Posts tagged New Orleans
20 healthcare strikes in 2026
September 28, 2026 // Union activity in healthcare continues in 2026, with 20 reported strikes since the beginning of the year. Some of these actions involve healthcare workers and leaders across hospitals and clinics in multiple states.
Workers at Swaybox Studios, Home to Batman Animated Movie, Vote to Unionize
July 23, 2026 // Unless valid challenges are presented, a group of 137 workers at the studio including animators, digital puppetry artists, CG modelers and other workers will soon join the union. The organizing campaign — tackling a film that IATSE claimed is budgeted at $90 million — was “one of the largest organizing drives in film and television production undertaken by IATSE in recent years,” the union said in a press release.
Protestors brave cold snap to support striking nurses at New Orleans’ UMC
November 12, 2025 // National Nurses United (NNU) — the union representing the UMC nurses — has been negotiating new staff contracts with hospital administrators since March 2024. This is the fifth strike in just over a year.
Dollar store workers fight to improve jobs, even without a union
October 17, 2025 // In 2022, Williams joined an organization that seemed, to him, like his best shot: Step Up Louisiana. Like several successful campaigns before it, Step Up organizes workers to improve their jobs, but stops short of calling for a union under the National Labor Relations Board. The approach, sometimes referred to as “premajority unionism,” is a natural fit for places like the South, with histories of public hostility to unions. Today, suggest experts, it may also be workers’ best bet for building power amid the hostility of the Trump administration.
CATS union workers edge closer to a strike after an alleged wage freeze
February 13, 2025 // “We can’t allow a company to impose and implement its own labor contract on its workforce,” Garland says. “If we do that, they won’t agree with anything the union’s saying when we go to the table. They’ll just implement what they want to. Now we have no choice but to strike.” The new contract also includes changes to disciplinary, grievance and overtime policies that were made without union input, Garland says. Union organizers are now gathering in Baton Rouge to deliberate their next steps.
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.
Ports strike would leave Walmart, Ikea, Home Depot with few import options, union warns
September 29, 2024 // These companies are among the leading importers at the 14 major ports that an ILA strike would impact, according to ImportGenius. Overall, between 43%-49% of all U.S. imports and billions of dollars in trade monthly are at stake as the union moves closer to the Oct. 1 deadline for a new contract, over which talks between the union and ports management broke down in June and have not resumed. Cruise operations at ports would continue. “To stop trade entering the U.S. on such a large-scale, even for short period of time, is highly-damaging to the economy so government intervention will be needed to bring the matter to a resolution for the good of the nation,” warned Peter Sand, chief shipping analyst at Xeneta. “A strike lasting just one week will impact schedules for ships leaving the Far East on voyages to the U.S. in late December and throughout January.”
States are pushing back with anti-labor laws as union popularity grows, policy experts say
September 18, 2024 // Growing union organizing across the country has triggered an anti-labor legislative response in some states, but cities and counties are increasingly pushing back, a new report found. The report, released this month by the New York University Wagner Labor Initiative and Local Progress Impact Lab, a group for local elected officials focused on economic and racial justice issues, cites examples of localities all over the U.S. using commissions to document working conditions, creating roles for protecting workers in the heat and educating workers on their labor rights.
Louisiana ADT Security Services Workers Overwhelmingly Vote to Remove Communication Workers of America Union from Workplace
June 17, 2024 // “This vote is the latest example of workers across the country exercising their right to remove unwanted unions, with the NLRB’s own statistics showing more decertification elections held last year than in any year since 2017,” said Foundation President Mark Mix. “Louisiana’s popular Right to Work law provides fundamental protections for employees in the Pelican State against being forced to fund a union they oppose, but, right now, that law does not override federal law that forces workers under a union’s so-called ‘representation’ against their will.”
Staff at New Orleans’ French immersion school, Lycée Français, vote to unionize
May 16, 2024 // This week's vote comes as Republican state lawmakers have introduced several bills aiming to weaken public-sector unions. However, one of the harshest measures, which would outlaw collective bargaining for teachers and other public employees, would not apply to charter schools because the federal labor board has ruled that they are entitled to union protections. Lycée Français is the seventh New Orleans charter school to unionize since 2013, when Morris Jeff Community School joined UTNO. The other union schools are Rooted School, International High School, Bricolage Academy, Ben Franklin High School and the Living School, though that school is set to close.