Labor Notes

By Berit Ehmke and Yanira Wolf - Labor Notes, April 8, 2024

Public transit workers across Germany have broken new ground by coordinating our contracts—nearly all of them nationwide have expired over the last four months—and shutting down bus systems with strikes in 57 cities.

To add to the pressure, we’ve done something new for our union and for Germany: we’ve formed an alliance between local transport workers and climate activists, including the students who have been leading massive school walkouts.

The devastating effects of climate change are already rocking Germany: major heat waves, flooding, and water shortages. A growing movement demanding climate action has made real headway—our energy and industrial sectors have almost halved their climate pollution over the past 30 years. But on transportation, our third-biggest source, we’ve made nearly zero progress.

To beat climate change we need more buses on the road. We’re building a movement to double bus service. After three decades of cuts and privatization, we need a major federal funding boost.

But these jobs have become so tough that most agencies have huge worker shortages. To make the climate impact real, we’ll also need to raise the floor for wages, breaks, and schedules—making this a good enough job that workers will sign on and stick around.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, April 5, 2024

Auto workers are gearing up to smash through anti-union bulwarks in Alabama and Tennessee.

In Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the only Volkswagen factory in the world without a union, votes will be counted April 19 as 4,300 workers who make the Atlas SUV and the ID.4 electric vehicle decide whether to join the United Auto Workers.

“We didn’t think things would happen so fast,” said VW worker Victor Vaughn.

Momentum spurred them forward. The organizing committee recruited 300 co-workers as election captains. “We have well over 90 percent coverage within the plant, every position, every line,” said Vaughn. “At that point we knew, ‘Yes, we’re where we need to be.’”

Next up will be Mercedes. Workers in Vance, Alabama, at one of only two nonunion Mercedes-Benz factories on the planet, filed for an election today; a vote is expected soon after the VW vote.

The 5,000 workers there make the highly profitable luxury GLE SUVs and the Maybach GLS, which retails for upwards of $170,000.

“You never know when a person goes inside a booth,” said Mercedes worker Jeremy Kimbrell. “Nobody’s watching, and the company’s got a month to scare the hell out of them. But I feel pretty good about the vote. Workers finally stood up for themselves and are ending the Alabama discount.”

More than 10,000 workers at 13 non-union carmakers across two dozen facilities nationwide have signed union cards since last November, when the UAW announced an ambitious goal to organize 150,000 workers at major non-union auto and battery plants.

That roughly mirrors the UAW’s existing Big 3 membership.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Network for Sustainability, March 8, 2024

Auto workers at a Toyota engine plant in Troy, Missouri, have signed up 30 percent of their 1,000 co-workers to join the United Auto Workers (UAW)—a first at Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, on the heels of the union’s announcements of organizing campaigns at Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz.

Workers at the plant just outside St. Louis build 2.6 million cylinder heads per year. Should they stop building them, it would cut off supplies for all of the company’s engine plants in North America. Toyota is still working to build up its supply of chips and other inventory, following pandemic lockdowns and global supply-chain snarls.

In the body of a vehicle, these cylinder heads are as essential as human lungs, controlling the flow of air and fuel into the combustion chamber, powering a vehicle’s performance on the road.

In a new video, “We Keep Toyota Running,” workers describe the steep cost at which that performance comes. “People say Toyota engines last forever,” a worker says in the video. “We know what makes it possible: our hands, our backs, our knees, our work. We carry the proof every day: injuries, surgeries, disabilities.”

By Schuyler Mitchell and Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, February 22, 2024

The smell of mold hit James “Lucky” Dugan the moment he walked into the plant.

Last fall, Dugan was one of thousands of union construction workers to arrive in small-town Glendale, Kentucky, to build a vast factory for Ford and SK On, a South Korean company. The plant, when completed, will make batteries for nearly a million electric pickup trucks each year.

When Dugan walked in, huge wooden boxes containing battery-making machines, largely shipped from overseas, were laid across the mile-long factory floor. Black streaks on those wooden boxes, plus the smell, immediately raised alarm bells for workers. But for months, those concerns were met with little remedy from the contractors hired by BlueOval to oversee construction.

Dugan and scores of others now believe they are in the midst of a health crisis at the site. “We don’t get sick pay,” Dugan said. “You’re sick, you’re out of luck.”

The BlueOval SK Battery Park, billed to open in 2025, is a banner project for President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a program of public subsidies and financing to companies moving away from fossil fuels. The Department of Energy has pledged to support the construction of three BlueOval plants in Tennessee and Kentucky with a $9.2 billion low-cost loan.

But under all the high-tech green fanfare, several construction workers, including some who wished to be anonymous, say the site has been gripped by mold and respiratory illness—medieval hazards that workers feel managers neglected in the pressure to quickly open the plant.

By Clara Marticorena and Julia Soul - Labor Notes, February 26, 2024

More than 1.5 million people took part in a general strike in Argentina on January 24 against a new president and his aggressive anti-union “reforms.”

Self-described “liberal-libertarian” Javier Milei, who won the November 22 presidential elections, is an economist who became popular as a panelist on a TV show. He advocated for ending the “privileges” of the “casta”—defined as corrupt politicians and social and union leaders taking advantage of “good people.”

With a new party, Freedom Advances (La Libertad Avanza), Milei won the votes of a range of people, from working-class people disappointed and angry with the incumbent Peronist government to the middle and ruling classes opposed to state intervention in the economy and income distribution.

His government’s new austerity program has already dealt a heavy blow to the pockets of working people. Days after he took office, Milei froze public workers’ wages, social assistance programs, and pensions, imposed a 118 percent devaluation of the Argentine peso, and increased tariffs for energy, public transport, and public services.

Real wages have plummeted nearly 15 percent. The government has also cut off food supplies to a lot of community organizations running “comedores comunitarios”: places where the unemployed and poor families can get some meals.

It seems that, for La Libertad Avanza, “the casta” is the working class and the poorest people, and its “privileges” are in fact labor and social rights.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, February 1, 2024

Auto workers at Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, have signed up more than 30 percent of their nearly 4,000 co-workers in an ambitious drive to unionize.

The Auto Workers (UAW) announced the organizing breakthrough with a new video, “Montgomery Can’t Wait,” where workers link the labor and civil rights movements: “Montgomery, the city where Rosa Parks sat down, and where thousands of Hyundai workers are ready to Stand Up.”

“There’s something about our fight to unionize being homegrown that makes it just that much sweeter,” said Quichelle Liggins, a 12-year quality inspector at Hyundai.

“All I can tell my people to do is be bold and intentional. Just like the leaders of the civil rights movement, we’re linking together one by one. One person had to say, ‘Hey, it's time for us to make a difference!’ And then several other people had to agree, and now we have a group of workers that feel the same way.”

Workers in this plant assemble the Santa Fe and Tucson SUVs, the Santa Cruz pickup truck, the Genesis GV70 luxury SUV, and the Electrified GV70.

They’re the third plant to reach the 30 percent milestone in the UAW’s new organizing push, just weeks after workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and on the heels of those at Tennessee’s Chattanooga Volkswagen plant in December.

The UAW announced Monday that more than 10,000 workers across 13 non-union plants have signed union cards since last November, when the union announced an ambitious goal to organize 150,000 autoworkers. That’s roughly the same number as are covered now under the Big Three contracts.

Once workers reach the threshold of 30 percent on signed union authorization cards, under the UAW’s rubric, they take their organizing public. At the 50 percent mark, they rally with their co-workers, families, neighbors, and community and union leaders, including UAW President Shawn Fain.

As soon as 70 percent of workers at a given plant sign cards, and their organizing committee has grown to include workers from every shift and job classification, they will demand voluntary recognition of their union. If the company refuses, the workers file for an election with the National Labor Relations Board.

By Alex Press - Jacobin, January 30, 2024

The United Auto Workers (UAW) keeps rolling on.

On Monday, the union announced that a combined ten thousand nonunion workers at two dozen plants across the United States have signed UAW cards since the union began its campaign to organize a sizable portion of the country’s nonunion auto sector, especially thirteen automakers: BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Subaru, Toyota, Volkswagen (VW), and Volvo, and electric vehicle (EV) producers Lucid, Rivian, and Tesla. The UAW estimates that the total workforce it’s targeting is around 150,000 people, roughly the same number as are covered by the union’s contracts with the “Big Three” Detroit automakers.

So ten thousand cards means the union has a long way to go. But coming less than ninety days after UAW members ratified the Big Three contracts following their hard-fought stand-up strike, it’s an encouraging milestone. Call it evidence that the union wasn’t bluffing when it said it was channeling resources into an effort to reverse the union’s decades-long decline, along with that of much of the rest of the labor movement.

“Our Stand-Up movement has caught fire among America’s autoworkers, far beyond the Big Three,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a statement on the announcement. “These workers are standing up for themselves, for their families, and for their communities, and our union will have their back every step of the way.”

By Laura Weiss - Prism, January 22, 2024

Before dawn broke on Jan. 14, hundreds of labor organizers and activists convened at the Port of Oakland for a protest to prevent ships carrying weapons bound for Israel from leaving the docks. Activists from the Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC) and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which co-organized the event, kept the momentum going all day. In the afternoon, 200 workers reportedly refused to cross the picket line to help load the ships. 

“The labor movement has the power to disrupt supply chains,” said Zachary Valdez, a union steward with United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2110 based in New York. “Workers can shut everything down.”

The action was an impressive show of solidarity between the labor movement and the Palestinian cause, one of a number of actions in the Bay Area and across the country co-organized or supported by unions in recent months, including teach-ins and other civil disobedience efforts.

Since the October attacks on the apartheid State of Israel by Hamas, the political and military organization that governs Gaza, Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians in Gaza, and the Israel Defense Forces has destroyed critical infrastructure, including electricity, hospitals, and the internet, shut off access to water, and purposefully created famine conditions. This has prompted a sea change in public opinion on Israel, with two-thirds of Americans saying they support a ceasefire in Gaza, all while the U.S. government continues to send billions of U.S. military aid to Israel. 

Within the labor movement, hundreds of unions and union locals have responded to a call from Palestinian labor unions and signed resolutions calling for a ceasefire, even those whose leadership has historically supported Israel. On Dec. 1, UAW, one of the largest unions in the country, made history when it released a ceasefire statement. Other influential unions, such as the United Electrical Workers, American Postal Workers Union, and 1199SEIU (United Healthcare Workers East), and countless other smaller unions have also released similar statements. On Jan. 22, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the second-largest public service employees union in the country, also released a call for a ceasefire. 

“We, members of the American labor movement, mourn the loss of life in Israel and Palestine. We express our solidarity with all workers and our common desire for peace in Palestine and Israel, and we call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza,” reads the petition signed by UAW and hundreds of other union locals.

Labor activists say the increasing number of unions supporting this call is a big deal. 

By Jeff Marshall - Labor Notes, December 15, 2023

Last summer I was working at the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, on a four-man electrical crew, replacing the existing lights with new LEDs. Our work area was 90 feet off the ground, maybe 20 feet below the roof decking, with no air circulation. You could feel the heat radiating from the ceiling pan.

Our crew has safety discussions every morning. Back in May we had discussed Washington’s heat laws—exposed workers are entitled to water and, if the temperature goes above 90 degrees, an additional rest break.

As the summer heated up, one of our crew members brought in a digital thermometer to check the actual temperature where we were working, not just the weather app. We paraded it by the foreman, as if to say, “We’re keeping a close eye on the situation.”

All summer we never crossed the 90-degree mark, though we came within two degrees. Still, one day a crew member reached his own limits. He notified the foreman and was allowed to come down and take a break, then redirected to a task in a milder climate.

Our time up there is very valuable—management has to coordinate with Boeing day by day for access to the “crane space” above the factory floor. Credit to our foreman: he toed the line on our behalf, prioritizing safety over production.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, December 7, 2023

Today workers at Volkswagen's Chattanooga, Tennessee, assembly plant announced their third bid to unionize plant-wide with the Auto Workers (UAW).

Riding the momentum of its strike of the Big 3 automakers, the UAW now wants to double its numbers in the auto industry by adding 150,000 workers at companies that have long avoided unionization. Thirteen non-union automakers are on notice: Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Nissan, Subaru, Mazda, Mercedes, Volvo, BMW, Volkswagen, and electric vehicle producers Rivian, Tesla, and Lucid.

The union says it has been inundated with calls and online sign-ups by workers at these firms. The Volkswagen drive is the first to go public, after 1,000 workers signed union cards.

The UAW’s two previous attempts to organize the full Chattanooga plant fell short narrowly. In 2014, workers lost by 86 votes. In 2019, the union came even closer, losing by just 57 votes with 93 percent turnout. There were 1,700 workers at the plant then. Some 3,800 workers today build the Atlas and Cross Sport SUVs, as well as the electric ID.4.

In 2015 a smaller group of skilled trades workers won their election by a vote of 108 to 44, joining UAW Local 42, which had formed as a minority union following the 2014 loss. But the company refused to negotiate with the smaller unit, delaying in the courts. The UAW quietly jettisoned the effort, filing instead for the full unit in 2019.

After the 2019 defeat, workers kept the flame of organizing alive, meeting regularly and running a petition for the right to use their paid time off outside the company's annual weeklong maintenance shutdown.