Posts tagged Trader Joe’s
Big Labor’s Astroturfed Unionization of Starbucks
January 10, 2023 // It’s unclear the degree to which the Starbucks campaign has featured salts, but Brisack isn’t the only one. Articles in union and socialist publications Jacobin, In These Times, and Labor Notes all reference the organizing role played by employees who “consciously took jobs at Starbucks to organize.” Outside the workplace, Workers United also funded an array of consultants, organizers, and attorneys to support the campaign. When organizing her co-workers, Brisack would introduce them to professional organizers such as Bensinger “to show the baristas that she had a real union backing her,” according to the Washington Post.
What Happens When Progressive Companies Meet Unionizing Workers?
January 5, 2023 // But today’s economy is unrecognizable from that of the 1950s, when U.S. labor last flexed considerable muscle before a decades-long downfall spurred by political kneecapping, internal mismanagement, and widescale deindustrialization. Today, as unionization rates hover near all-time lows, glimmers of hope for labor are appearing in traditionally non-unionized sectors—food/beverage, digital media, retail, museums, nonprofits, and tech. Bucking historical norms, those industries are public-facing, with customers who are often barraged by messaging about what companies believe. But when that rhetorical rubber meets the labor-agitated road, corporations often default to the same anti-union tactics that they’ve employed for more than a century.
How Gen Z helped galvanize a national retail unionization movement in 2022
January 4, 2023 // This generation is also connecting with organizers across the country and using social media to amplify their efforts. Starbucks workers in California, for example, swapped tips throughout the organizing drive. And the Inland Empire Amazon Workers coalition is running an Instagram series featuring stories of warehouse workers sharing their experiences.
Union wins made big news this year. Here are 5 reasons why it’s not the full story
December 29, 2022 // Spirited union campaigns at coffeehouses, on university campuses and at companies such as Starbucks and REI that have long positioned themselves as progressive have brought a new generation of workers into labor's fold. Whether they stay will likely depend on their career prospects in other fields and how they fare in collective bargaining.
Who Says Unions And ESOPs Don’t Mingle?
December 21, 2022 // Plus, with vigorous ESOP-related activity in Congress and state legislatures, I stand by my prediction that this will be the Decade of the ESOPs. In 2022, three major bills delivered significant incentives for existing and future ESOPs. They include the National Defense Appropriations Act, the Inflation Reduction Act that exempts ESOPS from a new 1% excise tax on corporate stock repurchases, and a measure signed in August strengthening the U.S. semiconductor industry that singles out employee-owned companies and associations for targeted support.
Home Depot workers vote against unionizing U.S. store
November 7, 2022 // Home Depot Workers United sought to unionize to address concerns regarding wages, staffing and training, said Vincent Quiles, interim president of Home Depot Workers United and a receiving associate at Home Depot. The independent union in mid-October filed an unfair labor practices charge against the retailer for engaging in unlawful surveillance and interrogating workers at the Philadelphia location, according to Home Depot Workers United. Home Depot said it will cooperate with the NLRB in the investigation and is confident it has not committed the alleged violations, according to a spokesperson.
Trader Joe’s United’s first loss is further proof that unionizing isn’t easy
November 2, 2022 // Ananya Bhattacharya Mon, October 31, 2022 at 4:43 AM·3 min read Three months into its unionizing efforts, Trader Joe’s United has lost its winning streak. At a Trader Joe’s store in Brooklyn, workers on Oct. 28 voted 94 to 66 against joining the independent union, which represents employees at two other stores in Massachusetts and in Minnesota.
New ‘Striketober’ looms as US walkouts increase amid surge in union activity
September 26, 2022 // According to the labor action tracker at Cornell University, strikes in 2022 so far have significantly outpaced strike activity in 2021, with 180 strikes involving 78,000 workers in the first six months of 2022, compared with 102 strikes involving 26,500 workers in the first six months of 2021. The tracker recorded 41 strikes that started between 15 August and 15 September 2022, involving 35,250 workers.
Sparked by Pandemic Stresses, Unionizing Workers Seek Respect and a Place at the Table
August 18, 2022 // Throughout the pandemic, we were called ‘essential workers,’ yet we weren’t given the wages, benefits or respect that being ‘essential’ would denote.” Nick Kalm, John Logan, Labor and Employment Studies Department at San Francisco State University
Opinion: Can Unions Still Transform the Workplace?
August 18, 2022 // Starbucks workers across Buffalo created a citywide account on the GroupMe app, which enabled them to track corporate executives as they moved from café to café—and alert one another to be prepared. “What you’re seeing is organizing evolving with the times,” Eisen says. Soon after the successful union vote at her store, Eisen hopped on a Zoom call with workers at a Starbucks café in Mesa, Arizona, to share what she had learned with her counterparts on the other side of the nation. Bill Fletcher Jr, geriatric millennial, Shaun Richman, Jane McAlevey, people of color,