Posts tagged Plumbing

    The Castro’s central Starbucks — ‘Bearbucks’ — shutters abruptly

    September 27, 2025 // Affectionately known as “Bearbucks” — owing to the prevalence of LGBTQ+ customers — that location was the first Starbucks in the city to unionize, during a nationwide push in 2022. At the time, workers cited difficulties at the cafe during and after the pandemic, including a four-month closure for plumbing issues. Citing declining sales, the company has shuttered at least six cafes in San Francisco in the past year, most of them downtown.

    5.9% of Washington Workers Are Union Members, 6th Most in the U.S.

    June 9, 2025 // Union membership in the United States has declined to its lowest point in decades. In 1979, unions represented 24.1% of the American workforce. By 2024, that share had fallen to just 9.9%, according to figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and UnionStats. In absolute terms, this represents a drop of roughly 6.7 million members—from a peak of 20.9 million in 1979 to around 14.2 million in 2024.

    Opinion: Biden to Apprentices: You’re Fired

    December 21, 2023 // About half of apprenticeship programs are jointly run by labor and management, typically governed by collective-bargaining agreements. Yet unions accuse non-union employers of using apprenticeships “to find cheap labor,” as DOL puts it. Its proposed rule aims to make it harder and more expensive for employers to use non-union apprenticeships.