Posts tagged labor movement
Portland strippers vote to unionize, could get official recognition later this week
September 15, 2023 // Across the country, there’s been a wave in recent years of workers in industries like food service and manufacturing demanding better pay and benefits, voting to unionize or going on strike to compel management to address their concerns. But last week when Creature and 15 other Magic Tavern dancers unanimously voted to unionize, they became just the second active group of strippers in the country — and the only one in Oregon — to do so. The Actors’ Equity Association, which represents the strippers, expects the National Labor Relations Board to certify the vote by the end of the week. A spokesperson for the NLRB said in an email that if the results are certified, Magic Tavern must bargain in good faith with the union.
From Strikes to New Union Contracts, Labor Day’s Organizing Roots Are Especially Strong Across the Country This Year
September 5, 2023 // The first U.S. Labor Day celebration took place in New York City on Sept. 5, 1882. Some 10,000 workers marched in a parade organized by the Central Labor Union and the Knights of Labor. A handful of cities and states began to adopt laws recognizing Labor Day in the years that followed, yet it took more than a decade before President Grover Cleveland signed a congressional act in 1894 establishing the first Monday of September as a legal holiday.
‘It feels like it’s strike summer’: US unions flex muscles across industries
July 31, 2023 // “In the wake of the Patco strike, companies saw strikes as opportunities to weaken unions or even break them. That’s not the case today. Today there’s no fear that calling a strike will result in disaster,” said Lichtenstein. “Today there’s a sense that unions are on the offensive,” Lichtenstein continued. “Take the actors. They say they don’t want just a good contract. They want a transformative contract.”
Michigan businesses urged to prepare for UPS strike by Teamsters
July 21, 2023 // So just how big is UPS to cause such concerns? It transports about 6 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. When it comes to total revenue from the nation’s domestic shipping, the U.S. Postal Service had the largest share at 32 percent in 2022 followed by UPS at 24 percent, Amazon Logistics at 23 percent, and FedEx with 19 percent, per the Pitney Bowes Parcel Shipping Index. UPS averaged 24.3 million parcels a day last year and 6.2 billion for 2022, which generated a company record $100.3 billion in revenue,
San Fran socialists killed historic Anchor Brewing, critics say
July 19, 2023 // But locals such as Greenberg told The Post that a cadre of Democratic Socialists of America drove the push to unionize Anchor’s modest 61-member workforce — in hopes of inspiring the masses to “take on the power of capital.” In 2020, the Anchor Union’s first contract kicked hourly pay up by as much as 28% — a substantial bump that exacerbated the company’s pandemic slump. “I’m very sympathetic to the workers, but there also has to be some reality,” Roth said. “And that’s the problem with socialism: in the real world, the economic and math tenets quite literally do not add up.”
As Boston’s own Sean O’Brien matches UPS at the bargaining table, Amazon could be next
June 26, 2023 // But O’Brien said he’d support pulling the trigger — putting the International’s $300 million-plus “strike defense fund” to use — if he doesn’t see adequate financial gains for his membership. For him, this battle over the largest private-sector union contract in the United States isn’t only about righting the wrongs baked into the union’s current agreement with UPS. It’s meant to show how organized labor can flex its muscle against giant companies. And it’s a prelude for a long-awaited showdown with decidedly anti-union Amazon, where the Teamsters hope to organize the online retail giant’s massive logistics workforce. “All eyes are upon what the Teamsters do in these negotiations,” O’Brien said in an interview. “It’s going to be the defining moment in the labor movement. It’s going to be a template on how we take on Corporate America, how we take on big business.” Dissatisfaction with the current UPS contract, signed in 2018, helped O’Brien win his race to lead the Teamsters two years ago. Then the head of the Teamsters Local 25 in Charlestown, O’Brien broke away from the previous International leadership, led by James Hoffa, because of disagreements over the last round of UPS negotiations.
One Small Union Is Stoking Much of the Militant New Graduate Worker Organizing
May 30, 2023 // With around 35,000 members, the UE is not a huge union. It was once the third-largest — and arguably the most left-wing and democratic — member of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, with around a half-million members in core industries, until it fell victim to postwar anti-communist purges, raids from other unions and plant shutdowns. But the union revived itself by the 1990s. Famously, UE workers at the Republic Windows & Doors factory in Chicago occupied their plant in 2008, and today the union boasts a range of affiliated locals across sectors and industries from California to Vermont.
After a year of organizing, staff union leaders look ahead to collective bargaining
May 11, 2023 // While it’s been months since OCWR certified the first staff union elections, waiting times are normal in collective bargaining. According to a Bloomberg Law analysis, the average CBA takes 465 days to sign after a union election, although a good chunk (47 percent) take less than a year. “What's really interesting about this process is we are inventing the wheel of how negotiating works in Congress,” said Laudick. “Members of Congress are having to learn about what this relationship looks like. And those members, as much as they tout that they're very pro-union and that they are for unions, they've never sat at the negotiating table. They have no clue how this works.” That extends to some of the top-level congressional aides in supervisory positions, who are considered management under federal labor law. “We heard a lot of chiefs of staff asking if they could join [the union] last year,” said Laudick.
Why baseball’s next unionization effort could come from MLB front offices: ‘We’re not protected at all’
May 8, 2023 // The lawsuit invoked the Curt Flood Act, a 1998 piece of antitrust reform named after the player who sued MLB to end the reserve clause. Judge Gardephe did not find the case convincing enough to transform the Wyckoff and Cox suit into the front-office employee equivalent of Flood's historic triumph; instead, he reinforced that teams were behaving within their rights set forth by MLB's antitrust exemption. "Because scouts' work has a direct and critical effect on the selection of players who will participate in the games that the public will watch," Gardephe opined, "their role cannot be characterized as 'wholly collateral' or 'incidental' to the business of professional baseball."
‘A huge opportunity for the labor movement’: Unions jump on newly won Democratic trifectas
December 1, 2022 // And if Democrats succeed in repealing certain laws in Michigan — and in pushing through other union-backed measures — union officials and campaign operatives hope to rekindle the labor movement’s influence in other states. Democrats are putting their energy toward raising the minimum wage, banning so-called captive audience meetings where employers can warn against unionization, and more. “We’re busy preparing our legislative agenda, because we put everything we had into the ground game for this election,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in an interview. “How can we go on offense to pass legislation to protect people’s voice and ability to exercise their rights?”