The week in US unions, January 8-15, 2022

Happy Martin Luther King Day, all. This week’s newsletter is in honor of Mike Parker, of the founding generation of Labor Notes, who passed away this weekend after a lifetime of labor and socialist organizing. I can’t think of a better way to honor his legacy than by spending some time with the iconic Democracy Is Power, which he co-authored, and which is now available as a free PDF online, and to which nothing I’ve ever read really compares. I’m also hosting a conversation between UAW, Teamster, and UFCW worker leaders on Wednesday night that is also free, and for which you can register here.

STRIKES & NEGOTIATIONS

UFCW Local 7 took the mantle of organizing the largest strike in the country, when some 8,400 grocery workers walked off the job Wednesday morning, beginning a three-week strike at nearly 80 Kroger-owned King Soopers grocery stores in the greater Denver area. It’s the first of many grocery contract expirations this year, with 100,000 workers covered by the nascent west coast UFCW coalition (a bit of a misnomer – it includes locals in Colorado, Southern California, and Washington). Several thousand could theoretically join the Local 7 strike as contracts expire on a rolling basis over the next few weeks. It’s the largest private sector strike in Colorado since the last time grocery workers struck King Soopers in 1996 (when they also struck Safeway). BCTGM Local 26 members who represent some King Soopers workers in Colorado voted to authorize their own strike as well.

While the Warrior Met strike in Brookwood, AL itself remains at its familiar stalemate, Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Tammy Baldwin wrote a letter to the CEO of BlackRock, the massive financial firm that owns 13% of Warrior Met stock, to publicly demand the company negotiate with UMWA.

Steelworkers Local 40 and Special Metals, who employ about 450 union members minus the 75 they just gave permanent layoff notices to, are back at the negotiating table with a new offer from the company, that the bargaining team has already rejected but that company is dubbing an “open” proposal which I don’t know what that means.

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, the Teamsters have released a new survey of Republic sanitation workers, highlighting the racial and gender discrimination workers experience on the job; obviously apt not only because King’s last campaign was to support the striking Memphis sanitation workers, but because hundreds of Republic sanitation workers are currently on strike. The Teamsters Local 542 strike against Republic in San Diego has spread to Washington state, where workers have extended the picket line to Seattle and surrounding areas. Which seems to be all the rage among Washington Teamsters, with Teamsters Local 174 bringing their concrete drivers’ picket line of various job sites to the concrete plants themselves, owned by one of the contractors the 330 workers are striking. And it appears to be working, with less and less concrete flowing, as the strike passes the two-month mark. Elsewhere in Teamsters strikes, the 75 striking Coca-Cola workers with Teamsters Local 773 in Bethlehem, PA have ratified an agreement and are headed back to work.

Also in honor of Martin Luther King Day, Kaiser mental health workers with NUHW in Oakland and Richmond, CA struck for the day against the healthcare giant rescinding its promise to make the day a paid holiday. Other worker actions including UPS Teamsters across the country rallying at UPS hubs to make the day a paid holiday (which was made a national priority after the incoming Teamsters United slate sponsored a resolution at last summer’s convention), and K-12 workers in Minneapolis rallying for living wages for school support staff.

K-12: The crisis around the omicron variant of COVID-19 has reignited lots of K-12 organizing, as Barbara Madeloni highlighted for Labor Notes this week. Most notably, the Chicago Teachers Union lockout has come to an end, with members narrowly voting to return to in-person schooling. In Oakland, teachers organized another sickout, as did their neighbors in West Contra Costa County, CA, and teachers in Montgomery County, MD held a vote of no confidence in the district’s virus response, and the union in Columbus, OH, is calling for a two-week switch to remote learning. But it’s not just teachers in the biggest, bluest cities taking action. Educators in East Baton Rouge, LA organized a sickout as well, and, while not directly omicron-related, Durham, NC school bus drivers walked off the job in protest of late paychecks. Elsewhere in K-12, school transportation workers in a suburban Twin Cities district with SEIU Local 284 are pushing for a raise, and the support staff union in Doylestown, PA is deadlocked in negotiations with the district.

17,000 railroad workers at Warren Buffett-owned BNSF with SMART-TD and BLET (IBT) have taken the first steps towards striking the railroad over its new attendance policy, which will effectively give workers one day off per month. While that’s a huge number of workers, and would of course have a massive economic impact, since they’re under the Railway Labor Act, a strike authorization isn’t the only hurdle, plus the move so far has been just to initiate the process of taking a strike authorization vote. But nonetheless, something to watch closely.

In similar strike watch (but not really strike watch, at least not yet) news, UAW Local 2164 in Bowling Green, KY, who represent workers at the Corvette auto plant, have overwhelmingly (as in, 98%) rejected a local contract offer and are talking strike. The reason I wouldn’t say this means we’re on the precipice of a Kentucky auto strike is they’re under the national GM agreement, and while you can strike on a local agreement, it requires the international to get involved, as far as I understand it.

And in other big-number-of-industrial-workers news, talks between the Steelworkers and an umbrella of employers, with the lead negotiating company being Marathon, covering 30,000 refinery workers, began this week. The contract expires on February 1st, and I just have no idea what to expect; the only speculation I can offer is that the refinery employers have been going for the throat in 2021, with big lockouts at Marathon and Exxon, and there’s no reason to think they won’t continue with that extremely aggressive strategy at the bargaining table.

In other USW news, Steelworkers Local 8888 has re-initiated contract talks after members rejected an offer from Huntington Ingalls, the company that runs the Newport News, VA shipyard. The local has openly hinted at a strike, but nothing has been authorized. Elsewhere in shipyard labor, members of Boilermakers Local 696 have rejected seven consecutive offers from shipbuilding firm Fincantieri in Marinette, WI, but apparently the international union went over their heads and signed a contract on New Year’s Eve.

A January 15th strike deadline for CWA workers at Frontier Communications in Connecticut, New York, and California came and went (though whether it was an actual deadline or not was sort of unclear; at least the California workers were not informed of the deadline, and members started a petition to honor it, and at least a handful picketed the bargaining committee in protest of a weak tentative agreement they received, while as far as I’ve seen the Connecticut and New York workers don’t have a tentative agreement yet).

The coalition of six municipal workers unions covering 1100 city workers in Portland, OR took a strike vote all this week, with results expected any moment (but it would be a shocker if they didn’t authorize).

Settlements and other updates: After a credible strike threat, CWA-represented Vail Resorts ski patrollers in Park City, UT have a contract, though they didn’t win the $17 an hour they’d been holding out for. Teamsters Local 320 snow plow drivers at the Minneapolis airport have a contract after authorizing a strike. 800 Steelworkers auto parts workers at Titan International across three locals in Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio have ratified a new contract. San Mateo County, CA transit workers with ATU Local 1574 almost have a contract. The MLBPA and Major League Baseball are still far from a contract, per the New York Times.

A Broadway producer’s public statement that a production of “Mrs. Doubtfire” would be going on “hiatus” has stirred up the many Broadway unions, who say that management is using COVID to skirt the contract, using phrases like “on hold” versus actually closing down a show, which comes with certain contractual obligations. The pandemic has been, of course, a very bad time for live performance.

POLITICS & LEGISLATION

The Supreme Court struck down Joe Biden’s vaccine-or-test mandate for private employers with over 100 workers, but kept his mandate for healthcare workers at facilities which receive federal funds. In some other countries, there’s a mechanism by which laws, particularly those that would affect millions of people’s health and safety, could be passed aside from one guy making up a law and then nine lifetime appointees voting it up or down, but in this country we enjoy American exceptionalism.

I found this Ballotpedia breakdown of active state-level public sector labor law legislative efforts to be helpful, and was steered toward it after researching IUPAT Local 116’s effort to legalize collective bargaining for employees of the Washington state legislature. 

In NYC, already-passed legislation mandating labor peace agreements for non-profits that contract with the city has drawn a lawsuit from those non-profit administrators. Also in NYC, the Times looked at new mayor Eric Adams’s cozy relationship with the carceral unions in particular. A bit further afield, but still in New York, City & State looked at the sheer velocity with which “like, every labor union” has endorsed Chuck Schumer for re-election.

INTERNAL UNION POLITICS

I don’t usually cover non-US unions, but there’s a potentially big development in the Mexican labor movement at a big US-based company that is really worth following. More than 6,000 GM workers in Silao, Guanajuato, Mexico, at one of GM’s most profitable plants, will be voting on February 1-2 on a new union to represent them after they voted to abandon their existing contract in August. The initiative is being driven by autoworkers organizing against the entrenched corrupt/company/protection union that’s a part of CTM, the big politically influential Mexican labor federation, and comes in the wake of new domestic labor law requiring the right to vote on union contracts and to “legitimate” all existing contracts by 2023 (under the assumption that many of these are not actually legitimate union contracts that workers approve of); after a tampered vote in April of last year, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai intervened under the labor provisions of the new USMCA and in a vote last August, the contract was rejected. Now a new independent autoworkers union, SINTIIA, is on the ballot to be an actually representative union bargaining legitimate contracts with GM. The upshot is this could be a big development for independent unionism in Mexico, with all the obvious ramifications for runaway manufacturing and other shops from the US, feeding the international race to the bottom.

In what would be a huge story for US labor’s internal politics, Sara Nelson AFL-CIO presidential run rumors have bubbled back up to the surface. Candidly, I’m not sure if this is new material or just revisiting the rumor mill that started a few years back at this point, and if she is mounting a run, time is short, with the convention set for June. The thing is, a successful AFL challenge would rely on lots of inside game, since the vast majority of members don’t actually get to vote, only executive board-level people do. But if she does run it could be a major shot in the arm for the grassroots anti-status-quo chunk of union members – though actually winning would be another, possibly entirely unrelated question.

For The Real News, my coworker Luis Feliz Leon wrote about the union democracy fights that paved the way for the successful settlement of the strike at Columbia University. It’s a good reminder that union power and union democracy are often deeply intertwined.

Union democracy is also messy! It certainly doesn’t mean everything that happens makes everybody happy. For example, a handful of members of PSC CUNY are taking the step of actually suing their union in response to pro-Palestinian resolutions the union passed, though the New York Post story on it is both sensational and thin.

A far more serious-sounding lawsuit is now live in California, where an executive board member is suing to remove SEIU Local 1000 president Richard Louis Brown for misusing funds and preventing the executive board from properly running the organization. The Local 1000 saga has been unfolding for months, after Brown’s surprise victory in local elections last year, and subsequent sweeping pronouncements about suspending all political funding (among other big changes) by the 100,000-member influential state workers union.

The Methuen, MA police union has new leadership after the union president resigned for what appears to be having bargained a contract that would provide for top salaries of over $400,000? Odd story.

NEW ORGANIZING

New election filings at the NLRB: 

Transit and school bus: 327 school bus drivers across 16 different contracted school bus companies for the Charles County, MD public schools are organizing with ATU Local 689 in 16 separate elections; this was one of the many school districts in which non-union bus drivers held sickouts or strikes, in this case shutting down their routes for days, and winning a 4% raise, all before officially unionizing. 40 school bus drivers and mechanics for Smith Bus Company in Apollo, PA are organizing with Teamsters Local 205. 19 drivers and mechanics at the Green Mountain Community Network in Bennington, VT are unionizing with Teamsters Local 597.

Medium to large shops: 250 EMTs and dispatchers for McCormick Ambulance in Compton, CA (serving Los Angeles County) are organizing with SEIU Local 5000 (a national EMTs local affiliated with NAGE). 174 K-12 workers at charter school network Carmen’s five schools in Milwaukee are organizing with Machinists District Lodge 10, [edit: I had this wrong, as District Lodge 9, due to an error on the NLRB site; thanks to a reader for your correction] which, just, there used to be a thing called jurisdiction, but of course it’s good they’re unionizing. 110 employees of the Jewish Museum in New York are unionizing with UAW Local 2110. 100 facilities and maintenance employees at Resorts World in Las Vegas are organizing with Operating Engineers Local 501, as are nine more “gaming techs” in a separate filing. 24 more Starbucks workers have officially filed at the NLRB with Workers United, this time in Tallahassee, FL, as are 25 more in Chicago, and 22 more in Hopewell, NJ and 20 in Cleveland and 15 in Eugene, OR; as I was finalizing this newsletter, another store in Baltimore (whoops, and then another in Memphis) announced their intention to unionize.

Smaller shops: 48 cannabis dispensary workers at Rise in Lake in the Hills, IL are organizing with UFCW Local 881. 40 medical interns and residents at the Greater Lawrence Family Health Center in Lawrence, MA are organizing with CIR (SEIU). 40 workers who make fruit juices for Ventura Coastal in Visalia, CA are unionizing with Teamsters Local 948. 38 cannabis workers at Ascend dispensary in Springfield, IL are organizing with UFCW Local 881. 12 EMTs with the predominantly-volunteer Avondale Fire Company in New Garden, PA are joining IAFF Local 5364. Ten “biometric fingerprinting technicians” at US Customs & Immigration facilities in Seattle, Spokane, WA, and Yakima, WA are joining Machinists District Lodge 751. Eight pharmacy techs for Providence Health in Monroe, WA are joining UFCW Local 21. Eight workers for Carlsen Precision Manufacturing in Rome, GA are joining Plumbers Local 72. Eight physical therapists for Tender Touch Rehab in Toms River, NJ are joining the dubious Novelty and Production Workers Local 298 (who just call themselves Amalgamated Local 298, with no reference to the Novelty and Production Workers on their website.) Eight cannabis workers at Budlandia in Portland, OR are unionizing with UFCW Local 555, as are six more cannabis workers at Flowr of Lyfe in Eugene, OR. Three painters at the Plaza Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas are joining Painters Local 159.

NLRB election wins…: In two big wins for AFSCME Council 31, 273 workers at the Art Institute of Chicago (vote count: 142-44) and 198 more at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (vote count: 115-48) voted to join the union; that’s 471 new members, and a shot in the arm for the national AFSCME museum organizing drive. 57 workers for Communitas, a non-profit that provides residential services for people with intellectual disabilities in Kitsap County, WA, have voted 21-2 to join SEIU Local 775. 51 public defenders in Jefferson County, KY (that’s Louisville and surrounding areas) voted 32-5 to join IBEW Local 369 (no, I don’t know why IBEW is organizing public defenders; as you will have learned by now, there are simply no rules). 18 transit workers for the Butler Transit Authority (run by mega-subcontractor MV Transportation) in Butler, PA voted 9-3 to join ATU Local 1743. 16 workers for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival Association in Ashland, OR voted 11-0 to join IATSE Local 154. Seven Starbucks workers inside an Albertson’s grocery store in Pocatello, ID have unionized with UFCW Local 555 in a 3-1 vote (this doesn’t quite count as part of the Starbucks organizing drive, since it’s not a corporate-owned store; these workers technically work for Albertson’s). Seven engineers for the Volunteer Energy Cooperative in Decatur, TN voted 5-2 to join IBEW Local 175. Six RNs at Forest Haven nursing home in Catonsville, MD voted 2-0 to join 1199 SEIU. Six workers at Integra Pool Covers in Burlington, IA voted 4-1 to join Machinists District Lodge 6. Five locksmiths at Princeton University voted 3-2 to join SEIU Local 175. Five construction workers for Wildcat Materials in Columbia, MO voted 4-0 to join Laborers Local 955. Five “construction managers” for the United Illuminating Company utility in Orange, CT voted 3-2 to join the Utility Workers. 

…and losses: 65 warehouse workers at PepsiCo in Harrisburg, PA voted 14-25 not to join Teamsters Local 776 40 workers at an “automated” (scare quotes because, uh, there are at least 40 workers there) online grocery warehouse owned by Ocado but serving, I believe, Kroger in Middletown, OH voted 6-23 not to join Teamsters Local 114. 36 healthcare and social services workers working for contractor Wellpath at the San Luis Obispo County, CA jail narrowly voted against joining NUHW, 16-17. 23 electricians and elevator mechanics at Princeton University voted 9-12 against joining SEIU Local 175 (unlike the locksmiths above). Per the NLRB site, 18 workers at The Harvest Center gardening shop in Eugene, OR voted 0-2 on joining UFCW Local 555, but I’m surprised they would have so few voters and no pro-union votes, so I wouldn’t be shocked if this is an NLRB data entry error (as happens not infrequently). 12 workers at blood bank Vitalant in Rapid City, SD deadlocked 5-5 on joining Teamsters Local 120, tie goes to the company; it was only the sixth NLRB election in the state in the past five years. Five drivers for EquipmentShare.com, Inc., in Columbia, MO voted 1-3 not to join Teamsters Local 833. 

Decertifications and raids: The NLRB data is unclear, but it looks like 57 workers at hardware wholesaler Blish-Mize in Atchison, KS decertified Teamsters Local 696 in a 14-26 vote. 25 workers at Bob’s Discount Furniture in Manchester, NH voted to stick with UFCW Local 1445 in a 14-9 vote against decertification.

Security guards: 98 “armed and unarmed child and family protection care specialists” working out of a site in Phoenix which is an unmarked building on Google Street View are joining the SPFPA.

The Board officially counted ballots in the one Starbucks store that already voted but where results were in limbo after ballots were challenged… and there is now a second officially-unionized corporate-run Starbucks in the US, in Hamburg, NY (outside Buffalo); the final count of 46 eligible voters was 15-9 for the union.

Staffers at union-adjacent firm Concerted Action are seeking voluntary recognition with the Washington Baltimore News Guild.

The New York Times had two really astoundingly good pieces on new union organizing this week, and I’d encourage you to read them both. First, from Noam Scheiber on the Starbucks organizing drive and the ways in which Bernie, and DSA, and other progressive millennial/zoomer influences have seeded the very fertile ground for Workers United. And second, this jaw-droppingly good piece by Vanessa Veselka about the organizing efforts at a nursing home in Springfield, OR, who you’ll remember went on a failed recognition strike early last year with SEIU Local 503.

In Bessemer, AL, ballots will mail to Amazon warehouse workers to vote on whether or not to join the RWDSU, almost exactly a year after the last time ballots mailed. One big difference? Statistically speaking, since Amazon enjoys 150% annual turnover, this will be an entirely new set of workers voting, making it that much more of an uphill battle.