Daniel Flippo, regional director of the United Steelworkers of America’s Southeastern district, was very happy with the vote. “For too long,” he said “corporations cynically viewed the South as a place where they could suppress wages and working conditions because they believed they could keep workers from unionizing.” But union officials are beginning to show […]
Rose Rosenfeld was just 17 years old. Born in a small town near Vienna, she had emigrated with her family to the United States in 1909 and settled in New York. She found work at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company who ran a factory in the top three floors of the 10-story building at 23-29 Washington […]
Amazon often contracts out its delivery services to trucking contractors. Most of them, like Amazon, are non-unionized. But the beginnings of change are in the air. On April 24, Amazon delivery drivers at Battle-Tested Strategies, a southern California company contractor, announced that they had joined Local 396 of the Teamsters Union. A week later, they […]
The big labor news so-far this month is the walkout of 11,500 movie and TV writers, members of the Writers Guild of America after their negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down. The strike was immediately felt in New York and Hollywood with late night TV shows cancelled or showing […]
STARBUCKS TRYING TO DECERTIFY 3 UNION STORES Starbucks, which has been using all kinds of tricks, legal, borderline, and down-dirty, to combat the union organizing drive in its stores, now is possibly involved in a new one. At three Starbucks locations where workers have voted for the Starbucks Workers United union, a worker has filed […]
In 2015, Carlos Moncayo, an Ecuadorian immigrant construction worker, was crushed to death on his job of helping to build a rooftop restaurant in New York City. His death made little news because on-the-job deaths, despite rules promulgated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, are a common occurrence in the country. According to the […]
The faculty at Rutgers University ended their week-long strike April 15 after the three unions representing them reached a “framework” of an agreement with the school. Students at the school were slated to return to their classes on Monday, April 17. Rutgers, the flagship in the New Jersey state university system, has 67,000 enrolled students. […]
America’s corporations spent over $400 million on retaining companies whose specialty is union-busting, a recent report from the Economic Policy Institute reveals. Amid the rising tide of union activity and organizing campaigns has come a backlash from employers who are fighting union organizing with an arsenal of weapons, some legal, some bordering on illegality, and […]
FORDHAM GRAD SCHOOL WORKERS STAGE 3-DAY STRIKE A three-day strike beginning April 23 at the two campuses of New York’s Fordham University has resulted in the cancellation of hundreds of classes on those three days. The strike was called by the Fordham Graduate Student Workers Union after a series of fruitless negotiating sessions. The union […]
In a close runoff election, Shawn Fain, an electrician and UAW member for over two decades, defeated the incumbent Ray Curry and has become the new president of the United Auto Workers. The defeat of the “Administration Caucus” that has run one of the country’s major unions for some 70 years marks a big upheaval […]
