Posts tagged union membership
OPINION: L.A. Teacher’s Fight With Union Appealed To Supreme Court
April 23, 2024 // Laird refused to dismiss his lawsuit, and with good reason. Because his case is about more than the return of his money. In fact, Laird is donating the entire amount he received from UTLA to a nonprofit group that helps disadvantaged students in the Los Angeles area. When judges at both the lower court level and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the union, the Freedom Foundation filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court to weigh in. Glenn Laird’s case is about a judicial acknowledgment and vindication of his First Amendment rights by a federal judge. As long as unions can cut checks using their members’ dues dollars to make lawsuits disappear, judges will never have the opportunity to rule on the actual constitutional issues, rendering the First Amendment and Janus decision meaningless. “Hopefully the Supreme Court will find my case worthy of making a ruling,” concluded Laird. “Janus set the stage, but now we need to build on that precedent so unions and lower court judges don’t continue to ignore the Supremes.”
Analysis: UAW membership drops significantly in Michigan
April 10, 2024 // The UAW is down to 370,239 active, dues-paying members, a drop of approximately13,000 from last year. The union had more than 700,000 active members in 2002 before bottoming out at around 355,191 in 2010. This hasn’t hurt the union’s revenue, however. It took in $485 million last year, the most ever. Membership numbers are even worse for the assorted UAW branches in Michigan. They lost about 6,500 members during the strike year and are now down to 127,458. That’s a 5% drop.
Commentary Big Labor’s Decline and Left Turn: Membership Decline
March 23, 2024 //
Union membership in Illinois dropped by 27,000 workers in 2023
February 16, 2024 // Criticizing a new bill filed in the Illinois legislature that would require high schools to observe “Workplace Readiness Week,” Mailee Smith, the Illinois Policy Institute’s senior director of Labor Policy and staff attorney, said unions, particularly government unions, will do whatever they can to ensure they maintain that foothold over power. “With this bill, it is about getting the kids … early on to give them this information about unionization and this becomes part of their thought process and part of their worldview without any sort of opposite viewpoint being taught to them,” Smith said.
Connecticut Union Membership at Three-Year High
February 2, 2024 // Nonetheless, there remains a possibility that they adhere to the initial strategy of adopting California’s emission regulations, which dictate that no new gas-powered vehicles can be purchased by the year 2035, with targeted annual mandates of electric vehicles (EV) sales beginning with 2027 model-year cars. Yankee Institute will be closely monitoring the progress of this potential bill and will keep you updated as the saga unfolds.
ACTING US SECRETARY OF LABOR JULIE SU ISSUES STATEMENT ON ANNUAL UNION MEMBERSHIP DATA
January 29, 2024 // “The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported an increase in union membership, with 139,000 more union members in 2023 than in 2022, meaning this country has 400,000 more union workers than we had in 2021. The gains under the Biden-Harris administration underscore President Biden’s commitment to being the most pro-worker, pro-union president in history. “We have seen large private sector increases in unionization among health care workers, transportation and warehousing workers, and in educational services. These are workers who recognize that they have power and are organizing to use that power. Workers in health care, auto manufacturing, transportation, entertainment and more have delivered big wins at the bargaining table in the past year.
Dem Demands On Automakers Could Backfire On Their Own Climate Agenda And Americans’ Wallets, Experts Say
January 17, 2024 // “EV cars require fewer workers to build,” Higgins told the DCNF, noting that greater union membership in the auto industry is probably not possible with a corresponding transition to EVs. “That’s just a fact. But that may not matter as much as you might think to the UAW. Believe it or not, only about 150,000 of the UAW’s 400,000 or so members actually work for Detroit automakers. The union has branched out into other areas, such as education, and those areas are growing… So fewer auto workers will hurt the union but not kill it.”
Janus had a large impact on union membership, five years later
November 22, 2023 //
Opinion: Employees deserve to hear both sides
November 21, 2023 // Their conditions often also include the employer yielding to a card check election. Under this method of union organizing, workers don’t vote via a secret ballot in an NLRB-supervised election. Instead, they make public their position on whether a workplace should be organized through an open petition process that is all but run by the union itself. This leaves employees — who are already hearing only one side of the story — vulnerable to threats and additional pressure tactics. The most significant concern, however, is that neutrality agreements deprive employees of their right to all information during a union election. This means that crucial information, such as past union corruption scandals, remains hidden from employees. The result is an imbalanced, one-sided view of unionization that undermines the core principles of democracy.
City Workers Ditch Unions, Skip Dues, Following Supreme Court Ruling
November 2, 2023 // Pre-Janus, public sector employees had the option to explicitly opt out of union membership thanks to an earlier Supreme Court decision but still had to pay “agency fees” out of their paychecks to the unions. Union leaders, including New York City’s Municipal Labor Committee, warned before the decision of potentially large declines in union membership if signing up became optional. Any dramatic loss of dues-paying union members could threaten unions’ operations or even their ability to exist – a possibility on the horizon in some so-called “right to work” states.