent Employees Union, or PSIEU, announced on Sunday that the Pirates' latest contract offer was rejected and that a strike vote was accepted. The union represents ushers, ticket takers, and ticket sellers at PNC Park. PSIEU says that workers will picket outside the Pirates' next home game on Thursday when the team takes on the Cincinnati Reds.
Starbucks union requests wage increases apply at unionized stores
August 2, 2022 // A labor union representing workers at nearly 200 Starbucks locations has asked the company to extend new wage and benefit increases to unionized employees. Lynne Fox, the international president of Workers United, sent a letter to Starbucks interim CEO Howard Schultz dated July 15 waiving the union’s bargaining rights to wage increases and Starbucks’s other recently announced benefit improvements. training programs, dress code updates, faster sick time accrual and in-app and credit card tipping. Maggie Carter,
Opinion: Unions And Stress—What Businesses Should Learn
June 23, 2022 // Unionization is often a sign of discontent more than wage/benefit dissatisfaction. And workers have plenty to be discontented about. Demand for goods and services is up, but the working-age population is not. Many workers toil in short-staffed offices and shops. Add to that all the people who changed jobs in the Great Resignation and have not yet come up to speed at their new positions. More experienced workers have to take up the slack created by new employees. A further problem is poor hires. Companies have been so desperate to hire that they may bring in people not well suited to a particular job, or not suited to any job at all. Pressure to get more done is high, and staffing across the country is not adequate. Bill Conerly
$30 per hour to start? Staten Island Amazon union has high hopes, but could face a tough road after victory
April 29, 2022 // Among other things, the nascent Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, has said it wants longer breaks for warehouse employees, more time off and a dramatically higher minimum hourly wage of $30, up from just over $18 an hour now at the Staten Island facility.