Striking graduate school student workers at Columbia University ended their labor action Jan. 7 with an agreement that includes a 7 to 11 percent raise for workers with annual contracts based upon the length of their appointments and an hourly wage boost from the previous $15/hour to $21/hour. The annual salaries of doctoral candidates on […]
The Washington DC bookstore group, Politics and Prose, which has 54 employees in three locations in the Capital, has voluntarily recognized Local 400 of the United Food and Commercial Workers as the bargaining agent for its employers, the union and owners announced in a joint statement. “We look forward to working with the union,” said […]
What a difference a good strong union makes. Particularly a progressive one that always keeps the needs of its rank-and-file members as its number-one priority. A most recent example of that difference is the work of the 60,000 member Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas, Nevada, representing the city’s workers in the hotels and casinos. […]
After more than nine months of a historic strike, nurses at Massachusetts St. Vincent Hospital, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, reached agreement on a contract calling for important improvements in staffing that will provide safer, high-quality nursing care for their patients. The strike was sparked by the impossibly overworked conditions of nurses at the […]
After repeated and determined efforts to unionize its warehouse workers in the face of stubborn intimidating tactics by the company, Amazon has finally come to a settlement with the National Labor Relations Board to keep its hands off workers attempts to freely organize into unions. In the settlement, reached just before Christmas, Amazon agreed to […]
In what the union described as a landmark agreement, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employers (IATSE) reached a three-year agreement with motion picture and television producers in October. The agreement affects 60,000 film and television workers in 36 IATSE locals across the country. IATSE member posting a message on the car of a union […]
After a prolonged strike that lasted 2 ½ months, workers at four Kellogg cereal plants ratified a new contract just a few days before Christmas and voted to return to work. The contract, negotiated through the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Union, will sharply limit the “unfair two-tier wage system” that had only […]
Most people think of unions as benefitting their members with higher pay and better working conditions. But it has long been known that the benefit of unions go far beyond that – affecting the well-being of their communities and the entire country. A recent report by analysts at the Economic Policy Institute documents the benefits […]
Despite the very small number of workers involved, the Starbucks store in Buffalo, NY made history Dec. 9 when it became the first one in the Starbucks chain to vote to unionize. The workers voted 19-8 to be represented by Workers United in an election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board. Starbucks, the biggest […]
With the singing of “Solidarity Forever” occasionally ringing out on their picket line, some 3,000 graduate school workers at Columbia University are on strike in their quest to obtain a fair contact. As many of the university’s faculty members walked out of their classes in a show of support on Dec. 6, the strikers are […]
