STRIKES & NEGOTIATIONS

K-12: After eight school days, the Sacramento K-12 strike by the local teachers union and SEIU Local 1021 is over. Among other things, the workers won 4% annual pay raises and increased sick time for COVID. Teachers in Palatine & Schaumburg, IL have authorized a strike in case they can’t reach a deal by the time their contract expires in June. Teachers in Dover, NH are organizing a “work to rule” for the next two weeks, as the school board refuses to enact an agreed-upon wage increase; work to rule is particularly effective in K-12 education, where the norm is working past work hours on lesson planning, grading, parent outreach, cleaning up the classroom, and so forth. After two years of bargaining, Springfield, MA paraprofessionals have a new contract with an $18/hour starting wage. Similarly in Allentown, PA, teachers have a new contract after almost two years without, bringing up their starting salaries to the mid-50k range; still the second lowest in the Lehigh Valley. In Long Beach, CA, teachers are at an impasse with the school board, over a 4 versus 6% raise; with the new inflation numbers out at 8.5%, I don’t imagine the union will be eager to give in on this one.

Higher ed: 350 dining, grounds, and janitorial workers with AFSCME Local 1110 at Illinois State University have put in their ten day strike notice, and are ready to walk off the job as soon as April 18th. 700 adjunct faculty at Mercy College in Dobbs Ferry, NY have also authorized a strike.

265 manufacturing workers with UAW Local 1472 who make kitchen equipment for Vollrath in Sheboygan, WI struck after their contract expired on April 1st. One of the big demands? The elimination of tiers. I haven’t seen any local news reporting on what’s in the final deal they ratified, but the fight against two-tier appears to be alive and well.

Talks are back on between Steelworkers Local 5 and Chevron in Richmond, CA, where 500 workers have been on strike for weeks. Meanwhile, Justin Miller at the Texas Observer has finally written the deep-dive piece that the 10-month Exxon lockout of 600 Steelworkers in Beaumont, TX deserves.

The Teamsters Local 174 concrete strike in Seattle has ended, in a way that seems pretty depressing: workers are back on the job without a deal. Especially after five months on strike, that stings. We’ll see if anything moves at the table.

IBEW Local 1220 workers at the WTTW TV station in Chicago are back on the job after 23 days on the picket line; the agreement includes language to “partially protect” the bargaining unit size, as fears of subcontracting and undermining the union were part of what provoked the strike.

Starbucks workers with Workers United in Overland Park, KS struck this week, as did their counterparts in Maryville, WA. It is pretty remarkable that these locations are striking before they even win their union votes, which makes these not quite recognition strikes but a level of militancy that is just extremely rare, or at least was before this campaign. Just another under-appreciated way in which this campaign has shifted the sense of what’s possible in the labor movement. Starbucks is clearly expecting more of this, putting out a job posting for a new top HR person with strike contingency planning experience.

Grocery: Several big grocery strikes did not happen last week, with major deals announced at the last minute in both Southern California (where 40,000 or so workers were set to walk off across seven UFCW locals) and East Texas (where 17,000 Kroger workers with UFCW Local 455 were once again on the precipice of a strike, for the third or fourth time during the pandemic). In both cases, the deals are now headed to ratification by the membership, but I haven’t seen any reason to think they won’t be approved. In the meantime, in Washington, UFCW Local 3000 (formerly Locals 21 and 1439) and Teamsters Local 38 have entered negotiations covering 30,000 grocery workers, and already have a date for info pickets as Kroger stonewalls basic requests. The big issue? Wages.

The contract covering 30,000 building services workers with 32BJ SEIU in New York City expires on April 20th and union leadership is openly voicing pessimism about the state of negotiations.

Hospitals: 300 nurses and hospital workers with the DC Nurses Association held a one-day strike against Howard University Hospital in DC. Meanwhile, in Palo Alto, CA, nearly 5,000 nurses with the independent union CRONA have authorized a strike over a contract that expired at the end of March; they’ll need to give ten days notice before walking off the job. In Escondido, CA, healthcare workers with NNU at Palomar Medical Center held a speak-out against management’s declaring of impasse during bargaining covering 3,000 nurses and hospital workers in two bargaining units.

Even podcasters are ready to walk! The Parcast Union (part of WGAE) has been in negotiations with Spotify for a year and a half, and is frustrated about pay, diversity, and intellectual property provisions.

Vice ran a piece about the BNSF rail carrier’s egregious “Hi-Viz” attendance policy that has been driving longtime railroaders with BMWE and SMART-TD out of the industry, and which the courts have more or less said the unions can’t strike over without massive state reprisal.

The Metal Trades Council (comprised of the Boilermakers, Laborers Local 737, Operating Engineers Local 701, Teamsters Local 162, UA Local 290, IBEW Local 48, and Machinists Lodge 63) at the shipyard in Portland voted to authorize a strike a couple weeks back and held a community rally this weekend to bring some more heat.

Also rallying were those Senate cafeteria workers with UNITE HERE Local 23 in DC. The rally featured some prominent supporters who apparently secured the funding to avoid 80 of these workers getting laid off.

400 New Haven, CT municipal workers with AFSCME Local 884 have gone over two years without a contract, and are enlisting the support of local politicians to make it happen.

POLITICS & LEGISLATION

NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo is at it again this week, dropping some extremely consequential memos. First, that captive audience meetings, where an employer forces workers to listen to propaganda against the union, or corners a worker on the job to convince them to vote no, are against the law. Second, that it’s time to reinstate the Joy Silk doctrine, by which a union is only not recognized when there’s some good faith reasons to doubt that it has majority support among the workers; not just when the boss would like to drag the union into a weeks- or months-long campaign. The second memo actually contains several important recommendations, though it’s not totally clear when these things might go into effect; they have to be taken up by the Board itself, and I think applied through case law, meaning they have to find cases on which to rule in this direction.

OK, I’m just going to go ahead and betray my ignorance on how courts exactly work and just say, this Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision being cheered on by mega union-busting firm Proskauer seems bad even if I don’t fully understand the implications… but it sounds like the courts are moving even further in the direction of incentivizing employers to just wait out unions so that when contracts expire they can fully do whatever they want, as opposed to having to bargain over certain changes even when the contract isn’t technically still in effect. Cue the labor lawyers kindly explaining to me why I have misconstrued this thing.

INTERNAL UNION POLITICS

Stuart Appelbaum has a challenger for the top spot in the RWDSU, with a heavy focus on allegations of corruption and the unions’ falling membership numbers. I have no clue if this is a credible challenge, but always notable when someone runs against the top incumbent of a union, especially with a public-facing website.

Speaking of leadership challenges, after the very contentious WGAE elections last year, there seems to have been an internal detente and restructuring of the union, potentially alleviating the turmoil around whether the union should keep expanding among digital newsrooms or stick to their legacy TV jurisdiction.

Ballots have mailed in the election for the leadership of the United Federation of Teachers, where the opposition groups to the forever-incumbent Unity Caucus have joined forces to vie for the leadership of the largest local union of the AFT (and arguably the largest local union in the country, if you don’t count mega-amalgamated “locals” that don’t really function like local unions in some key respects).

NEW ORGANIZING

New union election filings are up 57% year-over-year, per the NLRB. Something approaching 10% of those are from Starbucks alone.

New election filings at the NLRB: 500 faculty members at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA are organizing with the California Federation of Teachers. 479 Starbucks workers at 17 stores filed for elections with Workers United in: Chicago; St. Louis (x2); Boston; Pittsburgh (x2); Sun Valley, CA; Colorado Springs; Stevensville, Olney, Bel Air, and Nottingham, MD; Oklahoma City and Norman, OK; Warwick, RI; Denton, TX; Cottonwood Heights, UT; and Boone, NC. 350 transit workers for mega contractor MV Transportation, which now runs the MTA in Baltimore, are organizing with ATU Local 1764. 125 techs at Phelps Memorial Hospital in Sleepy Hollow, NY are unionizing with 1199 SEIU; the 400+ nurses and others at the hospital filed separately last week. 120 workers at Tower Behavioral Health in Reading, PA are organizing with SEIU Local 668.

Small shops: 62 staffers at good government non-profit Common Cause in DC are unionizing with the Washington Baltimore News Guild. 60 commercial building cleaners for HamHed in DC are organizing with Laborers Local 572. 55 workers at Mauser Packaging in Chicago are unionizing with UFCW Local 1546 (Teamsters Local 705 tried and failed to organize the dispatchers last year). 42 legal staffers at the Center for Appellate Litigation in NYC are unionizing with UAW Local 2325, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. 41 dispensary workers for Rise in Joliet, IL are unionizing with Teamsters Local 777. 40 workers for UPS Healthcare, which is a healthcare-specific logistics arm of the global delivery giant that I guess is not already organized, or at least not completely, are organizing with Teamsters Local 439 in Stockton, CA. 36 sheet metal workers for SCH Sheet Metal in Ronkonkoma, NY are unionizing with IUJAT Local 355, one of the bigger sometimes-company unions.

Tiny shops: 20 social services workers at the Northeastern Family Institute in Winooski, VT are organizing with the Vermont NEA. 16 gutter salesmen and installers for Leaf Guard in Springfield, IL are unionizing with Laborers Local 477. Ten building engineers for data center operator Digital Realty in NYC are joining Operating Engineers Local 30. Seven school bus clericals for First Student in Belvidere, IL are joining Teamsters Local 325. Seven more transit workers in Baltimore, but for Transdev (so I assume this is the paratransit service or some other non-MTA thing), are also joining ATU Local 1764. Six techs at an Acura dealership in Escondido, CA are joining Machinists Local 1484. Six housekeeping workers at a nursing home in Mountain Top, PA are unionizing with AFSCME District Council 87. Four maintenance workers at the Children’s Research and Innovation Campus in DC are joining Operating Engineers Local 99. Three flight simulator techs for CAE in Midland City, AL are joining the Machinists. Three sprinklerfitters for Amteck in Lexington, KY are joining UA Local 669.

NLRB election wins…: A massive 3,823 graduate student workers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology voted 1785-912 to join the UE; if it weren’t for the Amazon Labor Union, this would be the largest NLRB win in years, and represents a membership bump for the UE of probably more than 10%. Several more Starbucks stores have unionized with Workers United, with the updated count at 16, as all three stores in Ithaca, NY, the 86-worker Roastery in NYC, a store in Overland Park, KS, and three more in the Buffalo area counted their ballots this week; over 150 other stores are waiting on election dates, and new announcements just keep rolling in. 60 workers for food service contractor Morrison in Lansing, MI voted 18-3 to join OPEIU Local 459. 49 ski patrollers for Mountain Capital Partners in Durango, CO voted 35-3 to join CWA Local 7781 (the United Ski Patrols of America). 46 social services workers for Care for the Homeless in The Bronx, NY voted 34-1 to join AFSCME DC37. 16 retail workers at Half Price Books in Greenwood, IN voted 9-7 to join UFCW Local 700, as that chain store organizing drive continues to spread and win. 14 dispensary workers at Spacebuds in Eugene, OR voted 5-4 to join UFCW Local 555; seven more at Root 66 in St. Louis voted 5-0 to join UFCW Local 655. Nine pharmacists at a CVS in Long Beach, CA voted 7-2 to join UFCW Local 324. All seven workers at crane contractor D.R. O’Donnell in Cortland, IL voted to join Operating Engineers Local 150, and all three fleet mechanics at Linde in Fife, WA voted to join Teamsters Local 313.

…and losses: 26 techs for notoriously anti-union telecom company Spectrum in North Windham, CT split right down the middle, 13-13, on joining IBEW Local 2323. Ten workers at fertilizer company Nitricity in San Francisco also split down the middle, 5-5, not joining the IWW.

Decertifications and raids: Though I don’t usually report decertification filings, big ones are notable: 170 workers who make Wishbone salad dressing for Conagra Brands in St. Elmo, IL are facing a bid to drop their union, UFCW Local 881. 156 workers for Refresco Beverage in Fort Worth, TX remain with Teamsters Local 997 after beating a decert vote, 84-49; their counterparts in New Jersey unionized with the UE last year. 44 utility workers at the Basic Electric Power Cooperative in Gillette, WY voted to stick with their union, IBEW Local 415, in a 27-16 vote.

Security guards: 73 police officers at Georgetown University with LEOSU are being raided by the SPFPA. 60 armed guards working under the DHS in the East Bay, CA are joining LEOS-PBA. SPFPA continues to unionize K-9 handlers, with 40 more in DC filing this week. 15 security guards at an air traffic control center in Fort Worth, TX are joining Federal Contract Guards of America. Eight security guards at an office building in DC are joining SPFPA.

Outside the NLRB: Over 800 faculty members at the Harrisburg (PA) Area Community Colleges (HACC) voted 335-198 to unionize under the Pennsylvania labor board with the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Massachusetts state legislative staff are pushing for voluntary union recognition through IBEW Local 2222, who represents MA & NH Democratic Party staffers; their federal counterparts in Congress are still pushing for the same, as More Perfect Union reports. Teamsters Local 145 is bringing charges to the Connecticut labor board against the city of Shelton, CT, which it says illegally prevented workers from unionizing. The Union of Grinnell (Iowa) Student Dining Workers won a neutrality and election agreement from Grinnell College administration that could grow their union from 150 to 750 members.

The NLRB has finally ruled on “the Memphis 7”; seven Starbucks workers fired for organizing at a Memphis location, which provoked national protests, but what felt like a sluggish response from the Board in a campaign that’s moving at a speed unheard of for the 21st Century NLRB. The Board says the firings were illegal, which, yeah, but the question remains what is the Board willing to do to stop the tactic from spreading, as it has throughout the company, with activists fired in Buffalo, North Carolina, Arizona, and elsewhere.

Finally, Jeff Bezos has been diagnosed with a critical case of sore loser syndrome, whining to the NLRB all the reasons the Amazon Labor Union cheated by organizing in Staten Island. One of the reasons you know this is bullshit is because all of the ULPs were filed after the vote, which Amazon thought they would win. Turns out they didn’t! Let’s all wish Jeff a speedy recovery. Other things worth reading on the ALU are, as always, Luis Feliz Leon in The American Prospect, Lauren Kaori Gurley at Vice, Alex Press at Jacobin, Josefa Velasquez in The City on the fight ahead, and Anna Betts at the Observer on the significance of this all taking place in Staten Island. And if you’d rather watch something, I highly recommend you take an hour to listen to the Amazon Labor Union leaders tell it in their own voices, on this call put on by EWOC and Jacobin, featuring a certain Senator.

Who Gets the Bird?

The week in US unions, April 2nd-9th, 2022