These Unions Are on the Front Lines Fighting Against the Uberization of Us All: Some long established unions are challenging Silicon Valley’s agenda by pushing back on AI, surveillance, and wage theft.

• May 13, 2023
• Posted in Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

In the past year and a half, start-up unionization efforts such as those at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Apple have been satisfying to witness for those of us hungry for social justice in the United States. We have their backs, and we’ll continue to root for them. But the workers with the best chance of actually slowing the spread of oppressive technology (which aims to supplant humans with artificial intelligence and tries to maximize productivity by surveilling workers and controlling their time down to a fraction of a second) and stopping the Uberization of the workforce (which replaces full-time workers with contractors, turning good jobs into underpaid gigs with no benefits) are in unions that are already established. Read More

How Open Bargaining—and Not Letting Management Set the Ground Rules—Led to a Union Victory: In 2017, Kentucky became the most recent “right-to-work” state in the US. Which makes the recent victory by the Amalgamated Transit Union all the more significant.

• April 19, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

In this right-to-work state where only 7.9 percent of the workforce are covered by union contracts, the members of Local 1447 of the Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) beat back racist divide-and-conquer proposals by management last November to win a great contract. But their victory relied on method—not luck. Read the complete article here >> Read More

Getting to Contract: Negotiating and Winning Against the Odds: Workers learn governing power through high-participation negotiations. That’s also how they can get employers to the table.

• March 6, 2023
• Posted in Class Struggle, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, The Nation, Unions

Whether a union is new and independent or long-established, the questions of how to negotiate, and how to get to the bargaining table, represent strategic choices. Workers can’t begin the process of realizing the concrete gains that will lead to a better life—from ending torturous scheduling to achieving real cost-of-living wage increases to obtaining the health care and retirement plans everyone deserves—until they secure a first union contract. Read More

The Union Membership Rate Has Dropped to a Historic Low. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.: A new report offers a grim look at that the state of labor nationally, but that’s not the whole picture.

• January 22, 2023
• Posted in In These Times, Labor Movement, Mobilizing, Organizing, Strikes, Unions

Jane McAlevey’s quote in the article states the case clearly: Some advocates believe that focusing on building union power through worker organizing, rather than first seeking policy changes, holds the key to reversing the decline of union density.  Jane McAlevey, a senior policy fellow of with the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, puts the problem with union strategy bluntly: ​“It’s a lack of ambition and it’s risk aversion, but fundamentally, it’s a lack of faith in workers.” Read More

A Conversation about the Current UC strike and more: Union organizer and on-strike UC Academic Researcher Jane McAlevey and UC Labor Historian Nelson Lichtenstein

• November 30, 2022
• Posted in Class Struggle, Interviews, Labor Movement, Organizing, Strikes, Unions

[NOTE that the actual conversation begins at minute 14:50] Nelson Lichtenstein and I had a conversation online the evening of November 29th. We discussed the history of the UAW first, as he is a top expert on the union and Walter Reuther, and then brought that history forward to inform the current strike by UAW – UC workers (I am one of the 48,000 on strike!). Read More