The past week in US unions, October 2nd-8th, 2022

STRIKES & NEGOTIATIONS

The rail negotiations that just three weeks ago were national headlines have slowed to a trickle of news, by design, but are not yet over. This week’s small update is that a fourth of the dozen rail unions has voted to ratify their tentative agreement, with the ATDA voting by 64% to accept the deal. Three more unions should announce their results next week, with the BMWE being the big one (and one of the more likely to reject it, though members have lots of different opinions on what they expect to see). Members are still raising questions about the process so far, with at least one local chairman in the Machinists District Lodge 19 writing a scathing letter to that union’s leadership about their process.

In Alabama, the week saw two big work stoppages, one outside this newsletter’s normal purview, with male prisoners across the state refusing to work to push for reforms of life sentencing, parole, and time served. The other is a lockout of 450 Steelworkers members at WestRock’s Cottonton, AL paper mill; the workers rejected a contract offer with an eye-watering $28,000 ratification bonus, as they hold out for penalties on excessive overtime. This week also marked 18 months on the picket line for UMWA strikers at Warrior Met; Erick Wills wrote about it for Labor Notes.

Mill workers outside of Alabama made news this week as well, as 1100 Weyerhaeuser Machinists in Longview, WA voted to reject a new offer from the company, continuing their weeks-long strike.

Education: In higher ed, the Clark University Teamsters Local 170 grad workers won a tentative agreement after five days on strike; University of Chicago grad workers are pushing once again for union recognition, this time with the UE (they were previously affiliated with the AFT). The Cook County College Teachers Union in Chicago has authorized a strike at the city’s public colleges, and I assume the UAW Local 7902 adjuncts at New York University in NYC will announce the same, as their strike vote ended Friday – ditto for the 1500 blue collar Teamsters Local 320 members at the University of Minnesota. AFSCME Local 3650, better known as the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers in Cambridge, MA are under an indefinite contract extension as their contract expired at the end of September. Teamsters Local 2010 has a new tentative agreement for 11,000 clericals at the University of California system. In K-12 negotiations, workers are at an impasse in negotiations in Neshaminy, PA and Medford, MA, and have been working without a contract for nine months in New Castle, PA. In Montgomery County, MD, the district refuses to allow open bargaining, so negotiations can’t even agree on ground rules; not a good sign for a smooth round of bargaining.

About 530 Teamsters remain on strike at Sysco in Syracuse, NY and Plympton, MA, with Freightwaves speculating it could be a long fight. No movement in AFSCME Local 397’s strike at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, either; you can donate to the latter’s strike fund here. Elsewhere in mid-Atlantic AFSCME art museum organizing, workers at Baltimore’s Walters Art Museum are trying to win an election, but management apparently won’t agree to a non-NLRB process that would allow security guards to be part of the unit.

The NewsGuild, Teamsters Local 205/211, and GCC-IBT Local 24M/9N struck the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this week in response to unilateral changes to healthcare and the fact that workers haven’t had a contract for over five years, and haven’t seen a raise in sixteen years.

Around 1,000 Milwaukee transit workers with ATU Local 998 have voted to reject management's "best and final" contract offer by 97%, and have authorized a strike.

Some 2,000 UAW Local 1069 members at Boeing in Philadelphia may or not be close to a strike; there’s been zero coverage that I’ve been able to find, but having spoken to members, the union did authorize a strike in August, and the contract has now officially expired, and the local’s website even lists picket locations, all of which point to a level of seriousness worth keeping an eye on.

Around 250 janitors for Meta in the Bay Area are on strike with SEIU Local 87 and SEIU USW, against increasing layoffs (and thus increasing strain on the remaining workers). Of course, 2,000 NUHW mental healthcare workers at Kaiser in the area (and about 50 more in Hawaii) remain on strike after nearly two months. Elsewhere in northern California, members of IFPTE Local 21 and SEIU Local 1021 held a “strike school” in Solano County, CA, as county workers prepare to strike perhaps as soon as their contracts expire on October 21st. In nearby South San Francisco, 120 city workers with AFSCME Local 829 ratified a TA after having authorized a strike.

Starbucks Workers United struck in Buffalo again in the wake of a ridiculous firing, in Houston against the national firing wave, in Ithaca, NY and Columbia, SC for the company’s unilateral decision to drop COVID isolation pay, and Amazon workers in the Inland Empire, CA have started a strike countdown to the company’s so-called “Prime Day” on October 10th.

Steelworkers negotiations with US Steel at the company’s mines in northern Minnesota are not going well, to put it lightly; or, as a union rep told the local news, “we’re in the middle of a contract war.” The workers want the pattern set by Cleveland-Cliffs as negotiations were settled in recent weeks. The local reporter graciously accepted the union’s explanation of the popular “FDB” acronym being used as standing for “Fair Deal Burritt,” as in, US Steel CEO Dave Burritt, not as in some other “F Dave Burritt” acronym. Elsewhere in the USW, 400 workers at Graphic Packaging in Domino, TX with Steelworkers Locals 1148 and 1149 authorized a strike against two-tier pay back in June over a contract that expired back in April, but the union says a strike is still not imminent.

12,000 Kroger workers with UFCW Local 1059 across Ohio voted, and voted, and voted, and finally they got it right, ratifying a contract yesterday whose major selling point appeared to be that you wouldn’t have to keep voting. The union also made sure to combine a question to re-authorize a strike (which members already voted to do two weeks ago) with your vote on the contract, and invoked the UFCW constitution’s rule that unless 2/3rds of voting members reject the contract, the strike is not authorized. The workers I’ve been in touch with say they’re demoralized by the extremely weak contract and deflating process by which it was finally passed. Sigh.

Elsewhere in large grocery contracts, something like 17,000 Teamsters will be voting on the first-ever national Costco contract (though that achievement maybe overstates it, as it’s just joining the west coast and east coast contracts, as I understand it). I would expect it to be less controversial than the Ohio Kroger contract, but god knows I’ve been wrong before.

Yet another airline contract has been submitted for federal mediation, this time that of ALPA pilots at FedEx Express. This is somewhere between checking a box and declaring light impasse, but worth tracking. Elsewhere in airports, UNITE HERE Local 100 info picketed at Newark airport’s Lufthansa lounge.

POLITICS & LEGISLATION

Dave Jamieson at the Huffington Post has a very useful piece breaking down what’s at stake in Glacier Northwest, the case the Supreme Court just announced it plans to hear during this session. In the most dire reading, we could be headed towards a scenario in which private sector unions are liable for damages incurred by an employer during a strike, which depending how you slice it would basically make effective strikes impossible, since the vast majority of the leverage workers hold is in inflicting economic pain on employers. But it’s early days yet, and as always, it depends how narrowly or broadly the court rules. Not something I’d like to bet the future of all private sector strike activity on, though.

But if you can’t wait six to nine months for bad news, may I offer up the Missouri state supreme court’s ruling that reverses a decision to undo some of the worst of an anti-union law? My understanding is that this reintroduces the repeal of just cause for state employees.

The NLRB ruled this week that dues checkoff provisions should be considered part of the status quo that can’t be unilaterally changed once a contract expires.

INTERNAL UNION POLITICS

The Valley Labor Report had researcher Chris Bohner on to talk about his fantastic report, Labor’s Fortress of Finance. Bohner’s report is one of the rare wide-ranging deeply-researched critical takes on the labor movement as a whole that both activists and leadership alike should take a long hard look at. You can find it here.

The UFCW reform effort “Essential Workers for a Democratic UFCW” has launched a new website with lots of resources on their diagnosis of what the union’s getting wrong and a slate of resolutions they hope to pass at the 2023 convention.

In the wake of the trusteeship of AFSCME Local 1549 in NYC, the 1600 911 dispatchers in the local are looking to break away. Props to The City for this kind of coverage; it’s the kind of union inside baseball that doesn’t get much attention but I obviously find fascinating.

NEW ORGANIZING

Big picture, the NLRB released its report on its past fiscal year, which just ended, and I think it’s worth emphasizing where we’re generally at: new filings are up 53% over last year, and ULP filings are up 19% from last year, so it’s really true that we’re in the middle of a local uptick in NLRB activity. But those are very local upticks; there were more new filings in 2016 than in the past year, and that was no high-water mark. I think one way to think about what’s happening is that pre-pandemic we were at the beginning of a rising tide of union activity (2018, with the mass teachers strikes, was the striking-est year since 1986, and October 2019 had far more workers on strike than in so-called “Striketober” of 2021) that was interrupted by COVID and is now resuming; I recall C.M. Lewis making this argument on Twitter but can’t track down our original back and forth about it. Maybe the biggest takeaway from the NLRB report is that they’ve lost half their field staff in the past 20 years, and have had stagnant funding for the past nine; if we’re going to route new union activity through an administrative bureaucracy, it being under-resourced is going to become an existential problem.

New election filings at the NLRB: 625 RNs at Ascension Via Christi St. Francis in Wichita, KS are organizing with NNU. 250 workers who make electric switch products for ABB in Albuquerque are organizing with IBEW Local 611. 220 workers for live production staffing agency Rhino Staging in San Diego are unionizing with IATSE Local 122. 213 workers at the Maria Regina Residence nursing home in Brentwood, NY are organizing with 1199 SEIU, as are 23 workers at New Jewish Home Sara Neuman nursing home in Mamaroneck, NY. 200 technicians involved in PGA Tour golf tournament telecasts are organizing with the IBEW. 102 staffers at San Francisco homeless services non-profit Glide Foundation are unionizing with OPEIU Local 29. 80 home health care aides with Schofield Home Health Care in Kenmore, NY are unionizing with 1199 SEIU. 70 truck drivers with USPS freight contractor Ten Roads Express out of Peoria, IL are organizing with APWU. 54 high school educators at a KIPP charter school in St. Louis are unionizing with AFT Local 420. 50 EMTs for Bangs Ambulance in Ithaca, NY are organizing with CSEA Local 1000. 50 workers at Seattle recycling startup Ridwell are unionizing with Teamsters Local 117. 49 natural gas inspectors with STORTI in NYC and Northern New Jersey are unionizing with CWA. 44 Starbucks workers at two more stores, in Seaside, CA and Fayetteville, AR, have filed for elections with Workers United. 42 school bus drivers for Dattco in New Haven, CT are unionizing with UFCW Local 371. 40 hospice nurses for the St. Charles Health System in Oregon are organizing with the Oregon Nurses Association. The 36 photo editors for the Wall Street Journal are unionizing with NewsGuild Local 1096. 29 staffers at San Antonio arts non-profit Say Si are unionizing with United Professional Organizers. 23 staffers at behavioral health non-profit Zepf Center in Toledo, OH are joining SEIU 1199 WV/KY/OH. 19 stagehands at the Englert Civic Theatre in Iowa City, IA are unionizing with IATSE Local 690. 17 workers at the historic Allandale Farm in Brookline, MA are forming what looks like an independent union. Five building services workers at Chelsea, NYC’s Jardim condo complex are joining 32BJ SEIU. Three mechanics for Reyes Fleet Management in Stockton, CA are joining Teamsters Local 439. Two respiratory service techs at the US Army Post in Redstone Arsenal, AL are joining Operating Engineers Local 320. 

NLRB election wins…: 101 school bus drivers for First Student in New Britain, CT joined Teamsters Local 671 in a 53-40 vote, as did sixteen more in Manchester, CT, 5-0. 78 truck drivers for wholesale beverage distributor Republic in Houston voted 55-12 to join Teamsters Local 988. The Michigan Nurses Association logged an impressive 51-0 win among 70 RNs at the Upper Peninsula’s Bell Hospital in Ishpeming, MI. 60 mostly clerical workers for the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers in Ewing, NJ voted narrowly to join CWA, 29-27. 46 workers at Communication Service for the Deaf in Syracuse, NY also pitched a no-hitter, winning 34-0 to join CWA. 11 oil terminal operators for Vopak in San Pedro, CA voted 7-1 to join Teamsters Local 848. Eight workers at construction equipment dealer Sunbelt Rentals in Taylor, MI voted 7-0 to join Operating Engineers Local 324. Seven massage therapists at Elements Massage in Denver voted 4-0 to join UFCW Local 7. Six workers for Lyons Fire & Safety in Danville, IN voted 3-1 to join UA Local 669. Six maintenance workers at PNC banks in Indiana voted 5-1 to join Operating Engineers Local 399. All five rigger jump masters (no I don’t know what that is) at the STRAT Hotel in Vegas voted to join IATSE Local 720. Both subcontracted data entry clerks at the Intelligence Community Campus in Bethesda, MD voted to join Operating Engineers Local 99. 

…and losses: SEIU Local 509 narrowly lost an election among 99 workers at Communitas, who provide services for adults with disabilities, in a 44-51 vote. In the week’s only Starbucks Workers United tally, 24 workers in Seattle deadlocked 4-4. 17 workers at Ironwood Fabrication in La Habra, CA voted 4-7 not to join the Iron Workers. 14 workers at a Ford dealership in DeKalb, IL voted 2-11 against joining Machinists Local 701. 13 workers at gluten free bakery Natural Decadence in Eureka, CA voted 4-5 against joining UFCW Local 5. Nine workers at an electric vehicle automaker Lucid Motors showroom voted 1-6 against unionizing with UFCW Local 135. The eight meat department workers at Albertson’s in Lewistown, MT voted 1-5 against joining UFCW Local 1889. 

Decertifications and raids: 161 mental healthcare workers for Telecare in Long Beach, CA stuck with SEIU UHW in a 83-37 de-cert vote. 51 workers who make gypsum building products for Gold Bond (no connection to the powder as far as I can tell) in Burlington, NJ decertified Steelworkers Local4-380 in a 14-28 vote. Unclear whether it’s a raid or just a turf war, but 39 employees subcontracted out from I believe CT Transit in Hamden, CT voted 17-9 (and one sole anti-union vote) to join Teamsters Local 443 over ATU Local 281. 30 workers for Covanta Plymouth Renewable Energy in Conshohocken, PA stuck with Operating Engineers Local 542, 21-5. 

Staff at the Pineapple Street podcast production company are asking for voluntary recognition with WGAE.

Charlottesville, VA is the latest public sector jurisdiction in Virginia to pass a collective bargaining law, combined with a raise for bus drivers. In Alexandria, VA where a similar ordinance was passed a year and a half ago, nearly 200 city workers are now members of AFSCME Local 3001. Elsewhere in the public sector, the National Park Service is facing a complaint from AFGE that management illegally initiated the decertification of a unit of workers along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia and North Carolina.

At the National Mediation Board, 320 ramp workers for Sun Country Airlines at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport filed to join Teamsters Local 970, and 11 dispatchers for charter airline Omni Air voted 10-1 to join TWU.

But our “next PATCO” is increasingly unlikely to come from the federal government. Instead it’s unfolding in the harsh light of day, during a midterm election season in which Democrats are under the existential threat of further losing even more of the US working class, at the biggest-name companies with the most prominent organizing drives. Amid a spate of fires, and safety walkouts in response, Amazon has suspended nearly 100 workers with the Amazon Labor Union in Staten Island, NY; Starbucks is firing Workers United leaders with abandon; Google is firing workers for affiliating with the Alphabet Workers Union; GE has fired a pregnant woman for trying to unionize with IUE-CWA in Auburn, AL; Apple is busting unions before they are born; as is Chipotle. The thing about PATCO is there wasn’t a specific policy change, but rather a re-setting of norms amid mass firings in the public sector that emboldened private sector bosses to take their kill shots against unions across industries, inaugurating the mass de-unionization wave that defines our contemporary labor movement. This time around, CEOs aren’t looking for a bat signal, but are taking increasingly illegal actions against workers and making sure, step by step, that they can get away with it. If we don’t have an answer for this illegal behavior that leads to short-term gains and protections for a broad number of workers, whether through worker activity or political intervention, there’s not much point in filing hundreds or thousands of new NLRB petitions. A union that can’t win won’t be a union for long.