Rolling Labor Action Thread

I couldn’t find one, that we should have one. Mostly because I was looking for a place to post this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtXprCW45RI

Background on Frito-Lay strike: https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2021/7/21/22586982/frito-lay-products-strike-boycott-topeka-kansas

good thread

I've been encouraged to see a lot more ferment and labor talk even here in my very red state over the past year. Local service workers formed Facebook groups etc., have become a lot more outspoken. Still a long way from real organization in most cases, but the ground is fertile.

(btw the video clip at the top is a skit)

posted this on union rat thread

Today, a majority of the Board found that a union’s use of rats or other inflatables, along with other bannering activity, does not violate the National Labor Relations Act, even when targeting a neutral employer. Read more: https://t.co/d5F9OjBJ2Y

— NLRB (@NLRB) July 21, 2021

Long live Scabby.

My wife works in this area and told me about one employer who responded with an inflatable cat.

Was it ... a fat cat?

I think there have been those as well.

Interesting news from the Teamsters: https://www.labornotes.org/2021/07/convention-no-other-teamster-challengers-turn-corner

<3

No contract. No snacks.
Flour and sugar stays on tracks. https://t.co/F7g00htw1H

— Railroad Workers United ✊ (@railroadworkers) August 27, 2021

Happy Labor Day! Leave that Nabisco alone.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/labor-day-demands-supporting-nabisco-s-striking-bakery-workers-n1278486

It’s on.

https://iatse.net/by-a-nearly-unanimous-margin-iatse-members-in-tv-and-film-production-vote-to-authorize-a-nationwide-strike/

Oh yeah here comes big daddy

Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but is there a deadline for when the strike would start? Seems like they are still giving the studios one more chance first...

They are. The idea is that if this doesn't make it happen, they can then call the strike; the vote was to authorize the union leader to call the strike as needed rather than a specific vote TO strike, if you see the difference.

John Deere may be headed to the picket line: https://gizmodo.com/john-deere-workers-sure-look-like-they-re-about-to-go-o-1847847258

And we might be about to get the first unionized Dollar General: https://inthesetimes.com/article/dollar-general-workers-store-connecticut-union-campaign

wow gizmodo comments are woke

one for the 'left wing drift' thread

the dollar general story is great - also grim, also just incredibly familiar. the same things play out again and again and again. places like walmart swoop down like hawks on anybody attempting to unionize. they do captive audience meetings with powerpoints showing employees that their wages will go down etc - and it fucking works. and i guess ufcw just doesn't have the resources to fight it? i dunno. i hope it goes down differently this time.

IATSE gonna strike on the 18th

i keep thinking about these low wage big box jobs and like, 7-11s and stuff. i guess the turnover is just so high, and they're shitty jobs anyway, that it's like... how many people are going to put in the work to actually fight for dignity in these jobs? how many people are going to face the absolute mountain of shit the company is going to rain down on them and make it through to the other side? if it really gets bad you quit and get a job somewhere else if you can. move on.

The John Deere strike is underway.

For anyone just catching up on the 10,000 worker UAW strike at John Deere -- the largest strike in the US in two years -- here's how you can get up to speed, based on what I've written for @labornotes:

— Jonah Furman (@JonahFurman) October 14, 2021

lmao Deere itself put out a graphic in August to show how much better their employees have it, because of their pension -

Here's another great image from Deere management.

In August, they told UAW members how much better they had it than at competitors CAT and CNH, because of the pension.

Now Deere wants to eliminate the pension, and the stool is collapsing; but not in the way the company thought! pic.twitter.com/uLJ9BiERIo

— Jonah Furman (@JonahFurman) October 13, 2021

sorry just restated the tweet there, so you get the drift, doubly

John Deere is trying to break a strike by having salaried office workers operate heavy machinery, let’s see how that’s going— pic.twitter.com/Yb1JkoFAH8

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) October 15, 2021

So happy for the IATSE strike. My union’s working conditions are way better than theirs and I’m still reeling after each film shoot, it’s a very tough industry. I can’t imagine what IATSE members have been going through and I really hope the strike brings about change.

A few days ago the nurses union for Kaiser-Permanente, a very big health care provider on the US west coast, voted to authorize a strike whenever their leadership decides that contract talks have broken down completely. The management was offering them a 1% raise!

btw, they're my provider. if they screw this up I'll be mad as hell at management not the nurses.

Looks like a whole lot of people aren’t taking it anymore

There was a regular at the bar who I hadn't seen for months. He was in Thursday, said he'd had enough of 70-80 hour weeks and had quit his job. I said "way to go, comrade, I love seeing power swing from mgmt to labor." He's a typical white middleaged southern conservative and was extremely uncomfortable with this.

this little wave of strikes is literally the only thing giving me any kind of hope at all about making a better world

xp lol

So IATSE tweeted this out, but a lot of tweets saying the deal sucks and/or isn’t much better than the previous one and that they plan to vote no:

“We went toe to toe with some of the richest and most powerful entertainment and tech companies in the world, and we havenow reached an agreement with the AMPTP that meets our members’ needs.”https://t.co/861fwvQNii

— IATSE // #IASolidarity (@IATSE) October 17, 2021

BREAKING: @BVWU_IWW has reached a tentative agreement with Burgerville. If ratified, 100 workers at five Oregon locations will become the only fast food workforce in the U.S. to be covered by a union contract. They’ve been in contract negotiations since 2018. A historic moment! pic.twitter.com/ujUJaGenLp

— Kim Kelly (@GrimKim) November 12, 2021

the wobblies??

the workers at the local bathhouse here in Toronto won their union drive!!!

we won 🥲 https://t.co/VjscVj78gP

— graeme lamb (@_gmlamb) November 12, 2021

yup. the wobblies are still out there.

Activision action

https://www.polygon.com/22786117/activision-blizzard-walk-out-bobby-kotick-resignation-demands

https://lbo-news.com/2021/11/12/striketober-wasnt/

As marvelous as it would be to see a revival of labor militancy, people got a little ahead of things calling last month “Striketober.” According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) stats, it was a blip by historical standards.

Here’s a graph of the number of workers involved in strikes or lockouts (the BLS counts them together) since 2000. There were 57 months with higher numbers of workers off the job. At the high point of this graph, May 2018, there were over fourteen times as many workers on strike as there were last month.

https://doughenwood.files.wordpress.com/2021/11/stoppages-monthly.png?w=1280

Here’s another measurement—what the BLS, in nice Victorian fashion, calls “days of idleness” as a percent of total days worked throughout the economy. It was 0.01% in October, a level that’s been matched in 39 other months since January 2000. And as the bottom graph shows, back in the old days when strikes were frequent, lost workdays were many times 0.01%. Before 1980, the low was 0.07%, set in 1957. From 1948 to 1979, it averaged 0.16%. In 1959, just two years after the pre-neoliberal era low, it was 0.43%, the series high.

there's always hope for strikevember

https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/kaiser-nurses-to-hold-sympathy-strike-in-solidarity-with-engineers/

BREAKING: The 10,000 striking John Deere workers voted to approve a third contract offer 61%-39%, ending the 5-week strike & solidifying major concessions from the company.

The big wins include:
- $8500 bonus
- Immediate 10% raise
- Another 10% raise by 2025
- Improved pension

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) November 18, 2021

nice

I think the disproportionate attention is because — at least for the moment — there's a lot of focus on workers, or lack of workers. But it's a good opportunity to get people thinking about it. And publicity for something like the John Deere deal is worth a lot in making people think organizing could work for them.

yeah if it sticks, more media focus on strikes is a welcome trend

i saw some people who cover labor complaining about erasure in this piece, but the fact that it's getting written about as a media trend is a sign something is different (for now) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/07/business/media/labor-unions-media-coverage.html.

my guess is labor power is about to begin a secular increase for the next few decades, not just for political reasons but because the US is trending towards labor scarcity. the trump/stephen miller reductions in legal immigration (which reduced refugee/asylum-seeker inflows by 100% and green cards by 50%) is now consensus policy, and birth-rates are below replacement. the working-age population started to shrink around 2018-19 and will probably accelerate

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=J3eH

we named the cc https://t.co/3bcwZPZjmN

— Michael Rose (@dcmichaelrose) December 13, 2021

sorry, posted reply instead of tweet

Wow. An NLRB employee has been charged with bribery and fraud. Charging doc alleges she was selling non-public info on potential union elections and ULP's to an outside labor consultant who would then sell the info to law firms https://t.co/6ybLIeD3Q8 pic.twitter.com/hh7k8Nxkp1

— Dave Jamieson (@jamieson) December 13, 2021

look at the world's tiniest legal notice on the bottom

That last bullet point is fucking despicable.#SupportWorkers #FredMeyerStrike pic.twitter.com/ydAG1aJCOC

— Shawn Levy (@shawnlevy) December 17, 2021

minneapolis federation of teachers on strike now, here's a recap of the last week:

https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/minneapolis-teacher-strike-week-one-update/89-95a9dd41-2bbe-4724-9ef5-2be2b0738dc5

really good deep dive into the people behind the vote

https://www.thecity.nyc/staten-island/2022/3/24/22995196/amazon-workers-staten-island-union-vote

Current Vote Totals:
2050 Yes
1574 No

476 votes in ALU’s favor after resuming the count today on the last box.

— Amazon Labor Union (@amazonlabor) April 1, 2022

Memphis Starbucks has fired 7 of its employees involved in unionization

Former CEO and also former vaporware presidential candidate Howard Schultz has returned as CEO in order to crush the unionising push and its going great

If @SBWorkersUnited can win new benefits with just 9 unionized stores, imagine the gains Starbucks workers can win with hundreds of unionized stores. https://t.co/VFQF9fRb2F

— Josh Miller-Lewis (@jmillerlewis) March 31, 2022

Starbucks' appeal of a decision ordering a union election, which was due last Friday, was mislabeled and filed with the wrong part of the labor board, Starbucks' law firm Littler said in a new NLRB filing today that ends "Thank you in advance for your...professional cooperation"

— Josh Eidelson (@josheidelson) March 30, 2022

^ this is the second SBU union the law firm has failed to stop in recent weeks due to misfiling an appeal. Labor and employment law specialists Littler Mendelsohn PLC… welcome to the resistance

From earlier this month, guess the union busting podcast didn’t work.

VICTORY: by a vote of 86%, workers have voted to unionize with @RWDSU, officially making REI SoHo the first unionized @REI store in the nation! We go further together! #REIunion pic.twitter.com/tywvPzZAf9

— REI Union SoHo (@reiunionsoho) March 3, 2022

lmaooooo

“We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going up to space, because while he was up there, we were organizing a union,” a jubilant Chris Smalls said in remarks outside the NLRB offices in Brooklyn: https://t.co/PxBsVBAgGL

— Richard Kim (@RichardKimNYC) April 1, 2022

The latest unionized Starbucks is here in Knoxville, first one in the South. It was an 8-7 vote and there was a 16th ballot that Starbucks is challenging (because it was cast by an assistant manager who they say shouldn't have been able to vote), but the fact that they're the ones challenging it means they know it was a vote in favor. So I think either they lose 9-7 or 8-7, but it's going through either way.

this shit is my "inspirational fb meme" - just makes me feel immediately better xp

The first hometown one to unionize was last week - I got off the train three stops (40 min walk) early to stick my face inside a a Starbucks door for the third time ever and call out congrats to the workers

that's awesome. pretty sure it's never going to happen here (utah) for so many reasons, one of which is that conservatism runs so deep in the blood that almost all workers hate their own interests. i mean if it ever does happen i'd be shocked and elated.

Howard Schultz' new pitch for why workers shouldn't unionize: by the end of the year, Starbucks will be the most successful NFT platform in the world.

Why drink coffee when you can have a JPG of an ape drinking coffee?

Not sure if this is the right thread or not, but I've really been looking forward to K1m K3lly's book since it was announced. I was mostly offline for the long weekend and just now catching up on the brouhaha whipped up by the excerpt in the WaPost this weekend. Disappointing to see, even if it sounds like the book itself provides the proper citation. It also seems like the book's "Untold" subtitle is still stirring up a little bit of controversary today.

I like her writing a lot and I've really gotten a lot of our her labor reporting, this is a bummer all around.

There are currently 69 Unionized Starbucks in America! pic.twitter.com/sxOa69LDVm

— Every Union Starbucks (@everyunionsbux) May 15, 2022

Replies check out

Breaking: Dodger Stadium Workers Vote 99% to Authorize Strike Ahead of MLB All-Star Game pic.twitter.com/nQ70evlQj4

— UNITE HERE Local 11 (@UNITEHERE11) July 11, 2022

yessssss

fuck em up

They walking out at Amazon in Atlanta 😭 y’all not getting them prime day packages pic.twitter.com/rECUcRB1Lg

— Maybe: Papi Women Neglecter vol 5 (@JuicegawdinPriv) July 13, 2022

New strike dates dropped

RMT (Uk rail workers' union):

27 July
18 Aug
20 Aug

and drivers for 8 franchises walk on 30 July

It appears to be on, as they say, like Donkey Kong

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-62166276
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62173334

hmm

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/34248463/dodger-stadium-concession-workers-pleased-progress-negotiations-strike-all-star-game

We are the actors, stunt performers, and stable hands of Medieval Times in Lyndhurst, New Jersey joining together in union to create a fairer, safer, and more enjoyable workplace. With a supermajority of support, we are excited to be forming our union with the AGVA.

— Medieval Times Performers United (@MTUnitedNJ) June 28, 2022

haha nice

so much for the tolerant SPCA

I posted this elsewhere today but it's a good 'un

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMNmWPuw5/?k=1

400 Planned Parenthood workers at @ppnorthcentral—who work at 28 locations across Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota and Nebraska—have just won the hell out of their union, with 90% voting YES to join @SEIUHCMNIA in a 238-26 landslide! https://t.co/trnQBOWrn3

— Kim “FIGHT LIKE HELL📕Out Now!” Kelly (@GrimKim) July 21, 2022

sharing this one again because it’s a black-led independent union of Amazon workers in the South using tried-and-tested tactics to build support and shop-floor power. CAUSE estimates it now has 700 workers interested—far more people should know about them https://t.co/6a7x2GNkBO

— Alex Press (@alexnpress) July 21, 2022

UNANIMOUS WIN!

DALLAS IS A UNION TOWN!!!!

— SBWU Mockingbird Station (@sbwumbs) July 29, 2022

The Major League Baseball Players Association has launched a campaign to unionize Minor League Players across the country #1u #FairBall pic.twitter.com/DDq4Q8NOXI

— MLBPA Communications (@MLBPA_News) August 29, 2022

71% of Americans support labor unions

https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx

fuck this

If unions like CWU and RMT melt over something like this, it doesn't give you much confidence that they'll actually fight as hard as they're gonna need to against the shit that's coming https://t.co/coC4NDFNGC

— Tony Collins (@tontytrains) September 8, 2022

who gives a shit tbrr

I do

why?

shouldn't need fucking spelling out

well at least now we know what the M in RMT really stands for.

idk sort of exasperating but i kind of get it. rare time what seems like of mass public support (or at least understanding) for widespread industrial action, probs no harm in waiting a few weeks for the next ones so as not to alienate the 'she was a nice old dearie' or 'its sad when anyone dies' lot

these fucking people shouldn't have any influence on unions and their strike planning and they aren't the majority imo

i trust mick lynch to read the room, the point is to win, and if delaying helps them win then delay. no one’s feelings about royalty have anything to do with the deal they’re fighting for

when Lynch isn't flavour of the month anymore or public opinion is turning against the strikes, is he supposed to read the room then as well?

yeah times like these are exactly when you SHOULD be striking cf the LA Dodgers' Stadium staff threatening to strike before the all star game

lol owned

You literally stormed out of the room in the middle of us reading the “Respect and Dignity” contract proposal to yall, so now we’re playing Mario Party & eating lunch waiting for you to come back to our table.

Slay I guess https://t.co/ttHdIc9N9w pic.twitter.com/BJXgC5Yjsr

— Tyler - Starbucks Workers United (@UnionTyler) October 25, 2022

apparently Starbucks has been doing this a lot i.e. showing up for 5 minutes then leaving so that they can technically claim that they’ve “negotiated” with x many branches

Plans by @BirkbeckUoL to sack 140 staff are a disaster for the university, its students and its staff

UCU will not stand by and let this happen and we urge the university to work with us and rethink these cutshttps://t.co/uv8ETG3AAz

— UCU (@ucu) October 31, 2022

Large number of redundancies planned in University of London, among both academic and administrative and support staff.

UCU and Unison will be involved in negotiations but we will see if this goes to a formal dispute and potentially a very large strike which could have long-term effects all round.

This is at a time when national UCU is already in dispute and has just secured a huge mandate for strike action, though on nationwide issues separate from local cuts like these.

mysteriously, the first Starbucks in Starbucks' home town to unionise is closing down due to "safety and security incidents"

coincidentally, the Starbucks five blocks away closed down due to "crime rates" earlier this year, four weeks after the staff voted unanimously to unionise

yeah they're doing it everywhere afaict

The Starbucks Union-Busting Playbook

Workers Say Starbucks Uses Long-Ignored Problems as an Excuse to Close Stores

pics like this warm my cold dead heart

https://twitter.com/labornotes/status/1617937086354706435?s=20&t=n4GoR5-UwOVFncICSp3Q7w

New: Latino immigrant kitchen workers and a group of racially diverse women servers walked out at the Twin Peaks restaurant in Brentwood, Tennessee, on Saturday, January 14. They say their employer is serving up of a toxic brew of racism and sexism.https://t.co/adHmDEFDTA pic.twitter.com/zD8MozN7wl

— Labor Notes (@labornotes) January 24, 2023