Posts tagged Decertify
Penske Truck Rental Employees in Minneapolis and Nashville Seeking Votes to Remove IAM Union Officials
April 18, 2024 // Employees of Penske Truck Rental have submitted petitions seeking votes to remove International Association of Machinists (IAM) union officials from power at Penske locations in the Minneapolis, MN, metro area, and in Nashville, TN. Penske employees Kyle Fulkerson and David Saylor filed the petitions at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) with free legal aid from the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation.
Trader Joe’s in Chicago files to unionize
April 11, 2024 // The Tribune reports that the Trader Joe’s filed for a union election on Monday, and needs 140 “yes” votes in order to establish the union. The workers there are not affiliated with an established union and instead are organizing independently under the name Trader Joe’s United. One worker at the store told the Tribune that she makes $22.50 an hour and receives 75-cent raises twice a year. Trader Joe’s spokesperson Nakia Rohde told the Tribune that its workers receive annual raises of approximately 7%.
Albany Starbucks Employees Seek Vote to Kick Out SBWU Union
March 1, 2024 // Dowey and her colleagues join Starbucks partners and other coffee company employees across the country in banding together to vote out SBWU union officials. In the past year, Starbucks employees in Manhattan, NY; two Buffalo, NY locations; Pittsburgh, PA; Bloomington, MN; Salt Lake City, UT; Greenville, SC; Oklahoma City, OK; San Antonio, TX; and Philadelphia, PA, have all sought free Foundation legal aid in filing or defending decertification petitions at the NLRB. Foundation attorneys have helped employees at independent Philadelphia coffee shops Good Karma Café and Ultimo Coffee successfully oust Workers United union officials, who are affiliated with SBWU. Many employees of Starbucks or other coffee establishments are requesting decertification votes from the NLRB roughly one year after union bosses attained power in their workplaces, which is the earliest opportunity afforded by federal law to do so.
Right to Work Foundation SCOTUS Brief: Workers Exercising Right to Oppose Unions Isn’t “Harm” to Be Eliminated
March 1, 2024 // Foundation attorneys argue that “the Court must require the NLRB to prove employees were unlawfully coerced not to support a union because, absent such proof, employees have every right to make that choice”
WASHINGTON DEMOCRATS ADVANCE BILL TO PERMIT ELECTRONIC UNION ORGANIZING
February 26, 2024 // The real problem with SB 6060 is that it doesn’t go far enough. The state agency administering Washington’s collective bargaining laws for public employees — the Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) — processes three kinds of representation petitions: (1) petitions filed by unions seeking to represent groups of non-union employees; (2) petitions filed by unions seeking to supplant an incumbent union; and, (3) petitions filed by employees seeking to decertify the union currently representing them. To proceed, state law requires that each of these three petition types be supported by signatures from at least 30 percent of the affected employees. Under SB 6060, unions could use electronic signatures in their efforts to unionize new groups of employees while those seeking to change unions or remove an unwanted union would still have to gather John Hancocks the old-fashioned way. But if the goal is to “empower” public employees to choose whatever union representation they wish, shouldn’t electronic signatures be permitted across the board?
Tens of thousands of workers in Florida have just lost their labor unions. More is coming.
February 22, 2024 // The numbers are not being tracked or published by the state or any labor organization, so WLRN requested the records and created a public database to track the fallout of the law. Most affected employees perform core public sector jobs like teaching in schools, doing clerical work for state and local government, repairing engines and machinery for government agencies, answering 911 calls at call centers and working at city parks.
Opinion: Protect workers by preventing union neutrality agreements
February 21, 2024 // A neutrality agreement is a contract between a union and an employer that typically forbids employers from communicating with employees about the unionization effort or the union behind it. This includes not discussing with workers the viability of any promises the union makes, the accuracy of information provided by the union, or details about the union’s record. Employers that sign neutrality agreements are even precluded from answering employees’ basic questions about how the bargaining process works. So in short, these deceptively named neutrality agreements are anything but. Employers are not actually asked to be neutral, but instead to leave employees in the dark about the choice they face.
THOUSANDS OF FLORIDIANS DECERTIFY THEIR GOVERNMENT UNIONS
February 11, 2024 // “This is a major victory for workers across Florida, who now have more dollars in their pockets and have the option of better representation.” “As the Orlando Weekly put it,” concluded Withe, “this is just the first purge of government employee unions – and the Freedom Foundation is going to do everything in our power to make this a reality, helping tens of thousands of public employees exercise their right to freedom from union bosses who don’t even know their names.”
Despite more ‘salting,’ labor unions are getting pushback in their drive to organize restaurants
January 24, 2024 // While unions "salt" more restaurants with organizers posing as employees, a countermovement is building among the already-unionized to end their representation by groups like Workers United, as this week’s episode of the Working Lunch podcast attests. The broadcast features a guest appearance by Mark Mix, president of the Right to Work Committee. The group helps organized employees across all industries to vote on whether to remain in their unions, a process known as decertification. He spoke a day after Workers United, the parent of the union that’s organized 375 Starbucks units, decided to end its representation of an Ultimo Coffee café. All but one employee of the store had signed a petition asking federal regulators to permit a vote on whether to oust the labor group.