Tag: unionizing
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18 Tips from a Veteran Union Organizer
Workers need bread, but they need roses too. Labor unions generally focus on negotiating wages, benefits, fair work rules, and safety. That’s all very essential. But one thing we often fail to do is acknowledge workers’ need for recognition. People have dreams and values, along with a desire to be respected and to connect to…
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To Build our Power, We Must First Understand our Employer’s Power
While many unions do corporate research to design organizing or contract campaigns, it’s usually just a staff project. The members, and even local leaders, are expected to take marching orders from the staff team. This approach is backwards, write the authors. Their model involves members in the research right from the start, all the way…
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Beat the Heat: How US Workers Are Winning Fans, AC, and Even Heat Pay
In 2022, the latest year for which we have data, 43 U.S. workers lost their lives to heat on the job. That’s up from 36 in 2021, and we can expect this cruel number to keep climbing. But from warehouses to coffeehouses to construction sites, workers using solidarity and creative action—even without the protection of a union…
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Management Rights: A Pitfall When Negotiating Your First Contract
In the past year, retail and service sector workers have started organizing unions with success in companies like Starbucks and Amazon. The negotiation process for their first contracts is challenging, with employers seeking language that weakens the union. Management rights clauses have become a point of contention, as employers aim to limit union rights. Changes…
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How to Organize in High Turnover Jobs
By Jenny Brown for Labor Notes, published May 22nd 2023 Original article here. When the Amazon Labor Union first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over 1,000 of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.” The sky-high turnover at the…
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Independent, locally focused unions are expanding the playing field for workers’ rights
While union efforts at corporate giants have gained the most national attention, labor organizing is also happening in businesses less accustomed to unionization, including small restaurants, the video game industry, museums, newsrooms, theaters, the arts, and nonprofit organizations. These unions are on the front lines of developing new ways of operating to bring new groups…
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Three times Central American migrants bolstered the US labor movement
Elizabeth Oglesby, University of Arizona Tech workers, warehouse employees and baristas have notched many victories in recent months at major U.S. companies long deemed long shots for unions, including Apple, Amazon and Starbucks. To me, these recent union wins recall another pivotal period in the U.S. labor movement several decades ago. But that one was…
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Women and Labor: Key Struggles in the MENA Region
Embodying the intersection of gender and class, women trade union leaders are essential to the goals of ending gender violence and promoting women empowerment By Valentine M. Moghadam for ROAR Mag ow do women and gender equality measures advance in a context of conflict, climate change, high unemployment, low labor force participation, limited democratization and…
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Know, Hear, See: A Practical Organizing Concept
Part 1 and Part 2 originally published by The Industrial Worker, found online in the Southern Maine IWW Library: Weakening the Dam Part 1 Know the Union, Hear the Union, See the Union On a 100 degree summer day I was in Stockton, at the Sikh temple meeting room. A middle aged trucker with a…
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Every Boss has a Weak Spot. Find it and Use it.
By Alexandra Bradbury, Jane Slaughter and Mark Brenner for LaborNotes This article is excerpted from the Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer, available for $15 at labornotes.org/secrets. Steel production in the late 1800s used to require one crucial step: a 20-minute process called the “blow” that removed impurities, strengthening the metal. It was not unheard…
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