Posts tagged United Electrical Workers
A History of Everything Leftist Unionism: The Old Left and the Reds
March 10, 2025 // American labor radicalism has come a long way from Soviet agents in the Congress of Industrial Organizations through the UAW-funded Students for a Democratic Society to today’s SEIU purple-shirted demonstrators and red-shirted UAW anti-anti-Hamasniks. As Big Labor has declined, what independence the labor movement had from the progressive Left has diminished to the point where, with rare divergences, it effectively has ceased to exist. The causes of the Long Decline are many, and the causes of Big Labor’s leftism are also many, ranging from financial incentive structures of union officials to the structure of collective bargaining. Today, organized labor is a full member of the Everything Leftist coalition, not just in economic issues and labor organizing but also in social and foreign policy.
Dartmouth Ph.D. Student Hits Graduate Student Union With Federal Charges for Illegal Religious Discrimination
October 3, 2024 // A series of rulings by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) during the Obama and Biden Administrations gave union officials the ability to seize monopoly bargaining power over graduate students, and at private institutions like Dartmouth, unionized graduate students are subject to federal private sector labor law. Such law allows union officials to force those under their power to pay dues or fees as a condition of employment in a state like New Hampshire (where Dartmouth is located) that lacks Right to Work protections.
Can Distributed Organizing Unionize Millions?
September 17, 2024 // Together with similarly bottom-up union campaigns like Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and the reformed UAW’s organizing across Southern automakers, EWOC has demonstrated the viability of a new strategy of seeding unionization efforts, rather than passively waiting for workers to reach out (“hot-shopping”) or exclusively organizing pre-chosen workplaces (“strategic targeting”). Along these lines, Svoboda describes EWOC’s proactive efforts to provide organizing tools to as many workers as possible as “planting seeds of worker power.”
Jewish MIT Graduate Students Force Anti-Israel Union to Abandon Discriminatory Demands for Dues Payment
August 21, 2024 // everal Jewish graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have prevailed in their legal cases to cut off financial support to the MIT Graduate Student Union (GSU), an affiliate of the United Electrical (UE) union. The students, all of whom received free legal assistance from National Right to Work Foundation staff attorneys, objected to GSU union officials’ anti-Israel activities, particularly their support for the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.
Commentary: Call for End to Israel Aid Is More Proof Organized Labor Is Progressivism and Progressivism Is Organized Labor
July 24, 2024 // The UAW called for a cease-fire in Gaza in December of last year, with some UAW locals calling for one mere days after the Hamas attack on October 7. The UAW, in particular, has a large contingent of higher-education workers in its ranks, with college campuses being hotbeds of anti-Israel activism. The UAW represents about the same number of workers at the University of California system as it does at General Motors. The UAW Arab Caucus, which also supports the BDS movement, called for the union to change its stance from calling for a cease-fire only to also calling for a halt to all U.S. military aid back in February.
Jewish MIT Graduate Students Slam BDS-Linked Union with Federal Discrimination Charges
March 29, 2024 // The university students object to the union’s anti-Semitic advocacy, including the union’s endorsement of the anti-Israel “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions” (BDS) movement. Each of the EEOC charges state that the union is “discriminating against me based on a failure to accommodate my religious beliefs and cultural heritage” and “discriminating against me based on national origin, race, cultural heritage & identity.” The students sent individual letters asserting their religious objections to supporting the union and asserting their rights to religious accommodations, but union officials brazenly rejected each request and continue to demand dues from the students.
Labor unions are making unprecedented calls for a ceasefire in Gaza
January 24, 2024 // However, leadership of some large unions like the AFL-CIO and SAG-AFTRA have remained silent, seeing the issue as beyond their purview, risky to support, or too split among their members. Others have released statements in support of Israel, such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten. But a number of AFT locals and other teachers’ unions have supported ceasefire resolutions themselves, revealing a schism between leadership and rank-and-file members. While there has been considerable support for the ceasefire resolutions, union members involved in organizing for Palestine say that they must go further to support efforts like Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) and not be complicit in the abuses against Palestinians by Israel, supported by U.S. tax dollars. “Just the ceasefire declaration, if there’s nothing more, if it doesn’t have any teeth, is not enough,” Saba said. Unions have a long history of standing for progressive causes internationally, from “opposing fascism in WWII to mobilizing against apartheid South Africa and the CONTRA war,” cited UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla in a UAW press release. Over the decades, labor has stood up against World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War.
IU faculty votes to support grad students unionizing
June 2, 2022 // Grad students are seeking fee changes, improved stipends and union recognition.