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
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.
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.