Posts tagged housing
San Jose city employees prepare for possible strike
July 13, 2023 // The strike school will start at 5:30 p.m. at San Jose First Methodist Church located on Fifth Street, across from the San Jose City Hall. Those attending include 911 dispatchers, library workers, public airport staff, water treatment center staff and union workers who maintain the city’s streets.
Five Years after Janus, Government Unions Are Weaker — and More Desperate
July 5, 2023 // When SEIU HCII, which operates across four states, is removed from the picture, the overall public-sector-union membership in Illinois has decreased by over 10 percent. These declines are not isolated to a single entity but spread across all public employers, with teachers’ unions such as the Illinois Education Association and Illinois Federation of Teachers losing a combined 9.4 percent of their members or fee-payers. AFSCME Council 31 — the union that represented Janus — has seen an 18.5 percent drop. A significant decrease in union membership is a sign that workers are exercising their Janus freedoms. It also means that $25 million didn’t flow into government-union coffers in 2022. This is a financial blow to a movement that’s accustomed to having huge cash reserves to fund the politicking that gets the union bosses exactly what they want. Such a dramatic shift illustrates how many government workers feel underrepresented by their unions, pushing them to distance themselves from groups now charging more and delivering less. Which points up another consequence of Janus: Government unions are in a fight for their lives. Desperation has made them even more polarizing, extreme, and political — and greedy.
USC housing workers unionize in hopes of boosting pay, benefits
June 21, 2023 // Mike Long, a spokesman for SEIU Local 721, said the climate is good for union action. “You can’t ignore the regional context with the Hollywood writers out on strike,” he said. “And there has been a flurry of activity across Southern California with hotel workers.” More than 15,000 Southern California hotel workers voted earlier this month to authorize a strike as they bargain for a $5-an-hour pay hike, more affordable health care, a secure pension plan and “safe and humane” workloads. Unite Here Local 11, which represents the room attendants, cooks, dishwashers, front desk agents, servers and food service workers, said it would be “the largest hotel worker strike in modern U.S. history” and could happen as early as the July 4 weekend.
Teachers unions demand housing, transportation and other student supports during negotiations
May 26, 2023 // Teachers unions in school districts across the country are demanding improved salaries, benefits and class sizes when it’s time to renew their contracts. They are also leveraging negotiations to benefit school employees, students and their families. This process, known as bargaining in the common good, has been used to gain agreements on a host of items, such as housing assistance for low-income students, updating antiquated school facilities and increasing the number of psychologists, social workers and nurses on campuses.
A Bay Area homebuilder planned a project with union rules. Can it work anywhere else?
May 9, 2023 // Developers are subject to state fines of up to $10,000 per month for each missing monthly compliance report. If a company is found to be skirting the “skilled and trained” standard entirely, the penalties can rack up much higher and much quicker: $200 per day “for each worker employed in contravention” of the rule.
Push to unionize at college dorms is growing
March 31, 2023 // Colleges have been a breeding ground for illness and social havoc since the pandemic began, and much of the onus has been placed on RAs, who are appointed to shepherd the well-being of an entire floor of younger students. In the past, that has typically meant hosting events, mediating roommate disputes, and perhaps guiding an overserved first-year safely to bed. For this, RAs are compensated with free or discounted housing and meal plans. But in recent semesters, and especially since schools reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, those responsibilities have ballooned. RAs who spoke with the Globe describe being deputized as “COVID police” to enforce masking and social distance, and wrangling students whose university — or even high school — experience was stunted by lockdowns and remote learning. Several schools later assigned RAs to longer overnight “on call” shifts and additional check-ins with residents.
Graduate Unions: Why Student Workers at University of California, Temple, More Are Striking
March 27, 2023 // HELU was founded in 2021 in an effort to fill those shoes. At a digital summit that July, members of 75 unions and labor organizations convened to draft a “vision platform” laying out everything from their legislative commitments (like Sen. Bernie Sanders’s College for All Act) to their support of student debt cancelation. The endgame is a unified academic labor movement capable of securing public investment and reorienting higher ed to “prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige.” To date, 130 unions and affiliated groups representing over half a million workers have endorsed the platform. The first step in realizing this vision, says Jaime, who attended the 2021 summit, is to build union density. “Transforming academia is not going to happen in one single contract campaign. We have to organize workers in every single university in order to achieve real change,” he says.
L.A. schools would close if union workers go on massive three-day strike, Supt. Carvalho says
March 14, 2023 // United Teachers Los Angeles, which also is in contract talks, has advised its members that they should walk out in solidarity with Local 99 to ratchet up pressure on the district. Local 99 has described the strike as an unfair labor practice charge walkout in protest of alleged illegal actions by L.A. Unified during the negotiations process. Such strikes typically last for a fixed duration and can be staged without going through all the steps of bargaining that typically precede an open-ended strike, according to the unions. The union bargaining platform is extensive, covering a range of workplace and social-justice issues, including a commitment to extra resources for Black students and affordable housing for low-income families.
Rutgers could face first faculty strike in its history — key union vote Tuesday
February 24, 2023 // The voting will run for a week-and-a-half, and a strike will only be called if an overwhelming majority of the members agree to it, organizers said. A strike wouldn’t automatically be triggered by the vote, the unions said in a letter to members. Instead, their leaders would instead have the option of calling a strike in March or April, if they still haven’t struck a contract deal with the university. “All of us would rather be teaching. None of us want to go out on strike,” said Rebecca Givan, the president of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT and an associate professor in the School of Management. The Rutgers AAUP-AFT represents about 5,000 full-time faculty, graduate workers, postdoctoral associates and Educational Opportunity Fund counselors. The adjunct union represents another 2,700 part-time lecturers.
UC strike energizes unprecedented national surge of union organizing by academic workers
January 3, 2023 // In 2022 alone, graduate students representing 30,000 peers at nearly a dozen institutions filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. They include USC, Northwestern, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Caltech plans to officially kick off its organizing campaign this month, and other academic researchers are working to form unions at the University of Alaska, Western Washington University, the National Institutes of Health and such influential think tanks as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute. Princeton University, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Pasadena, Caltech, Pardee Rand Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison