NYC RETIREES WIN BIG VICTORY

Photo AMANDA SALAZAR

New York City retirees won major victory earlier this month when a state Supreme Court judge permanently enjoined the city from switching retirees from their traditional Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan. Retirees have been fighting this change that the city is trying to force down their throats for two years.

The scheme is the result of several years of secret negotiations between city administrations and the Municipal Labor Committee representing the unions of workers employed by New York City. Although the MLC is composed of many unions, the two largest ones, the United Federation of Teachers and DC 37 of AFSCME dominate the body. Several other unions have opposed the measure but they have been steamrolled over by the Big Two.

However, rank-and-file committees of the unions, including UFT and DC37 members have spung up, called rallies, testified at City Council meetings, and gained wide support in opposition to the change. They have disputed that the city’s claim that it will save the city $600 million. They have pointed to the fact that there would not be a problem if New York hadn’t tried to pay for a city workers’ promised raises several years ago by dipping into the health care trust fund, thereby pitting retirees against current workers. And they have pointed to a number of ways the city can come up with the money without penalizing retirees.

Ignoring all the protests and the blatant shortcomings in the enforced changes, Mayor Adams’ administration earlier this year signed a contract with Aetna, the giant health care company, to implement the plan. While the city claims that the plan is the same or better than their current one (these advantage plans often offer sweetening items like free gym memberships) they are profit-making companies that are notorious for saving money by requiring many medical procedures and doctor’s visits to get prior approval for payment, which is often denied. They also require you to choose only from panel of their doctors, which would require many retirees to leave the doctors of their choice for someone else. Not to mention that Aetna has been cited by the federal government as one of the leading insurance company perpetrators of Medicare fraud that has bilked the government out of billions of dollars.

The decision by Supreme Court Judge  Lyle Frank made permanent his temporary stay issued a month earlier. He noted that the city had repeatedly promised retirees that by forgoing other benefits when they were active workers, they would be assured of full Medicare and paid medigap coverage free of co-pays and with only a relatively small deductible when they retired. He ruled that the city could not renege on this commitment.

The ruling has thrown the entire plan onto hold, a temporary victory, since a spokesperson for Mayor Adams said he plans to appeal. If the judge’s ruling is upheld it will be a big win for the 250,000 NYC retirees in their two-year fight to preserve the health care they deserve.

The attempt by the city to make this move is part of a larger push by government administrations and legislative bodies to disembody Medicare, one of the federal government’s greatest achievements, and turn it over to the multi-billion dollar insurance industry, further subordinating the health of Americans to greedy bottom line corporate profits.

Labor Start. 8/11

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NEWLY SPIRITED UAW LAYS OUT BARGAINING DEMANDS TO AUTO MAKERS

UAW is threatening to strike as early as Sept. 15 at any of the Big Three automakers if their contract demands are not met. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya/File / AP Images)

The Big Three auto manufacturers – GM, Ford and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) are facing a different kind of union leadership as negotiations began on a new contract this year. With some of the old leaders now in jail, guilty of embezzling union funds and a referendum two years ago that mandated direct elections of the leadership, the auto giants are now confronted by a leadership with close ties to the rank-and-file members and a renewed determination to wage a strong fight for their interests.

“The UAW is back in the fight,” said newly elected President Shawn Fain, speaking for the new spirit in the union. as he delivered the UAW bargaining demands August 1. While speaking, he was framed by two images in the background. One displayed headlines from the previous week, when the Big Three reported their quarterly earnings, which included soaring profits. The other image detailed how UAW members have lost ground over the past two decades. For instance, current starting wages are $18.04, lower than the rate workers received in 2007, which amounted to $19.60 when adjusted for inflation.

“When you put these two images together, they paint a damning picture of what’s happening,” said Fain. “Not just in our industry but across the economy: the rich are getting richer while the rest of us are getting left behind.”

The current contract, a master agreement for the three auto companies large plants – GM’s Factory Zero Detroit-Hamtramck Assembly Center, Stellantis’s Sterling Heights Assembly plant and Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne – cover some 150,000 workers. It expires September 14.

Among the union’s negotiating priorities presented to the companies are: strong double-digit percentage increases in pay, ending a two-tier wage system, converting all temporary workers into permanent positions and placing strict limits on the future use of such workers, restoring cost of living allowances (COLA) and retiree health care benefits conceded by workers in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession, increasing pension benefits for current retirees as well as ensuring all workers receive defined-benefit pensions, and bolstering paid time off.

Fain compared the compensation of auto executives with that of auto workers. GM’s CEO Mary Barra drew compensation of $29 million last year while the starting pay at the GM joint venture Ultium Cells battery plant in Ohio gets only $16.50 an hour. “Our members are working sixty, seventy, even eighty hours a week just to make ends meet,” he said. “That’s not a living; it’s barely surviving, and it needs to stop.”

One of UAW’s big concerns are the new joint venture plants producing batteries for electric vehicles, which were not covered by the union’s contract with the Big Three and have much lower pay and benefits.

When one company, claiming that union demands would nor make it competitive, made an offer that wasn’t even in the same ball park with union proposals, Fain symbolically tossed it in the trash.

As the situation heats up with the threat of an industry strike pending and tensions rising, major parts of the American economy that supply the auto makers are holding their breaths. A strike could severely affect their businesses.

Stay tuned.

Jacobin, 8/4; Fortune, 8/9

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TEAMSTERS WIN MAJOR GAINS IN NEW UPS CONTRACT

In what first impressions indicate to be a major win for Teamsters Union drivers at UPS, the company and the union came to a tentative agreement July 25 on a five-year contract, avoiding a massive strike that would have had a major impact on the US economy. The 325,000 UPS drivers had voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike on August 1, the date the old contract ended, if an agreement on a new one was not reached by that date.

After negotiations broke down in early July, prospects were pessimistic about avoiding a strike until they resumed with a major company concession on part-time drivers July 25. The agreement was sealed a few hours later. The new agreement still has to be ratified by the Teamsters Union membership, a process that will take several weeks.

“We demanded the best contract in the history of UPS, and we got it,” the Teamsters president, Sean M. O’Brien, said in a statement. “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.” For the first time in Teamster’s Union history, rank-and-file members served on the union’s negotiating committee.

According to a union statement, the new contract provisions include:

  • Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023. Over the length of the contract, wage increases will total $7.50 per hour.
  • Existing part-timers will immediately be raised up to no less than $21 per hour, a big boost from then current minimum of $16.20 for part-timers now. and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment would still receive all new general wage increases. Part timers currently comprise nearly half ofm UPS drivers.
  • General wage increases for part-time workers will be double the amount obtained in the previous UPS Teamsters contract — and existing part-time workers will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.
  • Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour. They currently make $42 on average after four years.
  • Current UPS Teamsters working part-time would receive longevity wage increases of up to $1.50 per hour on top of new hourly raises, compounding their earnings.
  • New part-time hires at UPS would start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.
  • An end to the unfair two-tier wage system and all drivers now entitled to seniority protection.
  • Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.
  • All UPS Teamsters would receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.
  • No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers would keep one of two workweek schedules and could not be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.
  • The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work.
  • No concessions from the rank-and-file.

The contract, if ratified,  is a big win for the new teamster leadership, which is closer to the ßrank-and-file members, that ousted the old guard in a direct election of the entire membership last year. Previously, the leadership was chosen by delegates at national conventions.

Teamsters Union Website, 7/25; NY Times, 7/25

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HUMAN COMPASSION, HELL! NEW TEXAS LAW SAYS NOT FOR WORKERS

This one is hard to believe. In Austin and Dallas, Texas, ordinances had mandated 10-minute breaks for construction workers every four hours. These workers, 60 percent of whom are Latino, mostly work outdoors, often in blistering Texas heat. The 10-minute breaks allow them to rest, drink water their bodies have lost, and generally take a brief respite from the heat. A simple act of humanity, yes?

But the Republican state legislature and Republican Governor Greg Abbott say no! According to them, it is just another one of those “hodgepodge of onerous and burdensome regulations” on Texas businesses. A measure passed by the legislature and recently signed into law by Abbott, to take effect in September, nullifies the Austin and Dallas ordinances and prevents any other local governments from passing similar protections for workers.

Days later, a 35-year-old utility lineman who was working in 100-degree temperature to restore power in Marshall, Texas, died of heat exhaustion. Unions and civil rights groups have been enraged by the new law, warning that it will cause more heat-related deaths and illnesses in a state that already tallies the highest number of worker deaths due to high temperatures.

“In the midst of a record-setting heatwave, I could not think of a worse time for this governor or any elected official who has any, any, kind of compassion, to do this,” said David Cruz, the communications director for League of United Latin American Citizens National (Lulac), a Latino civil rights group. “This administration is incrementally trying to move us backwards into a dark time in this nation when plantation owners and agrarian mentalities prevailed.”

A simple question could be asked of Abbott and the Texas lawmakers: “Are you guys human?’

The Guardian, 6/26

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LABOR STIRRINGS ARE IN THE AIR

For many years labor unions have been in a “long slide,” declining from the 1950’s when more than one in every three workers belonged to unions to only 11.6 percent in 2021. There are many factors responsible for this, writes William E. Scheuerman in his book A New American Labor Movement. Among them are the offshoring of jobs hastened by the trade agreements that saw millions of American manufacturing jobs disappear as corporations moved plants to low wage areas around the world, automation, corporate consolidation and its all-out war on labor.

Fred Wright cartoon courtesy of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE)

But a part of the blame rests on unions themselves, he writes, “recognizing but not placing major culpability on factors such as business unionism, ineffective organizing techniques, lack of militancy, overly bureaucratic leaders who are unresponsive to their members, and emphasis on electoral politics rather than organizing.”

An example of the latter is labor’s failure to extract some major quid pro quos from Democratic politicians even when Democrats had large majorities in Congress and a Democratic president. As a result, the Taft-Hartley Act 0f 1947 is still on the books. Section 148 of  that law allows states to outlaw the union shop, resulting in  some workers gaining the benefits of union members without joining the union and paying dues. The act has encouraged union busting since its inception, throwing quicksand in the path of union organizing. By quietly acquiescing instead of actively opposing the law and demanding that politicians commit to repealing it, unions have been shooting themselves in the foot for more than 75 years.

But there are signs of stirring in the ranks of labor. Among younger workers and women workers a new militancy is growing as a majority of Americans today look favorably upon unions, the highest number  in the past 60 years. According to the National Labor Relations Board, in just one year, from 2021 to 2022, there has been a 60 percent increase in union elections with 77 percent resulting in a union victory.

And this stirring among rank and file workers is beginning to ripple upward. Two major international unions, the Teamsters and the Auto Workers unions, have replaced their top leaderships in the past year with more militant leaders who are more closely connected to their membership. A sign of this is the United Auto Workers’ withholding its endorsement of Biden and national Democrats, insisting on a promise from them that the money now pouring in to the manufacture of electric vehicles go to companies that hire union workers and pay union wages and benefits to its workers. While very few doubt that the union will eventually endorse and campaign for Biden, considering the terrible alternative, the Auto Workers union is letting the Democrats know that they can no longer be taken for granted.

Dollars and Sense, 5/23, pages 4, 42-45

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CORPORATIONS OVER WORKING PEOPLE: SCOTUS DOES IT AGAIN

“Fred Wright cartoon courtesy of United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE)”.

“The teamsters will strike any employer, when necessary, no matter the size or the depth of their pockets,” was the defiant response of Teamster Union President Sean O’Brien to the latest Supreme Court decision that sharply impedes the ability of labor to conduct strikes. “The political hacks at the Supreme Court have again voted in favor of corporations over working people,” he declared. “Make no mistake – this ruling has everything to do with giving companies more power to hobble workers if any attempt is made to fight back against a growing system of corruption…. American workers must remember that their right to strike has not been taken away. All workers, union and nonunion alike, will forever have the right to withhold their labor.”

O’Brien’s sharp comments were the Teamsters’ reaction to the Court’s ruling June 1 saying that employers could sue unions in state courts for damages to their goods during a strike, overturning years of legal precedent that the National Labor Relations Board had the initial jurisdiction in the case.

The case, Glacier Northwest v. International Brotherhood of Teamsters, involved unionized members of a concrete mixing and pouring company. The company and the union were in negotiations for a contract when negotiations broke down and the union called a strike. The workers, who had reported to work that day, had already poured wet concrete in their trucks. The workers took precautions to keep the trucks running to prevent the hardened cement from damaging the trucks, meeting legal standards for taking responsible steps to avoid harming the employer’s property. The lost concrete on the trucks simply amounted to lost spoilage of a product for which unions have not been held legally responsible.

Nevertheless, Glacier Northwest sued the union for damage to the cement. In cases like this, the National Labor Relations Board is the adjudicator in the dispute. And in fact, the NLRB general counsel had already found that by preventing damage to the trucks, the workers had taken the necessary steps to prevent harm to the employer’s property and that the union was, in legalese, “arguably protected” from spoilage to the product that normally often occurs during a strike. After all, the whole purpose of a strike is to cause the employer economic harm and pressure him to negotiate a satisfactory contract, providing there is not malicious vandalism to his property.

Ignoring precedent and facts in the case, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the eight justice majority, said that the union workers were responsible for the damage to the cement and that the state court in Washington should hear the company’s lawsuit. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the lone dissenter. The other two liberal justices joined in the majority opinion and there is speculation that they did so to obtain a bargained compromise to avoid a much harsher judgment against unions.

Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, writing for himself and Justice Gorsuch, said that the court should reconsider whether the NLRB should even have initial jurisdiction in such cases. Justice Alito went even further, questioning the NLRB’s legal right to decide labor cases.

The ruling is only the latest in a string of decisions in favor of corporations against unions issued by this court in the past several years. A decision in 2018, contrary to the National Labor Relations Act, said that companies could prohibit workers from collectively bringing legal actions against employers. Also in 2018, the court ruled that public sector unions could not require nonmembers to pay fees for the benefits that the union’s bargaining had gained for them. Three years later, the court did it again, deciding that a California law that allowed organizers for the Farm Workers union access to the employer’s property to speak to workers during their lunch time and breaks, was unconstitutional.

The latest ruling, while not prohibiting strikes, makes it more difficult for unions, since they will have to consider the economic effects of company lawsuits and the resulting uncertainty of court decisions, particularly with a Supreme Court biased in favor of employers. Often, it is just the threat of a strike that helps unions win concessions. Since unions would now hesitate to use the strike weapon, “without the threat of a strike, you have little leverage in negotiations,” commented Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union.


NY Times, 6/1, also see Elie Mystal’s This is not the End of the Supreme Court’s War on Labor in The Nation, 6/2

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LABOR SEES VICTORY AT BLUE BIRD AS A “BELLWETHER” FOR THE SOUTH

Blue Bird, which builds electric school buses, has benefited from a large infusion of federal money. Credit…Matthew Pearson/WABE, via Associated Press

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 optimism about prospects for the region  in the wake of a landmark union victory at Blue Bird, a factory in Fort Valley, Georgia, that builds electric school buses. The surprise vote in which the workers voted 697-to-435 to join the United Steelworkers was supervised by the National Labor Relations Board.

“This is just a bellwether for the future,” predicted AFLCIO President Liz Shuler, “particularly in the South, where working people have been ignored.”

Blue Bird, a company that employs 1,400 workers, has been the recipient of $500 million in federal funds for aid to companies specifically to combat climate change. In building electric school buses to replace diesel school buses, Blue Bird qualified for a part of the $370 billion included in the Inflation Reduction Act for clean energy to combat climate change. But the aid also came with the proviso that companies must remain neutral in any union organizing drive in their plants and to voluntarily recognize the union based on a show of majority support. Further, no federal money may be used to oppose a union election. These provisions are important aids to unions seeking bargaining recognition from employers. And although the union charged that the company had violated some of the law, it srill aided the Steelworkers Union in its victory at Blue Bird.

The union hopes it will be just the beginning in the South with new manufacturers of electric vehicles, including foreign automakers like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Hyundai moving in, partly because of its history of hostility to unions.

NY Times print edition, 5/13; NY Times online edition, 5/12

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TEAMSTERS BEGIN FIGHT TO UNIO0NIZE AMAZON DELIVERY TRUCKERS

Amazon relies on some 2,500 delivery service partners (DSPs) to deliver packages. The Teamsters are attempting to organize DSP workers, posing a challenge to the company’s business model.  AP Photo:Steven Senne

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 announced a union contract with the company that upped wages from $19.75 to $30 an hour by September. They also won several paid holidays and did not have to accept a no-strike clause.

The union victory represents what union activists see as a possible beginning to the unionization of Amazon contractors. It could also raise a possible legal challenge to Amazon’s use of these contractors to claim that they bore no responsibility for bargaining with the drivers since they are workers for another company, or in the case of small truckers, independent contractors not employees.

Amazon however is fighting back with its usual union-busting tactics. When the union drive began at BTS, Amazon took steps to cancel its contract with BTS, fearful that the union drive would spread to other truckers, raising its costs for shipment.

Stay tuned.

American Prospect, 5/4

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‘PENCILS DOWN’ AS MOVIE & TV WRITERS GO ON STRIKE

Writers Guild of America members walk the picket line on the first day of their strike in front of Sony Pictures on Tuesday in Culver City.(Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

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 re-runs.

The big issue is the rapid growth of online platforms like Netflix. The union points to the fact that minimum pay, affecting a large number of guild members, and residuals (the money they get for re-runs) have not kept up with the rapid technological change, They are demanding higher minimum pay and streaming residuals.

On the first day of the strike, hundreds of picketing writers lined the streets in New York outside offices of NBC Universal and major studios in Hollywood. They carried signs saying, “Pencils Down! No Contract, No Scripts” The last writers strike in 2007 lasted nearly three months.

NY Times, 4/30; 5/1   Los Angeles Times, 5/2

 

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HEALTH & SAFETY RE-IMERGE AS BIG JOB ISSUES

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 AFL-CIO, in 2020 4,764 workers were killed on the job, with an average of 340 dying each day due to employer neglect of hazardous working conditions. 120,000 died from occupational related diseases and 705 lost their lives to workplace violence.

The issue has risen again in the wake of revelations of the rising number of injuries suffered by workers, many of them illegal immigrants, as employers flout the rules and OSHA, whose funding have been repeatedly cut by Congress, lacks the resources to enforce those rules.

And a new element in the mix is the recent upsurge in the illegal employment of children in unsafe or unhealthy jobs like work in meatpacking plants and operating dangerous machinery. As previously reported on this page and in the NY Times (2/25), children as young as 12 are now working at dangerous jobs around the country, some late at night at machinery like fast-moving pulleys and gears that have torn off fingers and ripped open a woman’s scalp. The practice of employing child labor today is being aided and abetted in a number of states, like Arkansas and Iowa, which have passed laws lifting many restrictions on the employment of children.

One illustration of the recent attention to job-related illness and death is the upsurge of a new version of black lung disease among coal miners in Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. According recent data from OSHA, in Kentucky and West Virginia 1 out of every 8 miners, many only in their forties and fifties “are struggling to breathe.” It’s a sharp increase from the 1 out of 30 just a decade ago. But the dust that they’re breathing comes not primarily from coal. It’s from silica dust which is 20 times more toxic than coal. The dust is caused by having to drill through layers of silica-laden rock as the old coal veins yield less and miners have to drill deeper and deeper to access the coal.

The dust clings to their clothes and parts of their bodies and eventually gets into their lungs, causing chronic pulmonary diseases like bronchitis and lung cancer, and eventually killing them. And as mentioned above, with OSHA’s enforcement ability severely hindered by a lack of resources, mine operators have been flouting health and safety regulations for decades.

What is clearly needed is pressure to push for the enactment of strictly enforced laws for the protection of workers’ lives. It’s a factor in the renewed organizing drives for unions that can negotiate the enforcement of these rules by management along with the demand for higher wages and better working conditions. For what is more basic than the very lives of people who do the work.

NY Times print edition, 2/25. Work Bites, 5/1, In These Times, May/23

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