Posts tagged Chipotle
Chipotle testing robots to make bowls, salads
October 6, 2023 // Eventually, Namasivayam expects that a certain percentage of restaurants — maybe 30% — will continue to have human servers and be considered more luxurious, while the rest will lean more heavily on robots in the kitchen and in dining rooms. Economics are on the side of robots, he said; the cost of human labor will continue to rise, but technology costs will fall.
Student Activists Are Turning Their Attention to the Labor Movement
June 22, 2023 // Last year, the Young Democratic Socialists of America’s Red Hot Summer program trained hundreds of young people to organize their workplaces and helped launch union drives representing thousands. This year’s program hopes to be even bigger, writes YDSA’s cochair. Student workers across the country are engaged in an unprecedented wave of labor organization. Spurred on by the support of organizations like the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), of which I am cochair, undergraduate student workers have launched union drives on nearly thirty public and private campuses in the United States. These workers are fighting for increased pay, improvements to scheduling and hours, sick pay, and better health care. They are also fighting for issues that go beyond bread and butter, like removing Israeli products from dining halls.
Focus organizing drives on workers without college degrees, US unions told
May 8, 2023 // n contrast, unionization hasn’t taken off nearly as rapidly at many blue-collar, lower-paid workplaces. No other Chipotle restaurant has unionized since workers in Lansing, Michigan, voted last August to make theirs the nation’s first unionized Chipotle. Only one Amazon warehouse is unionized in the US, just two Apple stores and four Trader Joe’s. Those companies have mounted fierce anti-union counterattacks to slow and they hope stop the spread. Chris Rosell, the Teamsters’ organizing director, says one reason unionization of blue-collar workers often doesn’t catch fire is that it’s frequently easier for anti-union consultants to scare and deter those workers. “Blue-collar workers often aren’t as educated about this union-busting stuff,” he said. “They could be more susceptible to these kinds of tactics.” Rosell said the Teamsters often run elaborate campaigns that seek to inoculate workers from the pressures and propaganda from anti-union consultants. He said the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, hopes to double the union’s membership and focus organizing on such area trucking, warehouses and sanitation work. Erica Smiley, executive director of Jobs with Justice, a labor rights group, says it’s often harder to unionize blue-collar workers because they tend to have less economic security than educated workers and have greater fear of what will happen to them if they’re retaliated against, perhaps getting fired, for seeking to unionize.
Barnes & Noble Education Workers Seek to Unionize, Extending Organizing Wave
April 10, 2023 // Workers say they’ve signed up most of the roughly 70 employees at the store on Rutgers University’s campus. After announcing their organizing campaign to local management, they plan to submit a filing Thursday asking the US National Labor Relations Board to conduct a unionization election. Employees are petitioning to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which currently represents retail workers at Macy’s Inc., H&M Hennes & Mauritz AB and, most recently, Recreational Equipment Inc., where it first secured a foothold last year in New York City. Barnes & Noble Education didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The company, which retailer Barnes & Noble Inc. spun off in 2015, operates 785 physical bookstores for students and hundreds of online bookstores. It also has exclusive deals with schools and universities to distribute course materials.
The Undercover Organizers Behind America’s Union Wins
April 5, 2023 // The practice of joining a workplace with the secret aim of organizing it is called “salting.” Westlake was addressing recruits at the Inside Organizer School, a workshop held a couple times a year by a loose confederation of labor organizers. At these meetups, experienced activists train other attendees in the art of going undercover. Speakers lecture and lead discussions on how to pass employer screenings, forge relationships with co-workers and process the complicated feelings that can accompany a double life. Most salts are volunteers, not paid union officials, but unions sometimes fund their housing or, later, tap them for full-time jobs. Workers United, the Service Employees International Union affiliate that’s home to the new Starbucks union, hired Westlake as an organizer around the time the coffee chain fired him last fall.
Chipotle will pay a $240,000 penalty — roughly 1% of its daily revenue— for shutting down a store that tried to unionize
March 28, 2023 // The employees filed a petition to form a union last June — the first time Chipotle employees had taken that step. The following month, Chipotle said it would close the location, citing problems recruiting enough employees to run the location, CNBC reported. According to the Kennebec Journal, the National Labor Relations Board later found that the closure violated labor laws. The payment will be split among the former location's employees, who will receive between $5,800 and $21,000 each based on their seniority, pay rate, and other factors, per the Journal.
Labor Law Reform Is Needed for Unions to Succeed
February 9, 2023 // U.S. Department of Labor reported last week that union membership levels have actually declined over the last year and are now at their lowest level ever — 6% in the private sector.
US union membership rate hits all-time low despite campaigns
January 23, 2023 // The number of workers belonging to a union actually increased by 1.9% to 14.3 million. But that failed to keep pace with higher overall employment rates. The number of wage- and salary-earning workers rose by 3.9%, the government said. U.S. union membership has been falling steadily for decades. In 1983, the first year that comparable data is available, the union membership rate was 20.1%, the government said. Public-sector workers, like police and teachers, had the highest unionization rates last year, at 33%. Just 6% of private-sector workers were unionized.
White Castle’s New Robot Employee Wants to Know If You Want Fries With That
January 17, 2023 // "Flippy will drop everything into the fryer and then at the perfect time, take everything out, give it a little shake, and put it into the area for the packaging for the team members,"
As Starbucks unionizing slows, some strike, others skeptical
January 11, 2023 // Contract negotiations at three stores in Buffalo and Arizona began last spring. Since then, bargaining sessions have been held at 75 stores, but Starbucks has walked out on the meetings because it opposes having union officials join by Zoom. Starbucks says labor organizers are violating the rules by failing to share Zoom links or name remote participants and, in at least two cases, posting recordings from bargaining sessions on social media. The union says Starbucks is reversing itself after initially allowing Zoom negotiations last spring.