Posts tagged fight for 15
SEIU Rejoins AFL-CIO After Splitting Off 20 Years Ago
January 8, 2025 // The reaffiliation means the AFL-CIO can more directly pitch in on SEIU campaigns, including a high-profile one at Starbucks. That effort is led by Workers United, an SEIU affiliate, and has led to more than 500 unionized stores nationwide at the coffee chain, making it one of the most closely watched organizing pushes in decades.
One-day strikes are in: Why unions are keeping it short on the picket line
December 4, 2024 // When it comes to getting employers to cave to demands, the success of one-day strikes is mixed — especially for those low-wage, low-leverage workers. Short work stoppages failed to unionize Walmart in the 2010s, along with those fast food workers from Fight for 15. Starbucks and its unionized employees are still negotiating a first contract. Long strikes are still happening — just ask SAG-AFTRA — and probably won’t be phased out entirely because they still carry much more leverage. Instead, one-day strikes often have a different goal in mind that’s still essential for a union victory — getting workers excited.
The number of striking U.S. workers more than doubled in 2023
February 15, 2024 // While the overall number of strikes only ticked up a bit in 2023, many more workers were involved in stoppages.
OPINION: The SEIU’s fake fast food union
February 12, 2024 // Struggling at the national level, the union turned to its legislative allies in California. It worked for several years to enact the so-called “Fast Recovery Act,” a scheme to create a new council that would regulate wages and working conditions for fast-food workers. The idea: Save the union the unproductive hassle of signing up new workers, and instead make all of them subject to a union-controlled government board. Though it took the union two legislative sessions to pass it, over fierce resistance from restaurants, it eventually got to the Governor’s desk in 2022. He signed it on Labor Day that year.
How McDonald’s, Chipotle, Starbucks are preparing for the fast-food worker battles to come in 2024
January 4, 2024 // “Anyone looking at this in the industry, now that emotion has been removed from the negotiation, sees this as the least bad option or worst good option, depending on which side you’re on,” said Matt Haller, president and CEO of the International Franchise Association, a trade group that represents franchisors, franchisees and franchise suppliers. In exchange for concessions, and staring down a very uncertain outcome on the referendum, “We have this very predictable business environment for our members moving forward,” he said.
This New Labor Rule Could Be Trouble for McDonald’s
October 5, 2023 // McDonald’s and other franchise companies have made it clear they believe the stakes are high. The “reality is that our business model is under attack,” CEO Chris Kempczinski said of possible joint-employer regulations in a speech at a franchising industry conference in Las Vegas earlier this year, in remarks he also published on LinkedIn. Changes by the NLRB, he said, would transform franchisees “from independent small-business owners to employees of the parent brands.” Heightened joint-employer liability could hurt the franchise model in two main ways, according to the International Franchise Association. One possibility, along the lines of what Kempczinski described, is that a franchisor would exert more control over the franchisees. That undercuts one of franchisors’ big selling points to potential franchisees—that they’re offering a path to running their own business, with all of the freedoms that provides. It could also add compliance costs, and potentially, legal and liability expenses. Those increased costs are also a frequent worry for franchisees, says restaurant consultant John Gordon, principal at Pacific Management Consulting Group. Franchisees typically pay franchisors a percentage of their sales, and their profit comes after those fees and their operating expenses. Franchisees are “justifiably afraid of the franchisor passing costs onto them that weren’t part of the franchise agreement,” he says, and wary of joint-employer liability for that reason.
Dunkin’ faces first union push in 12 years
September 5, 2023 // Recently, SEIU’s Union of Southern Service Workers has begun working toward a new model of unionism that relies on a combination of organizing across industries in specific cities, shop floor actions and regulatory pressure campaigns. The USSW’s strategy resulted in a strike at a South Carolina Waffle House earlier this summer, and a march on the boss at an Atlanta Dunkin’ earlier this month. Why BCTGM, which is not affiliated with SEIU, chose to pursue a union election at a 23-person Dunkin’ Donuts in Ohio is not clear. But it could signal that the upsurge in labor activity at the margins of the restaurant industry has not yet dissipated. BCTGM members struck Kellogg’s plants in 2021, and a Hormel plant in 2022.
A FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND UNION RAMPS UP EFFORTS TO SWEEP THE SOUTH
August 30, 2023 // The Union of Southern Service Workers began making headlines last fall after formally christening themselves during a rally in Columbia, South Carolina. This union holds some familiar attributes, given that it began as an offshoot of Raise Up, the Southern leg of the SEIU’s Fight for $15 initiative. Yet this is no ordinary effort by the SEIU, for the USSW purports to not only be “built by and for low-wage workers” but also stretches across many industries. A key distinction: The union frames itself as a cross-sector organization, designed to retain members even if they job-hop between industries, i.e., fast food, retail, hotel, nursing home, warehouses, etc.
California’s on the cusp of transforming America’s fast food industry — again
August 16, 2023 // “Because it’s so many stores, and going store to store would be difficult, the path to unionization here is basically through legislation,” said Brandon Dawkins, SEIU 1021 vice president of organizing. “After we get the council together and force the employer to the table, then the unions — we can come in and really sit down and negotiate with the corporations to, number one, create a union and, number two, address issues like safety and wage theft.” A labor council’s purview extends to workplace conditions like predictable scheduling — a longstanding goal for labor — noted California Labor Federation Executive Officer Lorena Gonzalez, a former state lawmaker who carried an earlier version of the bill when she served in the state Assembly. “If you get joint employer liability, it’s more likely McDonald’s would want to talk about a national agreement or strategy because now they’re on the hook for every labor violation,” Gonzalez said. That tactic has angered restaurant operators who have rallied against the legislation. Marisol Sanchez, a second-generation McDonald’s franchise owner, has appeared in advertising opposing the 2023 bill. Sanchez said she believed SEIU was acting on its own political agenda rather than in response to worker demands.
Democrats want to make the minimum wage $17 an hour and give nearly 28 million workers a raise
July 27, 2023 // Sen. Bernie Sanders is once again pushing for a higher minimum wage. Sanders, alongside 29 senators and nearly 150 House representatives, introduced new legislation to bring up the federal minimum rate for the first time since 2009.