Posts tagged Cleveland
Op-ed: Ohio needs to wrest control of public schools from the teachers’ un
August 25, 2025 // Bureaucratic schools where merit doesn’t matter. Unions have used their clout, including their ability to elect pro-union school boards, to secure lengthy, incredibly detailed employment contracts that advance their interests while tying up school leaders with red tape. These contracts include job protections (even for incompetent teachers), onerous procedural hoops that schools must follow to evaluate or discipline an employee, and benefits that exceed what many private sector employees enjoy (e.g., generous healthcare, even for retirees, and paid leave). Moreover, following a union-supported state law, these contracts require Ohio teachers to be paid according to rigid salary schedules that reward seniority and degrees instead of classroom effectiveness and individual talent—a merit-based approach to compensation that has proven to benefit students in the (few) places where it has been tried. Escalating spending.
Labor organizers hope to maintain support after summer of strikes
December 13, 2023 // Labor organizers have since been trying to appeal to workers by tapping into frustrations about those inequities and taking action. Here in Ohio, Former State Sen. Nina Turner has established a nonprofit called We Are Somebody just to help those efforts nationwide. “We Are Somebody is a capacity building organization for the working class,” Turner said. “Our goal is to organize, amplify and fund workers on the front line, and that could be workers that are officially in a labor union, but also workers that are not in labor unions.”
The Kroger Company Adds Right to Work Tennessee Facility
September 20, 2023 // The Kroger Company is adding a new location soon in Right to Work Cleveland, Tennessee. This will serve as a central fill facility for the company. As a result, the new location will also mean 140 new jobs for the area. So this is an exciting economic development for Bradley County!
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.
Cleveland, union reach tentative agreement that could avert plow driver strike
January 17, 2023 // he FOX 8 I-Team has learned of a tentative agreement reached in a contract dispute involving Cleveland plow drivers, garbage collectors, airport maintenance workers and others. The agreement comes after a sudden round of contract talks a week before the workers had planned to hold a vote to decide if they would go on strike.
Voting opens in key UAW test to organize U.S. battery plants
December 8, 2022 // Workers begin two days of voting on Wednesday to decide whether to unionize at a General Motors (GM.N)-LG Energy (373220.KS) battery cell manufacturing joint venture in Ohio. Workers at an Ultium Cells plant near Cleveland are voting on Wednesday and Thursday after the United Auto Workers (UAW) union petitioned to represent about 900 workers. Results of the election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board are expected on Friday. Last week, GM CEO Mary Barra told Bloomberg TV the company is "very supportive of the plant being unionized ... The employees are going to be voting, but we’re very supportive." In a trip to South Korea in May, President Joe Biden expressed support for workers seeking to unionize JV battery plants. The Detroit Three automakers all have battery plants in the works with South Korean partners.
Biden spotlights effort to rescue union pensions
July 7, 2022 // Reassuring frustrated blue-collar voters, President Joe Biden on Wednesday visited Ohio iron workers to highlight federal action to shore up troubled pension funding for millions now on the job or retired — and to make his political case that he’s been a champion for workers in the White House. Bill DeVito, Jeffrey Carlson, Rob Portman, Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan, Republican J.D. Vance,
Opinion: Biden’s political hacks won’t stop charter schools’ growth
May 16, 2022 // Much to the delight of teachers’ union bosses, the Biden administration is quickly becoming history’s most anti-(school) choice political pack, demonstrated most recently in its proposals to make charter schools’ access to federal funding more difficult.
Labor Racket Weekly: Big Labor’s Naughty List
December 28, 2021 //
PRO Act allies hit the road
December 6, 2021 // Our Revolution, the progressive advocacy group Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) launched in 2016, Communications Workers Association, and the Worker Power Coalition, which includes several national unions, kick off a nationwide tour today aimed at rallying lawmakers around the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, Democrats’ wide-reaching bill that would make it easier for workers to join unions.