NEW ORGANIZING
NLRB new organizing filings this week:
Security: SEIU Local 105 and the Law Enforcement Officers Security Union-PBA are both going after 260 security guards in Denver. The Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America Local 725 and the Law Enforcement Officers Security Union-PBA are fighting over 28 border patrol guards in Laredo, Texas. The Security, Police, and Fire Professionals of America seeks to represent 25 security guards in Honolulu.
Healthcare: SEIU Healthcare Wisconsin is organizing a wall-to-wall unit of 240 healthcare workers at ThedaCare Regional Medical Center in Appleton, Wisconsin. AFSCME Council 65 is organizing 31 healthcare workers at the Lake Region Healthcare Cancer Care and Research Center in Fergus Falls, MN. SEIU Healthcare PA is organizing 27 CNAs and service workers at Lakeview Healthcare and Rehab in Smethport, PA, and 3 RNs in a separate unit. SEIU 1199-NE is organizing 24 LPNs at a nursing home in Woodbridge, Connecticut, as well as 17 nurses at Touchpoints Rehab in Bloomfield, CT; Teamsters Local 671 is intervening in the latter. Eight maintenance workers at South Shore Hospital in Chicago are joining the Operating Engineers. Four healthcare workers at Nellis Airforce Base in Nevada are organizing with Machinists Lodge 711.
Food: Eighty five kosher grocery store workers at Gourmet Glatt Market in Borough Park, Brooklyn are organizing either with Local 17-18 of the United Production Workers Union, or Local 713 of the International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, both of which sound made up and I’ve never heard of but definitely have websites. Thirty five drivers with Reinhart Foodservice in Warren, Michigan, are organizing with Teamsters Local 337. Teamsters Local 916 is organizing 26 workers at a Pepsi bottling plant in Rochester, Illinois. Teamsters Local 688 is organizing 25 workers at Smith Foods, a Midwestern dairy products company, in Pacific, Missouri.
Weed: Thirty three workers at Windy City Cannabis in Chicago are organizing with UFCW Local 881. Nine weed dispensary workers at Cape Ann Cannabis in Newburyport, MA are joining UFCW Local 1445, while nine other weed dispensary workers at Liberty Dispensary in Springfield, MA are joining UFCW Local 1459.
Transportation: Twenty five airport cleaners with subcontractor Airway at the Philly airport are organizing with the United Construction Trades and Industrial Employees (ever heard of them?) Local 621. ATU Local 1743 is organizing five drivers with First Transit in Houston, PA. Teamsters 166 is organizing two motor vehicle mechanics at the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Barstow, California.
Skilled trades: Nineteen refrigeration techs at Hussmann Corp in Colorado are organizing with Pipefitters Local 208. Carpenters Local 1005 is organizing nine construction workers in Crown Point, Indiana. Teamsters Local 665 is expanding a small unit by 10 yard workers at two Shamrock Materials concrete suppliers in San Rafael and Cotati, California. Two maintenance techs are organizing with IBEW 953 at Pablo Management in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
Education: Eighteen “Residential Desk Coordinators” at Drexel University in Philadelphia are joining Teamsters Local 115.
NLRB election wins..: 175 workers at Newburg Egg (“the premier provider of egg resources) in Woodridge, NY joined UFCW Local 342 after a 20-16 low-turnout vote. Fifty two weed edible processing workers (but not the gardeners) at JDRC (also known as Cresco) in Lincoln, Illinois voted to join UFCW Local 881. Twenty two drivers for Airgas in Grand Prairie, Texas voted 15-6 to join Teamsters Local 745. Seventeen drivers and warehouse workers at AMS, a roofing supply company in Las Vegas, voted 7-1 to join Teamsters Local 663. Thirteen cement masons at a flooring installation company in Snohomish, WA voted 5-0 to join Operative Plasterers and Cement Masons Local 528. Six equipment operators with Conco Quarries in Springfield, MO voted 5-0 to join Heavy Construction Laborers LIUNA Local 663. Four people who do something related to simulations and geospatial something or other for at the Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico have voted 2-0 to join Machinists Lodge 794.
...and losses: Eight sanitation workers at Recology in Auburn, California (the same employer where a handful of data specialists with the Seattle Teamsters authorized a strike a couple weeks back) voted 3-5 not to join Teamsters Local 150. Seven heavy equipment techs at PacWest Machinery in Kent, Washington, remain non-union after voting 1-5 against joining Operating Engineers Local 302.
Forty drivers and clerks at MV Transportation in Selma, California had a three-way ballot between ATU Local 1027, Teamsters Local 890, and “neither,” and from what I can tell, seventeen workers voted: 8 for ATU, 8 for the Teamsters, and 1 for neither. Some NLRB expert can tell me what happens next.
Outside the NLRB: EMILY’s List staffers joined OPEIU Local 2. Journalists at every Marxist’s favorite news outlet, the Financial Times, are joining the WGAE.
Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama have their NLRB vote set and scheduled. With the absolutely broken NLRB system, even getting to a vote is something of a victory, though onlookers are not optimistic, to put it gently. Amazon successfully lobbied to expand the eligible voting population from the 1500 workers the RWDSU filed to represent to a whopping 6200 workers, including folks who were there seasonally or temporarily and no longer actually, you know, work at Amazon. This plus having the world’s richest person on the other side of a totally stacked deck makes a victory feel kind of not-gonna-happen-ish. The most cynical among us might say this is the union movement’s latest loping effort to organize the South and will meet the fate of the Canton Nissan drive, the Chattanooga Volkswagen drive, and the Charleston Boeing drive. Voting starts on February 8th, is conducted by mail (which is probably better for RW than in-person, but Amazon has plenty of cash to direct-mail every voter), and we should know the results in late March, I believe. To be clear, GO RWDSU!
Members of the new Desert Sun NewsGuild in the Coachella Valley spoke out about the whys and hows of forming their union.
STRIKES & BARGAINING
Over a thousand Teamsters of Local 202 in the Bronx are striking the Hunts Point Terminal Market, a massive produce distribution site. The workers are looking for a $1/hour raise, plus increased health care contributions to maintain current costs, which the thirty employers at the Market countered with 32 cents. It’s a 24/7 picket since Sunday, and in the early hours of January 19th, the morning after Martin Luther King Day, NYPD descended on the line and arrested picketers. Apparently, upon their release from jail, the strikers went straight back to the line. The employers are likely feeling some kind of pandemic-related economic squeeze, as are, of course, the workers. This is the first big strike of 2021, a municipal election year in NYC, and a Teamsters election year, in which the President of Local 202, Dan Kane, Jr., is running for national office on the Teamsters United slate. As of printing, a bunch of electeds, including AOC, have gone to show their support, and NYC DSA seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in terms of building a strike fund and turning people out to the line. Go pay your respects at 772 Edgewater Road in the Bronx, if you’re in the Tri-State.
The New Yorker Union, a unit of the New York NewsGuild, is on a 24-hour strike in response to management’s extreme lowball around negotiating starting salaries. “However much we may love our jobs, that love is not enough to live on.”
The Chicago Teachers Union took a sort of strike vote on Wednesday, with the House of Delegates sending a vote to the membership to refuse to work in-person classes on Monday, and to authorize a strike if CPS decides to turn that into a lockout.
More K-12 updates: The Hawaii State Teachers Association says the state is violating federal law by trying to cut education funding, against the provisions of the federal stimulus bills. I definitely don’t know the ins and outs of education funding, but if this is a successful block on education austerity budgeting, it would be a big deal for K-12 unions everywhere. The Amherst-Pelham Education Association in Western Mass is talking unfair labor practice charges as the school district voted to partially reopen schools in February. Broward teachers are telling the district not to bring even more people back into school buildings. The Peabody (Massachusetts) Federation of Teachers is sick of its district’s “toxic positivity.” Minnesota teachers are still pushing for a delay in reopening. Rhode Island teachers want all students and staff vaccinated. Teachers in Chesapeake, Virginia, feel similarly. AFT West Virginia is still pushing for an injunction around reopening. The 600,000 member-strong New York State United Teachers, the heart of the AFT, is calling on the state to cancel their standardized testing, a perennial progressive priority, due to the pandemic. The Oklahoma City Teachers Union leadership is singing a different tune, praising the district for their protocols after previous protests around reopening; I wonder if members feel the same way.
Fight for $15 held a national “strike” in 15 cities, though as usual with FF15 it’s hard to assess which of these were more like demonstrations, and which were actual business-stopping interventions by workers who would otherwise be running the store (and how meaningful that distinction is, especially for small franchises of mega-corporations). The LA Times had a good retrospective on fast food worker organizing over the past year.
NLMK steelworkers in Western PA are getting community support to pay the bills as that strike -- now a lockout, primarily fueled by healthcare cost disputes -- nears the five-month mark.
Ski patrollers in Park City, Utah, are “just practicing,” with info pickets at ski resorts, as they hit a contract impasse with Vail Resorts over pay and sick leave. The United Professional Ski Patrols of America is Local 7781 of CWA.
Instacart is laying off thousands of workers -- you know, the ones who go grocery shopping for your grandma so she doesn’t get COVID and die -- including its only unionized workers. UFCW says some of them are getting as little as $250 in severance pay. Lauren Kaori Gurley has the story at Vice.
On COVID: IBEW on Long Island is pushing for its workers to be moved up in the vaccination wait list; part of their job is in-home repairs, so, yeah, let’s go ahead and vaccinate please. AFGE members at the VA widely report terrible COVID-19 protocols at the agency, with people not being informed of positive cases among coworkers or patients. IATSE is pushing for COVID vaccination sites at music venues. IAFF Local 1631 in Norwood, Massachusetts wants their fire chief out, partly over his non-handling of COVID-19. Harvard is ending its pandemic relief policies for hundreds of its lowest paid workers. Makes sense, since the pandemic is over. UNITE HERE Local 26 is organizing against the move.
Happy MLK Day -- management at the Miami New Times still won’t recognize it as a holiday in bargaining, says the NewsGuild.
POLITICS & LEGISLATION
Joe Biden wasted no time with some shake-ups at the NLRB on day one, with the ouster of General Counsel Peter Robb (who he first asked to resign, and then fired upon Robb’s refusal) and demoting Board Chair John Ring. The five-member Board retains a 3-1 GOP majority (with one vacancy) but unions appreciated the red meat. The NLRB is extremely broken, but still manages to tighten the screws with incredible consistency, and Robb in particular, with his role in the PATCO strike (which still stands out as the iconic inflection point of the US union movement’s decline). On day 2, Biden told OSHA to look into a COVID workplace safety rule, which falls a bit short of the emergency safety standard nurses and others have been pushing for ten months, but is a good sign. Another good sign is that he might make the former Steelworkers health and safety guy the head of OSHA.
32BJ is pushing the New Jersey legislature to raise employer contributions to health care costs for their members at the Newark airport.
The Clark County Education Association put together a report on the need for economic diversification in the Vegas area after the hospitality sector collapsed during the pandemic. CCEA is a big player in Nevada politics, but it’s interesting to see them putting out wide-ranging economic proposals that go far outside the classroom.
UNION LEADERSHIP
In the Firefighters leadership race, challenger Mahlon Mitchell picked up a big endorsement from the Chicago IAFF, whose President dropped out of the race two weeks ago. The IAFF convention is next week, and I wrote about the race here, if you missed it.
Nelson Lichtenstein has an absolutely great article at Labor Notes about the UAW democratic reforms, the history of democracy in that union, and on union democracy more generally. I really encourage everyone to read it.
Upon hearing that Biden planned to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline project, the subject of national controversy for the past decade, the UA issued a statement decrying the decision for its lost jobs and increased consumer prices. In other UA news, a Black UA member has brought a class action anti-discrimination suit in federal court against UA Pipeliners Local 798 for a long, sordid history of racism and misogyny. NPR has the story here.
The New Bedford, MA police union is missing a lot of money.
SAG-AFTRA is considering expelling Trump. (Fun fact: Trump is the second union member to become President, the first being Ronald Reagan. Both came out of SAG.)
One of the men who died at the failed insurrection at the Capitol was a vice president of his UFCW local in Alabama. Political education is fundamental, folks.
Abby Abrams has a really thoughtful article at TIME on the prospects and challenges unions are facing during this pandemic. I’m super curious to see whether the perceived uptick is reflected in the 2020 numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be releasing tomorrow.
Hey Jonah, enjoying the blog! I've also had an occasional interest in the shadowy world of tiny, almost uniformly-criminal, "independent" unions that seem especially prevalent in the NY-NJ-CT area. Two that you mention here, United Production Workers Union and the International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, rang a bell for me. With the help of some googling, I remembered where I had heard of UPWU before - back in 2008, now-defunct kosher meatpackers Agriprocessors was raided in one of the largest immigration raids ever. Agriprocessors by then was notorious for the use of anti-immigrant laws against its own workers. Around that same time, Agriprocessors employed UPWU as a company union in its Brooklyn facilities, to deflect the efforts of UFCW to unionize, as Steven Greenhouse reported in the Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/nyregion/01union.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&pagewanted=all
Agriprocessors was run by Sholom Rubashkin (who Trump let out of jail in 2017), and UPWU seems to have had a long-running association with the Rubashkin family. You can find NLRB decisions for UPWU-Rubashkin disputes going back to 1995. In 1994, a young Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a piece for the Atlantic detailing UPWU's yellow unionism in other Williamsburg textile facilities (article now only available via the blog of Shmarya Rosenberg, an embittered ex-Chasid: https://failedmessiah.typepad.com/failed_messiahcom/2008/09/the-agriprocess.html). You can see that the UPWU president quoted in Goldberg's reporting, Doug Isaacson, is still the president of UPWU today.
UPWU's rival at Glatt Market, the International Brotherhood of Trade Unions, is of the same cloth. IBTOU was led for many years by expelled Teamster and Genovese associate Robert Scalza. IBTOU is somehow or other affiliated with IUJAT, which claims to be the oldest union in the US, and is a very creepy outfit. For a period in the 90s-2000s, an IUJAT local called USWA scammed the AFL-CIO into affiliation. It was during this period that IUJAT tried to raid the staff of Saigon Grill, who were organizing pickets with the help of a worker center (this was all up the street from my freshman dorm at NYU). Twitter personality Gregory Butler wrote about the affair in 2011: http://gangboxnews.blogspot.com/2011/03/ In These Times provided a more mainstream account (but also talked to more workers): https://inthesetimes.com/article/new-yorkers-launch-sweatshop-free-campaign-amid-labor-strife-at-local
I had also never heard of the UCTIE, but a quick google search yielded a brief item from Greenhouse in 2000, where janitors employed by Muss Development stated that their employer had forced them to join UCTIE, and struck for recognition with a legitimate union.