Labor Notes

By Caitlyn Clark - Labor Notes, July 12, 2023

On June 29, the air quality in Detroit was among the worst in the world.

“Outside it smelled like burnt plastic, almost like trash,” said UAW member Cody Zaremba, who works at a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan. He and his co-workers were experiencing coughing, runny noses, watery eyes, and trouble breathing.

But GM didn’t even acknowledge the smoke, Zaremba said, much less offer any protection.

“Everybody just had to go about it their own way,” he said. “We can all see it and smell it. But what are we going to do about it?”

As wildfires, drought, floods, and scorching heat disrupt the supply chain, the logistics industry is starting to worry about the impact of climate change…on profits.

But workers are the ones bearing the brunt—forced to work through extreme weather events, induced by climate change, that are getting more frequent and more severe.

Wildfires in Canada this summer have spread hazardous smoke through the U.S. East Coast and Midwest. Semi-regular wildfires throughout the West Coast have produced what are now known as “fire seasons.”

Outdoor workers like those in delivery, construction, and farming are among the hardest hit. On the frontlines of the climate crisis, some workers are standing up to their employers’ negligence.

By Daria Marcantonio Kieffer and Micaela Morse - Labor Notes, May 19, 2023

The 3,000 teachers and support staff of the Oakland Education Association walked out May 4, shutting down all 85 elementary, middle, and high schools.

Community support was immediate and widespread—parents were already familiar with the cuts the district had inflicted or proposed. Many donated food and joined our picket lines to walk, dance, and chant in solidarity.

Eighty-eight percent of teachers had voted to strike, after it became clear that our demands were not being taken seriously at the negotiating table.

The Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) had stonewalled us—delaying meetings, failing to show up, and presenting vague proposals that demonstrated a limited understanding of what’s really needed day to day in schools.

“Teachers feel disrespected and fed up.” said Sarah Wheels, a fifth-grade teacher and union site representative. “We’ve been bargaining for six months, but our superintendent only came for the first time to meet and bargain with us last Sunday.”

By Dan DiMaggio - Labor Notes, May 18, 2023

Contracts covering 150,000 auto workers at the Big 3 will expire on September 14, and the new leadership of the United Auto Workers is taking a more aggressive stance than in years past.

“We’re going to launch our biggest contract campaign ever in our history,” UAW President Shawn Fain told members in a Facebook live video.

Fain took office in March after winning the union’s first one member, one vote election. Running on the slogan, “No Corruption, No Concessions, No Tiers,” he and the Members United slate swept all the positions they ran for, giving reformers a majority on the international executive board.

While the union has vowed to take on tiered wages and benefits, job security, and plant closures, the transition to electric vehicles (EV) looms especially large.

Since President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act last August, companies have announced $120 billion in investments in domestic EV and battery manufacturing. The Act includes big tax credits and incentives for clean energy and EVs.

Ford alone is investing $11 billion in a new EV assembly plant and battery factories in Tennessee and Kentucky. The Biden administration wants EVs to make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, May 16, 2023

After a bruising three-year fight, workers at school bus manufacturer Blue Bird in Fort Valley, Georgia, voted May 12 to join United Steelworkers (USW) Local 697.

“It’s been a long time since a manufacturing site with 1,400 people has been organized, let alone organized in the South, let alone organized with predominantly African American workers, and let alone in the auto industry,” said Maria Somma, organizing director with the USW.

“It’s not a single important win. It’s an example of what’s possible—workers wanting to organize and us being able to take advantage of a time and a policy that allowed them to clear a path to do so.”

The vote was 697 to 435 with 80 percent turnout. At two factories and a warehouse near Macon, the workers build school buses and an array of specialty buses.

Blue Bird is the second-largest bus manufacturer in the country, after Daimler Truck’s Thomas Built Buses. The Auto Workers represent workers at a Thomas Built facility in North Carolina.

The main issues in Georgia were pay and safety. Workers began organizing in earnest at the height of the pandemic in 2020 after Blue Bird workers reached out to a Steelworker organizer following a union win at a tire factory in nearby Macon. They overcame a fierce anti-union campaign in a right-to-work state where only 4.4 percent of workers are union members.

But Somma adds that workers tapped into local union networks. “People think the South is non-union, but we have a lot of members in middle Georgia,” she said.

The Steelworkers represent thousands of members in the state—at BASF, which makes chemicals used in plastics, detergent, and paper manufacturing, Anchor Glass, and the paper giant Graphic Packaging International.

By Luis Feliz Leon - Labor Notes, May 1, 2023

A hundred immigrant seafood processing workers in New Bedford, Massachusetts, lost their jobs March 31 when their employer abruptly terminated its contract with the temp agency that placed them. Workers say it was retaliation for organizing.

Their fight will be a test case of new protections for immigrants who organize on the job. The company invited the fired workers to apply for their old jobs, but only a handful were actually rehired.

“When the workers got the news, they started crying, worried about how they are going to pay their rent and bills,” said Ruth Castro, who has worked for five years at the plant and almost 20 years in the industry. “I felt so sad that when I got home all the tears I held back poured out of me.”

At the job site, though, Castro remained dogged. She rallied the workers and proposed a march on the company bosses. “What they did isn’t just. They are playing with the livelihoods of us workers,” she said in Spanish.

Forty workers marched into the Eastern Fisheries processing plant on April 3 to deliver a letter to upper management—demanding that it reconsider using E-verify to screen workers for eligibility to work in the U.S. and alleging that the reverification was retaliation for exercising their legal rights to organize for mutual aid and protection.

They have filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board and an investigation is pending.

By Keith Brower Brown - Labor Notes, April 25, 2023

Huge changes are coming for our workplaces, quick as a heat wave. This month Joe Biden inked new rules to make all-electrics the majority of new cars sold in America within a decade.

o charge all those batteries, many of the largest states are pushing to power their grids with two-thirds clean energy by the same deadline.

These green shifts have put billion-dollar signs in the eyes of bosses. Public cash is pouring out to subsidize cleaner manufacturing and energy. Corporations aim to cash in double by cutting unions out.

Automakers like General Motors are setting up huge parts of the electric car supply chain in anti-union “joint venture” plants. Solar energy jobs, as of 2022, were 90 percent non-union across the country. Union-busting is even more disgusting in a green disguise.

But as the song goes, “Without our brains and muscle, not a single wheel can turn.” That goes for electric wheels, too.

The enormous sweat and smarts needed for any climate transition worth the name give workers huge potential leverage, from electricians in Arizona to auto workers in Tennessee.

And around these green boom-towns, childcare, education, health, and logistics workers could see their leverage grow, too.

By Lauren Bianchi - Labor Notes, January 31, 2023

For two years, teachers and staff in my workplace, George Washington High School, helped lead a community campaign to stop a hazardous industrial metal shredder, General Iron, from moving a few blocks from our school.

Repeating a historic pattern, city officials facilitated General Iron’s planned move from the wealthy and white Lincoln Park neighborhood where it had operated for decades to the working-class, majority Latino Southeast Side.

Our campaign won a major victory when we pressured Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Department of Public Health into denying the final operating permit for General Iron. It took years of mobilizing, street protest, and a month-long hunger strike to force the mayor to do the right thing.

The experience of Chicago Teachers Union members in the #StopGeneralIron campaign highlights the power of union members when we stand shoulder to shoulder with environmental justice activists to demand safe living and working conditions.

By Julia Conley - Common Dreams, October 10, 2022

Maintenance workers voted against the tentative agreement reached last month and said without a fair contract, a work stoppage could begin as early at November 19.

A union representing railroad maintenance and construction workers on Monday announced that its members have rejected the tentative agreement reached last month between unions and rail carriers, putting pressure on the carriers to offer a better deal to workers in order to avoid a nationwide strike in the coming weeks.

Reporting a turnout of 11,845 members, the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees Division (BMWED) said that 6,646 people had voted against ratifying the agreement and 5,100 had supported the deal, which was brokered last month with the help of the Biden administration's Presidential Emergency Board. Ninety-nine ballots were returned blank or were voided due to user errors.

The tentative agreement reached last month would include one additional paid day off and permit workers to take unpaid days to receive medical care without being penalized by carriers' strict attendance policies—two key concessions from the companies, as railroad workers' unions had expressed deep dissatisfaction with attendance rules and a lack of any paid sick time.

The deal also would include a 24% pay raise between 2020 and 2024 and would freeze workers' monthly contributions for their healthcare plans.

After the tentative agreement was reached on September 15, the railroad sector's unions agreed not to strike as workers across the industry voted on the deal.

Now, said the BMWED—the nation's third-largest rail workers' union and a division of the Teamsters—on Monday, a work stoppage could begin as early as November 19, depending on the upcoming votes by other unions.

By Ericka Wills - Labor Notes, October 7, 2022

A somber bell toll broke the silence outside the West Brookwood Church in Tuscaloosa County, Alabama. The white-gloved hand of Larry Spencer, International Vice President of Mine Workers (UMWA) District 20, solemnly struck the Miners’ Memorial bell as the names of victims of mine-related deaths were read aloud.

“As we gather this evening for our service, it is appropriate that we remember in the past twelve months over 2021 and 2022 there has been tremendous heartache as the result of mining accidents across this country,” Thomas Wilson, a retired UMWA staff representative, announced from the podium. “Twelve coal miners’ lives have been snuffed out—also, 19 metal and non-metal miners—for a total of 31 fallen miners since we last gathered.”

The annual Miners’ Memorial Service commemorates not only those who left for work in the mines over the past year never to come home again; it also honors the 13 men who died in a series of explosions in Jim Walter Resources Mine No. 5 in Brookwood on September 23, 2001. Standing on the front lawn of the church in the shadows of mine tipples, families reminisced about gathering at the same location on that fateful day in September when they anxiously waited to hear if their loved ones had survived the blasts.

In 2001, the No. 5 mine was owned by Walter Energy. Today it is part of Warrior Met Coal, the company at the center of the UMWA’s 550-day strike, the longest and largest ongoing strike in the United States. As strikers, families, and community members gathered to remember the fallen miners, all were reminded that what is at stake in the Warrior Met strike is, literally, life and death.