News / unions
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1 min read
The Ref Works for Management Now
Read more . . . →The agency that exists to protect your right to organize just got handed to the people who spent their careers making sure you can’t. Senate confirmed two Trump picks to the National Labor Relations Board on August 7th, locking in a 3-1 Republican majority. One of them is a former chief labor counsel for Boeing — yes, the Boeing currently under investigation for retaliating against workers who reported safety defects. Trump already fired the general counsel who was actually enforcing the law. A federal judge ruled he illegally fired the board chair. The administration shrugged and kept going. The NLRB...
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1 min read
The Country That Invented Labor Day Is on a Watchlist Now
Read more . . . →The International Trade Union Confederation put the United States on its Global Rights Watchlist this year. First time ever. The category is “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC represents 200 million workers across 169 countries, and they looked at a nation that stripped collective bargaining from over a million federal employees by executive order and said yeah, that belongs on the list. The same kind of list the US waves around when it wants labor provisions in a trade deal. The ITUC called it “perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history.” Not one union. Not...
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2 min read
They Threatened Him, Interrogated Him, Then Fired Him — But Sure, The Timing Was A Coincidence
Read more . . . →On Tuesday the Fifth Circuit handed down its ruling in the Starbucks union case out of Sylmar, California, and you have to read it twice to believe the shape of it. The court looked at what the company did to a worker named Untaran during the 2022 organizing drive and agreed, on the record, that Starbucks broke the law. It agreed a manager illegally threatened him over the union. It agreed he was illegally interrogated about it. The judges signed their names to all of that. And then the same worker got fired, and the court turned around and said...
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1 min read
34,000 NYC Building Workers Are About to Remind Manhattan Who Actually Runs It
Read more . . . →Thirty-four thousand NYC doormen, porters, and supers are gearing up to strike because the real estate industry — the one that made billions turning housing into a speculative asset — can’t stomach paying them a fair contract. These workers make about $62k a year in a city where rent on a shoebox is $4,000 a month. They keep your building running, accept your packages, fix your pipes, and somehow haven’t burned the whole thing down yet. The Realty Advisory Board’s counter-offer? Try to gut their healthcare and strip legal aid from immigrant members. Classic. If they walk out on April...
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1 min read
The People Who Make America's Bullets Can't Afford Groceries
Read more . . . →1,350 workers at Olin Winchester’s Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Kansas City walked off the job Saturday morning. These are the people who literally manufacture the bullets for the U.S. military — the actual supply chain behind every “support the troops” bumper sticker — and the company couldn’t be bothered to offer them a raise that keeps up with inflation. The workers cited garbage wages, forced overtime, and zero work-life balance. Olin posted $1.8 billion in revenue last year. But sure, the problem is that workers are too greedy. This is the part that never stops being darkly funny....
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1 min read
Meatpackers Are Striking for the First Time in 40 Years and Nobody's Talking About It
Read more . . . →Meatpacking workers are on strike for the first time in four decades. These are people standing in freezing plants for ten hours a day dismembering animals at line speeds that would make an ER doctor flinch, and they finally said enough. Meanwhile the companies posting record margins on your $9 ground beef can’t be bothered to negotiate in good faith. The last time meatpackers walked out, Reagan was president. It took forty years of getting ground down for these workers to hit the breaking point again. And where’s the coverage? Wall Street gets a live ticker for every quarter-point rate...
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