Union membership for 2019 is out. Here’s how labor did.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics released their annual report on union membership and density throughout the United States yesterday, and in spite of hopes that a renewed surge of militancy would bring good news, the figures from 2019 are a stark reminder that there’s work to be done. To help do that work, we’ve broken out the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers into a detailed analysis of trends showing where unions are losing members, where they’re gaining members, and what that means for the labor movement.
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“We’re there, but we’re not seen”: Inside the dangerous jobs of airline industry workers
While wages for some workers directly employed by legacy carriers have increased, already below-average wages for workers for regional subsidiaries and third-party contractors have often remained stagnant. Meanwhile, Delta reported its tenth straight quarter of profit, raking in over $1.12 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019. Now unions are fighting back.
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The Missouri Initiative: Taking back worker power one ballot at a time
Ballot initiatives show the labor movement a path forward in turning the tide against anti-worker policies at the state level.
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"People can't take it anymore": Inside the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike
Insufficient affordable housing and high cost-of-living is at the center of UCSC graduate students’ fight to win a higher cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). Since Dec. 9, Santa Cruz members of the United Auto Workers Local 2865, the union that represents UC students statewide, have been on strike, refusing to submit undergraduates’ grades until their demand for an increase of $1,412 to their COLAs has been addressed. Like many other university unions, there’s a “No Strike” clause in the UAW contract prohibiting strikes during the term of the agreement, exposing UCSC graduate student strikers to the risk of discipline or termination. They say it’s well worth it in a time of such deprivation.
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Closing the door on “right-to-work” in Virginia
The South has always been seen as a place of implacable opposition to labor organizing and collective working-class struggle. Perhaps the biggest symbol of that opposition that endures are so-called “right-to-work” laws.
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Unions like UNITE HERE have “Medicare for All” concerns. Advocates have to address them.
During the UNITE-HERE town halls in November, union members peppered presidential candidates with questions about medicare for all. For union workers that fought and struck for quality healthcare—the Culinary worker that questioned Sanders walked the picket in the six-and-a-half year long Frontier strike, the longest strike in American history—the seeming uncertainty of their future under a single payer system is still an understandable source of concern. They, and unions like UNITE-HERE, are intent on forcing politicians to address it.
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Chancellor Johnson isn’t fighting for SUNY. Our union will.
The key themes of Cuomo appointee Dr. Kristina M. Johnson’s chancellorship are said to be “individualized education, innovation and entrepreneurship, and sustainability, all of it underpinned by partnerships.” This is unfortunately reflective of what SUNY campuses have been forced to deal with for more than a decade now—death by a thousand cuts and a culture of entrepreneurialism shifting accountability for education from the public sector to the private sector, placing an undue burden on students, faculty and staff. That is why United University Professions (UUP), along with sister unions and student organizations, is leading the charge to save the SUNY system and restore it to its full operating capacity.
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A Rising Tide: Inside the Union Organizing Wave Taking Over Los Angeles Nonprofits
The union drive at AAAJ is part of a wave of nonprofit organizing campaigns across Los Angeles. While organizations have unionized in the city before—including the legal nonprofit Bet Tzedek—the sheer number of prominent public campaigns currently happening across the city suggests a sea change in the climate of nonprofit work in Los Angeles. Workers see flexing their collective power as critical to fulfilling their organization’s mission.
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New York’s “Taylor Law” exists to stop strikes. Will the strike wave change it?
Given TWU’s structural power and their history of strike action even in defiance of the law, they may ultimately choose to force important questions on Taylor Law—a law prompted by their strike action in 1966. Such a discussion is desperately needed, and can only be had by bringing the strike wave to New York—in force. Worker power, not legislative horse-trading, will change the state of play.
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Graduate Students at Williams & Mary Are Building a Union, and All Workers Are Invited
There is a massive crisis taking place for college students across the country, and Jasper Conner knows it all too well. As a history graduate student at the College of William & Mary, a public university in Virginia and one of the oldest legacy schools in the country, Conner was saddled with $25,000 in student debt as he walked into his program. Now, he is raising two children on the $24,000 stipend he makes providing educational services, like supporting tenured faculty as a teaching assistant.
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If “Industrial Democracy” Wasn’t Already Dead, Trump’s NLRB Just Killed It
There is nothing particularly new about the National Labor Relations Board failing the workers it was created to protect. The Board famously oscillates between defender and destroyer of labor rights depending on which party’s candidate inherits the White House, often reversing case law which the previous administration’s Board appointees enacted just years prior. Trump’s Board members have proven no strangers to this phenomenon, having swiftly repealed many of the Obama era’s pro-union decisions ever since constituting a majority of the Board.
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Facing uncertain future, graduates continue fight to organize
The context for this attack is far different than it was in 2004, when the Bush NLRB overturned a 2000 decision and ruled graduate assistants couldn’t unionize. The assault on graduate unions comes amidst widespread political upheaval in a historically reactionary Presidency, amidst increasing calls to cancel student loan debt and address spiraling college affordability, and amidst a nationwide strike wave and a resurgence of labor power.
So what does the path forward look like for graduate unionists?
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The Sanders "Workplace Democracy Plan" would transform labor law
The Sanders plan is the boldest vision for pro-worker labor policy released by a major presidential candidate since the New Deal: one that outstrips any recent proposal in recent memory, and which sets a high bar for presidential contenders to match. American workers and union leaders should take it seriously, and demand that Presidential candidates match it—or exceed it.
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Five Myths and One Truth About Graduate Worker Unions
There’s a reason that private universities are so opposed to graduate worker unionization: it threatens their bottom line, and the model of the neoliberal university as we know it. And the model desperately needs changing.
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Buffalo SPoT Coffee Workers Break New Ground With Union Vote
Yesterday, over 70 workers at four SPoT Coffee stores across Buffalo, New York voted 43 to 6 to join the Rochester Regional Joint Board/Workers United, SEIU. The landslide victory comes on the heels of a May vote to unionize at SPoT’s Rochester location; as a result of the two votes, a quarter of SPoT Coffee’s locations across New York are now organized.
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AFA-CWA President Sara Nelson: "Using power builds power."
Earlier this month, more than a thousand socialists gathered in Atlanta, Georgia, to discuss the next two years of the Democratic Socialists of America. Delegates from around the country deliberated proposals on topics from electoral strategy to antifascism to internal structural reforms, but not before hearing from Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants–CWA, a fifty-thousand member union that helped end the government shutdown and has fought Trump's immigration regime.
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Organize, and let the law follow
Striking workers that broke the law, not lobbyists, secured wage increases in West Virginia and Arizona. Striking workers, not lobbyists, won one of organized labor’s largest victories in years in Los Angeles. Striking workers, not lobbyists, secured industry-leading wage settlements for Marriott hotel workers. And striking workers, not lobbyists, fought Stop & Shop—and won.
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Missouri's public-sector busting bill has been delayed, but not defeated
On March 8th, Judge Joseph Walsh issued an injunction against Missouri’s House Bill 1413, a law that turned the world upside down for public sector labor organizing in the state.
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Want to celebrate May Day? Fight for antifascist unions.
Late last summer, ahead of the first anniversary of Heather Heyer's killing in Charlottesville, Kooper Caraway wrote a blog post for the website of the Sioux Falls AFL-CIO, a labor council representing mostly immigrants, refugees, and workers of color in an overwhelmingly white state that is historically hostile to unions.
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New York City nurses threatened to strike against the Hospital Alliance—and won. But the fight's not over.
In late fall of 2018, nurses from five private New York City hospitals in three competing hospital systems delivered their contract proposals to management.
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