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      ‘January 6 was a real wake-up call’: US unions fight to save democracy

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      ‘January 6 was a real wake-up call’: US unions fight to save democracyLabor leaders view this year’s elections – and 2024’s – with special urgency, as a goal-line stand to preserve America’s democracy Many union leaders used to pooh-pooh talk about saving democracy, according t0 Shane Larson, the Communications Workers of America’s director of government affairs. All that changed after the January 6 assault on the Capitol and after many Republicans pushed to overturn Biden’s victory in several states.The latest threat to democracy? A Trump-backed candidate willing to ‘find extra votes’Read more“Just a few years ago, some union leaders would complain, ‘Why are we focusing on these do-good democratic issues?’ They’d say we need to focus exclusively on labor rights and jobs, jobs, jobs,” Larson said. “Now no one is complaining about this at all. There’s a real recognition that the entire labor movement has to be involved in this effort, that we have to do something for our democracy or we can lose it.“January 6 was a real wake-up call,” Larson said. “Part of our effort is to hold accountable a number of insurrectionists running for some of these offices.” He mentioned the Arizona and Georgia secretary of state races in particular.With their ability to mobilize tens of thousands of union foot soldiers, unions are one of the nation’s most powerful political forces, and labor leaders view this year’s election – and 2024’s – with special urgency, as a goal-line stand to preserve America’s democracy.Traditionally focusing on presidential and congressional races, unions this year plan to focus far more than usual on state and local races – for instance, to prevent the election of secretaries of state and election commissioners who have embraced Trump’s “big lie” and signaled they might overturn their state’s 2024 vote results if the Democratic presidential nominee is ahead.Unite Here, the hotel workers’ union, is known for being one of the nation’s most politically active unions, and this year it has expanded its political ambitions – not just to elect worker-friendly candidates, but to help preserve America’s embattled democracy.For this year’s elections, Unite Here intends to build on its performance in 2020 when it had 500 full-time canvassers going door to door in Arizona, helping Joe Biden win that state. It also had an army of union members canvassing in Philadelphia, helping deliver Pennsylvania to Biden. That 300,000-member union later sent 200 canvassers to Georgia to help Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff win, giving Democrats control of the Senate.Unite Here has broadened its effort this year, with a stepped-up focus on protecting voting rights – and democracy itself. It is already educating voters in Arizona and Georgia about how to navigate around newly enacted voter restrictions. Like many other unions, it hopes to provide a flock of poll watchers to help ensure that voters, especially voters of color, are not intimidated by the promised army of Trumpist poll watchers. To help Democrats retain control of the Senate, Unite Here plans to deploy hundreds of canvassers to help Mark Kelly of Arizona, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and other Democratic senators win re-election.“Our goal is to get back to what we had in 2020, a steady ramp-up to have 500 people moving around, going door to door, reigniting people to vote,” said Gwen Mills, Unite Here’s secretary-treasurer. “The work of democracy is labor-intensive, is people-intensive.”Union leaders see two parallel strategies to preserve American democracy – one is to battle against efforts that roll back voting rights, reduce the political voice of minorities and enable hyper-partisans to skew, even overturn vote counts. The other strategy is to ensure that Democrats win key battleground states, especially longtime union strongholds Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.“There is no way that Donald Trump or the next Donald Trump or any anti-worker candidate can win the White House without winning those states,” said Steve Rosenthal, former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation.Rosenthal said that if union households accounted for 25% to 30% of the vote in those states, as they did a quarter-century ago, instead of 15% 20% as they do now, Trump could not have won those states in 2016, nor win them in 2024. Rosenthal has founded a group, In Union, that is reaching out to hundreds of thousands of former union members in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – they perhaps lost their jobs and union membership when their factories closed. In Union seeks to explain to these voters which candidates are pro-worker and which aren’t. Thus far In Union has communicated with 1.2 million voters in those three states (including many non-union members who support unions) — and hopes to get funding to reach out to another 3 million.Backed by unions and foundations, In Union seeks to build trust with those voters and explain, for instance, how Joe Biden would do more for blue-collar workers than Trump would. “What these voters are yearning for is a place they can go to to get information they trust,” Rosenthal said. “There’s a huge role for unions to play in this right now.”Many labor leaders say Democratic lawmakers have hurt their party’s cause by doing little in recent decades to stop union membership from declining – a trend Joe Biden seems eager to reverse and many Republicans seem eager to accelerate. Unions often help Democrats by explaining to workers which party will do more for them. Unions have also helped prevent workers from growing resentful and embracing rightwing populists like Trump by helping assure economic gains for workers and by reducing racial resentment among white workers.“Unions remain the only set of organizations in the US that can help prevent working-class whites from going conservative,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University.Paul Spink, the head of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Wisconsin, said one way to help save democracy would be to re-elect Tony Evers, Wisconsin’s Democratic governor. Spink said Republicans have so gerrymandered Wisconsin’s legislature that they are close to having a veto-proof supermajority even though Republicans often win less than 50% of the statewide vote.“In recent months, there’ve been at least five or six bills the legislature passed to limit voting rights and undermine elections,” Spink said. “We’re trying very hard to keep a Democratic governor in this state to block those.”Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, says her union fights to protect democracy in many ways, for example, by opposing book bans and defending teachers who face punishment for teaching about racism.“In many countries, labor unions have been a bulwark against authoritarianism,” Weingarten said.She said her union might endorse some non-Trumpist Republicans like Lynn Cheney, who oppose the “big lie” and undermining fair elections. That way, in places where Democrats have scant chance of winning, her union might help elect Republicans who oppose many Republicans’ increasing embrace of authoritarianism.Labor’s pro-democracy efforts have taken many forms. The Service Employees International Union ran internet ads that criticized Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines and Home Depot for donating to GOP lawmakers who backed new voting restrictions. Unite Here co-sponsored a “freedom ride” of buses to Washington to urge senators to enact new voting rights legislation.“I feel that work for democracy should be year-round,” said Unite Here’s Mills. “We try to keep a drum beat year in and year out: do democracy at work, do democracy at the doors, do democracy at the polls, do democracy in the capital.”Unite Here trains hotel workers to become leaders, with one winning a seat on the Phoenix city council. It pushed lawmakers to slam the Cyber Ninjas’ much-derided election review in Arizona. United Here says its canvassers knocked on 1m doors in Arizona in 2020 and talked with 125,000 infrequent voters, many of whom voted for Biden. It boasts that that helped assure Biden’s 10,457-vote victory in the state.“I want other unions to have more people canvassing in these races, to do it in every state,” said Susan Minato, co-president of Unite Here Local 11 in Arizona and southern California. “That would be huge.”TopicsUS unionsUS Capitol attackUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Teamsters president vows to pressure Amazon after New York votes for union

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      Teamsters president vows to pressure Amazon after New York votes for unionSean O’Brien says it’s vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has ‘total disrespect’ for its workers The Teamsters’ new president has pledged his powerful union will step up the pressure on Amazon and mount its own efforts to unionize the company after workers in New York voted to form the company’s first US union.In an interview with the Guardian Sean O’Brien said it was vital to organize Amazon, asserting that the e-commerce company has “total disrespect” for its workers and was putting downward pressure on standards for unionized warehouse workers and truck drivers across the US.“You have an employer like Jeff Bezos taking a joyride into space, and he bangs on his workers to be able to fund his trip,” said O’Brien, who was inaugurated as Teamsters president on 22 March. He asserted that Amazon workers would benefit greatly from joining the Teamsters, saying that Amazon’s drivers and warehouse workers are treated and paid considerably worse than their unionized counterparts at other companies.“They’re awful, they’re disrespectful the way they treat their employees,” O’Brien said of Amazon.On Friday, a final vote count showed that Amazon workers in Staten Island voted to unionize, 2,654 for a union, 2,131 against. Another vote to organize workers in Alabama hangs in the balance. Amazon beat off the union drive by 118 votes but the final tally is awaiting a review of 416 challenged ballots.O’Brien said he applauds any organization that seeks to take on Amazon: “I commend anybody who tries to take on a schoolyard bully like Amazon.”The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union is seeking to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, while a new, independent union, the Amazon Labor Union, was behind the organizing at two Amazon facilities on Staten Island.O’Brien said that no union is better positioned than the Teamsters to organize Amazon because his 1.3-million-member union has decades of experience in unionizing and winning good contracts for warehouse workers and truck drivers. “This is the only union that has the proven track record of organizing workers in these industries,” O’Brien said.He said the Teamsters needed to organize Amazon as an obligation to “our members” and “our largest employers”, most notably United Parcel Service and DHL. Concerned that Amazon’s lower pay is undercutting Teamster employers and Teamster contracts, O’Brien said he didn’t want Amazon to threaten the livelihood of Teamsters or “diminish the standards established by collective bargaining agreements”.“We have to organize Amazon,” he said. “We have to have a plan in place. We have to execute that plan and not be scared to change that plan if it doesn’t work at times. Even a world champion team doesn’t win all the time. Hopefully we will have a favorable win-to-loss ratio.”Before winning a five-year term as Teamsters’ president, O’Brien headed a large Teamsters local in the Boston area for 15 years. He succeeded James P Hoffa, who stepped down after 23 years as Teamsters president.“We the Teamsters have the best resources out there, not just financially” to unionize Amazon, O’Brien said. “We have the ability to utilize our members who work in the industry, who know the benefits of working under a collective bargaining agreement and having dignity and respect in the workplace.“We have a lot of work to do,” he continued. “We have a plan to focus on the big metro cities,” where he said the likelihood of winning unionization elections would be greatest. He said that the Teamsters would mount “non-traditional campaigns” that include up lining politicians’ support and extensive community support behind unionization. He stressed the importance of worker-to-worker organizing: “We need to utilize our best organizers: our worker members who work in these industries.”Amazon officials say their company’s pay levels are competitive – $18 for a full-time entry-level worker in Staten Island and nearly $16 in Alabama. The company notes that its benefits, including health coverage, begin for full-time workers the day they join the company.Amazon officials have repeatedly said they are committed to maintaining an environment where its employees can thrive and feel appreciated and respected.News of the Staten Island victory comes as union activity is experiencing a resurgence in the US. Joe Biden has positioned himself as the most pro-union president in generations.“The Biden administration has done a great job for unions right out of the gate,” O’Brien said. “An administration that’s not afraid to endorse unions is great.” He praised, in particular, a 2021 law that Biden backed that helped secure the pensions of millions of union members and retirees, including many Teamsters whose pension plans were seriously underfunded.O’Brien said the Teamsters and other unions need to do a far better job explaining to Americans how unions lift workers and the nation as a whole. He said many Americans view the Teamsters favorably despite the movie The Irishman about scandals inside the Teamsters a half-century ago. “During the worst pandemic we’ll ever face people saw that we delivered packages, did trash pick-ups, did food and grocery deliveries,” O’Brien said. “We’ve proven our worth providing goods and services to keep this country moving.”He talked at length about the importance of holding politicians accountable, especially when they fail to back workers and unions. “I can’t remember people’s birthdays. But I can remember the last person that screwed me. That’s how we’re going to deal with those politicians who vote against us. We’ll run people against you. We’ll campaign against you.”TopicsAmazonUS unionsBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘Unions benefit all of us’: new Biden plan encourages federal workers to unionize

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      ‘Unions benefit all of us’: new Biden plan encourages federal workers to unionizeTaskforce sets recommendations ‘to promote my policy of support for worker power, worker organizing and collective bargaining’ The Biden administration set out 70 recommendations to encourage union membership in the US on Monday, including making it easier for many federal employees to join unions and eliminating barriers for union organizers to talk with workers on federal property.The report, compiled by the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, reiterates Biden’s robust backing of unions. “At its core,” the report says, “it is our administration’s belief that unions benefit all of us.”Traffic, tickets, gas: rideshare and delivery app workers fight to unionizeRead moreIt adds: “Researchers have found that today’s union households earn up to 20% more than non-union households, with an even greater union advantage for workers with less formal education and workers of color.”The report comes amid a surge in interest in unions in the US and follows a wave of high-profile industrial actions last year.The taskforce, which includes 13 members of Biden’s cabinet and is chaired by Vice-President Kamala Harris, calls for stepping up enforcement to ensure that money going to federal contractors – whether manufacturers, food-processing companies or other contractors – is not spent on anti-union campaigns.The taskforce calls for requiring disclosure of any instances when federal contractors use anti-union consultants or lawyers to persuade employees working on a federal contract not to unionize.While corporations typically prohibit union organizers from setting foot on company property – as Amazon has done recently in Alabama – the taskforce recommends removing many barriers that block union organizers from being able to talk with employees on federal property about the benefits of unionizing. This applies not just to federal employees, but also to employees of private contractors on federal property, such as a grocery store on a military base or in a national park.Biden said the taskforce’s charge was to identify executive branch policies, practices and programs that could be used “to promote my administration’s policy of support for worker power, worker organizing, and collective bargaining”.The taskforce said the range of policies and programs “that can be leveraged is significant”.Its recommendations include making the federal government a model employer in terms of shaping jobs, ensuring that federal employees know their labor rights, and improving labor-management communications. The federal government is the nation’s largest employer, with more than 2.1 million non-postal employees. Of those, 1.2 million are represented by unions, but only 33% of those workers pay union dues – that small percentage limits the power of federal employee unions.Noting that screeners for the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) are largely excluded from having the collective bargaining rights available to other non-military federal employees, the taskforce instructed the Department of Homeland Security to issue expanded bargaining rights for TSA’s screening workforce.The report is likely to strengthen the notion that Biden is the most pro-union president since Franklin Roosevelt – and perhaps the most pro-union president in US history. That might help Biden when he seeks to persuade and mobilize union members to vote for Democrats this November. At the same time, the report’s pro-union tone and substance might result in more opposition from business.In its first sentence, the report says: “The Biden-Harris administration believes that increasing worker organizing and empowerment is critical to growing the middle class, building an economy that puts workers first, and strengthening our democracy.” The report catalogues several executive orders and other pro-union steps by the president and his administration.It reads: “Unions have fought for and helped win many aspects of our work lives many of us take for granted today, like the 40-hour work week and the weekend, as well as landmark programs like Medicare.”The report adds that research has shown that increased economic inequality, growing pay gaps for women and workers of color, and the declining voice of working-class Americans in the nation’s politics “are all caused, in part, by the declining percentage of workers represented by unions”.The taskforce calls on the Department of Labor – whose secretary, Martin Walsh, is the taskforce’s vice-chair – to become a resource center that provides materials on the advantages of union representation and collective bargaining.TopicsUS unionsBiden administrationUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      The Fed is about to raise interest rates and shaft American workers – again | Robert Reich

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      The Fed is about to raise interest rates and shaft American workers – againRobert ReichPolicymakers fear a labor shortage is pushing up wages and prices. Wrong. Real wages are down and workers are struggling The January jobs report from the US labor department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.This line of reasoning is totally wrong.Trump and his enablers unwittingly offer Democrats the best hope in the midterms | Robert ReichRead moreAmong the biggest job gains in January were workers who are normally temporary and paid low wages: leisure and hospitality, retail, transport and warehousing. In January, employers cut fewer of these workers than in most years because of rising customer demand combined with Omicron’s negative effect on the supply of workers. Due to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “seasonal adjustment”, cutting fewer workers than usual for this time of year appears as “adding lots of jobs”.Fed policymakers are poised to raise interest rates at their March meeting and then continue raising them, in order to slow the economy. They fear that a labor shortage is pushing up wages, which in turn are pushing up prices – and that this wage-price spiral could get out of control.It’s a huge mistake. Higher interest rates will harm millions of workers who will be involuntarily drafted into the inflation fight by losing jobs or long-overdue pay raises. There’s no “labor shortage” pushing up wages. There’s a shortage of good jobs paying adequate wages to support working families. Raising interest rates will worsen this shortage.There’s no “wage-price spiral” either, even though Fed chief Jerome Powell has expressed concern about wage hikes pushing up prices. To the contrary, workers’ real wages have dropped because of inflation. Even though overall wages have climbed, they’ve failed to keep up with price increases – making most workers worse off in terms of the purchasing power of their dollars.Wage-price spirals used to be a problem. Remember when John F Kennedy “jawboned” steel executives and the United Steel Workers to keep a lid on wages and prices? But such spirals are no longer a problem. That’s because the typical worker today has little or no bargaining power.Only 6% of private-sector workers are unionized. A half-century ago, more than a third were. Today, corporations can increase output by outsourcing just about anything anywhere because capital is global. A half-century ago, corporations needing more output had to bargain with their own workers to get it.These changes have shifted power from labor to capital – increasing the share of the economic pie going to profits and shrinking the share going to wages. This power shift ended wage-price spirals.Slowing the economy won’t remedy either of the two real causes of today’s inflation – continuing worldwide bottlenecks in the supply of goods and the ease with which big corporations (with record profits) pass these costs to customers in higher prices.Supply bottlenecks are all around us. Just take a look at all the ships with billions of dollars of cargo idling outside the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, through which 40% of all US seaborne imports flow.Big corporations have no incentive to absorb the rising costs of such supplies – even with profit margins at their highest level in 70 years. They have enough market power to pass these costs on to consumers, sometimes using inflation to justify even bigger price hikes.“A little bit of inflation is always good in our business,” the chief executive of Kroger said last June.“What we are very good at is pricing,” the chief executive of Colgate-Palmolive said in October.In fact, the Fed’s plan to slow the economy is the opposite of what’s needed now or in the foreseeable future. Covid is still with us. Even in its wake, we’ll be dealing with its damaging consequences for years: everything from long-term Covid to school children months or years behind.Friday’s jobs report shows that the economy is still 2.9m jobs below what it had in February 2020. Given the growth of the US population, it’s 4.5m short of what it would have by now had there been no pandemic.Consumers are almost tapped out. Not only are real (inflation-adjusted) incomes down but pandemic assistance has ended. Extra jobless benefits are gone. Child tax credits have expired. Rent moratoriums are over. Small wonder consumer spending fell 0.6% in December, the first decrease since last February.Many people are understandably gloomy about the future. The University of Michigan consumer sentiment survey plummeted in January to its lowest level since late 2011, back when the economy was trying to recover from the global financial crisis. The Conference Board’s index of confidence also dropped in January.Given all this, the last thing average working people need is for the Fed to raise interest rates and slow the economy further. The problem most people face isn’t inflation. It’s a lack of good jobs.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
      TopicsFederal ReserveOpinionUS economyEconomicsUS unemployment and employment dataUS unionsUS domestic policyUS politicscommentReuse this content More

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      Workers across the US are rising up. Can they turn their anger into a movement? | Steven Greenhouse

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      Workers across the US are rising up. Can they turn their anger into a movement?Steven GreenhouseSo far, increasingly militant workers are lacking something vital: a leader who can unite them all. Will that change? Throughout 2021, American workers stood up and fought back to an unusual degree. Workers went on strike at Kellogg’s, Nabisco, John Deere, Columbia University and numerous hospitals, while non-union “essential” workers – furious about how they’ve been treated – walked out at supermarkets, warehouses and fast-food restaurants. Workers have sought to unionize at Starbucks, Amazon, even the Art Institute of Chicago. And a record number of Americans have been quitting their jobs each month, more than 4 million monthly, fed up and eager for something better.Millions of workers are angry – angry that they didn’t get hazard pay for risking their lives during the pandemic, angry that they’ve been forced to work 70 or 80 hours a week, angry that they received puny raises while executive pay soared, angry that they didn’t get paid sick days when they got sick.‘They are fed up’: US labor on the march in 2021 after years of declineRead moreOut of this comes a question that looms large for America’s workers: will this surge of worker action and anger be a mere flash in the pan or will it be part of a longer-lasting phenomenon? The answer to this important question could turn on whether all this anger and energy are somehow transformed into a larger movement. At least for now, America’s labor leaders seem to be doing very little to tap all this energy and hope and to build it into something bigger and longer lasting. Yes, we are seeing unionization drives at this workplace and that one, but we are not seeing any bigger, broader effort to channel and transform all this worker energy and discontent into a new movement, one perhaps with millions of engaged and energetic nonunion workers, that would work in conjunction with the traditional union movement.Worker advocates I speak to keep wondering: what are labor leaders waiting for? If not now, when?In Joe Biden, we have the most pro-union president since Franklin Roosevelt, and public approval for unions is the highest it’s been in more than a half century. For decades, union leaders have said they are eager to reverse labor’s long decline – more than 20% of workers were in unions three decades ago, now just 10% are. Unless unions step up and do something bold, they’ll relegate themselves to continued decline.Many labor leaders evidently think it’s impossible or improbable to turn this year’s energy and anger into a new movement or a big, new group. But building a movement from scratch isn’t impossible. 350.org was founded in 2008 by several college students and environmentalist author Bill McKibben, and within two years, it organized a mammoth Day of Climate Action with a reported 5,245 actions in 181 countries. After the horrific shootings at Marjorie Stoneman high school in Florida in 2018, a handful of students founded March for Our Lives, and within five weeks, their group had organized nationwide rallies with hundreds of thousands of people calling for gun control. Black Lives Matter also grew into a powerful national movement within a few years. None of these movements were one-shot or one-month affairs – they have become powers to contend with in policy and politics.So why isn’t the labor movement seizing on this year’s burst of worker energy to build something bigger? I was discussing this with friend who is a professor of labor studies, and she said she thought that most of today’s union leaders were “constitutionally incapable” of building big or being bold and ambitious. She said that after decades of being on the defensive, of being beaten down by hostile corporations, hostile GOP lawmakers and hostile judicial decisions, many labor leaders seem unable to dream big or think outside the box on how to attract large numbers of workers in ways beyond the traditional one-workplace-at-a-time union drives.But building big and outside the box isn’t impossible for labor. Just look at the Fight for $15. The strategists and SEIU leaders behind it had a vision: they wanted to push the issue of low wages into the national conversation and lift the pay floor for millions of workers. They started small, with walkouts by 200 workers at a dozen fast-food restaurants in New York City, and within two years, they built a powerful national movement that held strikes and protests in hundreds of cities. This movement ultimately got a dozen states to enact a $15 minimum wage, lifting pay for over 20 million workers.Perhaps some brilliant, visionary workers or worker advocates will step forward to seek to channel this year’s burst of worker anger and energy into a new movement. Social media could certainly help build it, perhaps with the assistance of groups like Coworker.org, which has considerable experience engaging and mobilizing disgruntled rank-and-file workers via the internet.For many workers, a big new group or movement could be a waystation toward unionizing: helping educate and mobilize workers to unionize, guiding them on next steps and what their rights are, and promising a pool of ready support if they seek to unionize. This new group or movement could send out bulletins telling members how they could help other workers in their community or nearby communities – perhaps help unionization drives at Amazon or Starbucks or strikers at Kellogg’s or Warrior Met Coal in Alabama or food delivery workers who are cheated out of tips and don’t have access to bathrooms.Members of this new group could be called on to protest outside the offices of members of Congress or state lawmakers about myriad issues, perhaps raising the federal minimum wage or enacting paid family leave or the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Or they could join rallies for voting rights or immigrant rights or against police abuses or to combat global warming.Working America, an arm of the AFL-CIO, does some of this, mainly urging its members to vote and to contact lawmakers. To truly help reverse labor’s decline and capitalize on today’s worker anger, much more will be needed – an organization that is far more connected to workers and does far more organizing, protesting and mobilizing.America’s labor movement is terribly balkanized, with many unions engaged in turf battles and upset that another union has (perhaps) stepped into its territory. As a result, they too often find it hard to work together. But if America’s unions are serious about wanting to strengthen worker power and reverse labor’s decline, it’s time to put past divisions behind them and figure out how to build back something bigger.There are three main reasons that America’s labor movement has declined: first, corporate America’s fierce resistance to unions, second, the decades-long slide in factory jobs, and, third, the Republican party’s decades-long fight to weaken unions and make it tougher to unionize.But there’s another factor behind labor’s decline that is rarely discussed – many labor leaders don’t do nearly enough to inspire workers and expand the union movement. Today’s workers could use some vigorous, visionary leaders like Mother Jones, Sidney Hillman, John L Lewis and A Philip Randolph to lead and inspire, and build something bigger. Perhaps many union leaders haven’t been hearing what I often hear from rank-and-file union members: “Lead or get out of the way.”
      Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labor and the workplace. He is the author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor
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      Kaiser Permanente strike off after deal between unions and healthcare giant

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      Kaiser Permanente strike off after deal between unions and healthcare giant32,000 employees, most in California, threatened walkoutDeal ‘protects patients, safe staffing and fair wages’ An alliance of unions representing 50,000 Kaiser Permanente workers in California, Oregon and six other states called off strike set for Monday, after reaching a tentative labor deal with the healthcare network.The Alliance of Health Care Unions and Kaiser Permanente jointly announced the agreement, staving off a potentially crippling strike in which 32,000 employees, most of them in southern California, threatened to walk off the job to protest understaffing and wage cuts for new hires.Additional members of the alliance, comprised of 21 local unions, authorized a one-day “sympathy strike” on 18 November.Agreement on the four-year contract includes annual wage increases, while maintaining health benefits for employees, and new staffing language to continue to protect employees and patients, the statement said.“This agreement will mean patients will continue to receive the best care and Alliance members will have the best jobs,” said Hal Ruddick, executive director of the alliance.“This contract protects our patients, provides safe staffing, and guarantees fair wages and benefits for every Alliance member.”Christian Meisner, chief human resources officer at Kaiser Permanente, said the agreement “underscores our unwavering commitment to our employees by maintaining industry-leading wages and benefits”.Bargaining continues with the local units representing Kaiser pharmacists in Northern California and the Pacific north west, as well as a group of engineers.“We hope to reach agreements very soon,” Kaiser spokesman Steve Shivinsky said.The alliance said it has more than 35,000 member employees in California; 6,300 in Oregon and Washington; 2,100 in Colorado; 2,300 in Maryland, Washington, DC and northern Virginia; 3,000 in Georgia; and 1,900 in Hawaii.TopicsUS unionsUS healthcareUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture wars | Hamilton Nolan

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      America needs help. Yet Democrats are getting sucked into fake culture warsHamilton NolanThe hoopla about CRT and the like is a Republican game serious leaders would not play. But Democrats don’t have serious leaders I do not know if I can survive three more years of Democrats stumbling over themselves to disavow the Democratic platform in a doomed attempt to win bad-faith culture wars. It is too painful, like watching ruthless hunters herding panicked animals over the side of a cliff. The poor, dumb beasts inevitably go extinct if they are not able to outthink such a rudimentary strategy.Message to Democrats: embrace economic bread-and-butter issues to win | Matthew Karp and Dustin GuastellaRead moreWalk around your town. Explore a major American city. Drive across the country. What are the most important problems you see? There is poverty. Homelessness. A lack of affordable housing. Vast and jaw-dropping economic and racial inequality. There is a lack of public transportation, a broken healthcare system, environmental degradation, and a climate crisis that threatens to upend our way of life. These are real problems. These are the things that we need our government to fix. These are what we need to hear politicians talk about. These are what we must debate and focus on, if we are really concerned about human rights and our children’s future and all the other big things we claim to value.I guarantee you that neither “cancel culture” nor “critical race theory” nor, worse of all, “wokeness” will grab you as enormous problems after your exploration of America, unless that exploration ranges only from a college faculty lounge to a cable TV studio to the office of a rightwing thinktank. These are all words that mean nothing. To the extent that they are real at all, they are niche concerns that plague such a small subset of Americans that they deserve to be addressed only after we have solved the many other, realer problems.All these terms function primarily as empty vessels into which bad-faith actors can pour racism, so that it may appear more palatable when it hits the public airwaves. Common sense tells us we should spend most of our time talking about the biggest problems, and less time on the lesser problems, and no time on the mythical problems. To engage in long and tortured debates over these slippery and indefinable culture war terms is to violate that rule, with awful consequences for everyone.Let’s not bullshit about this. Racism is a wonderfully effective political tool for Republicans, yet explicit racism is frowned upon in polite society now, so there is a constant flow of new issues to stand in for racism in political discourse. Lee Atwater, who invented Nixon’s “southern strategy”, explained this all decades ago, and it is still true. George Wallace could be outright racist, but subsequent generations of politicians have had to cloak it in “welfare reform” or being “tough on crime” or, now, opposition to “wokeness” and “critical race theory” – things which mean, by the way, “caring about racism”.Three-quarters of a million Americans are dead from a pandemic. We have a Democratic president and a booming economy. So we will get culture wars, and more culture wars, all of which are built on stoking various forms of hate. This is a game that serious leaders should not play. Unfortunately, we don’t have too many serious leaders. We have the Democratic party.Republicans will push these culture wars as far as they can, but it takes Democrats to make the strategy work. There are two types of Democrats falling for this trap now. One type is the group of fairly well-meaning people who assume that the fact there is a cottage industry dedicated to amplifying these terms in the media means there must be something to them. The other type are the opportunistic Democrats, who often brand themselves “centrists”, who see the culture wars as a way to steal power from the left wing of their own party, even if it comes at the cost of hurting millions of Americans.We have seen this movie before. The 1990s was the era of fiery and stupid debates over gay people in the military, flag burning and Sister Souljah. They were just an earlier iteration of the same thing we’re going through now. The decision of Democrats to lean into this dynamic by running to the right led to atrocities like Bill Clinton’s “welfare reform” and crime bills that won him momentary electoral power by immiserating an entire generation of poor, non-white people, many of whom are still caged in prison today. Choosing to give credence to the culture wars has real life consequences. Already, we can see panicked Democrats rushing to decry the very sort of social justice fights that give the decrepit party its only redeeming value.Here is the good news: we don’t have to do this. We can step off this train before it pulls out of Bad Faith Station on the way to the Trump 2024 victory party. What we need is some sort of broad force that can unite people of disparate races and persuasions around a shared, common interest. Something capable of demonstrating the value of the fight against inequality and corporate domination in a real, tangible way. Something that wages its fights in reality, not in the remote world of buzzwords and misdirection.Guess what? That thing already exists. It’s called the labor movement. And it’s energetic as hell right now. A wave of strikes across the nation that has been building for months is garnering levels of attention unseen in decades. The popularity of unions is high. This is a model of progressive values in action that a political party could rally around, if that party was not always so easily tempted to trip over its own shoelaces.In deep red rural Alabama, you can find hundreds of striking mine workers – black and white, Democratic and Republican – completely united and fighting hard, in unity, for economic justice. These people whom our society typically divides have come together in a union, and are sacrificing for one another, side by side. The military is the only other institution in American society that accomplishes this feat of unity, and unions can do it without shooting anyone. The labor movement is living proof that the substance of progressive politics – protecting the poor against the rich, promoting equality, giving everyone fair treatment no matter who they are or how much money they make – is a tool powerful enough to overcome the background drone of Fox News (and the Atlantic).Democrats do not need to wonder how to overcome the culture wars. We already know how: organizing working people to create power that can produce a more just and equal world. It works. But to make it work, you need to hold it up and promote it and help it and talk about it, rather than talking about whether things are “too woke”. Our problems are in the real world. Our solutions are in the real world as well. Our politicians? Many of them are floating in the ether. Come back down to earth, join the labor movement, and help people walk the path away from the incredibly dumb nightmare that awaits us if we get sucked into bullshit debates, with bullshit people, about bullshit.
      Hamilton Nolan is a labor reporter at In These Times
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      ‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?

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      US unions‘Striketober’ is showing workers’ rising power – but will it lead to lasting change?A post-pandemic labor shortage has given workers leverage but experts doubt it will lead to a sustained rise in union membership Steven GreenhouseSat 23 Oct 2021 03.00 EDTLast modified on Sat 23 Oct 2021 03.02 EDTUS labor unions have been on the defensive for decades but this October there has been a surprising burst of worker militancy and strikes as workers have gone on the offensive to demand more. Experts are predicting more actions to come but whether “Striketober” can lead to permanent change remains an open question.The scale of industrial action is truly remarkable. Ten thousand John Deere workers have gone on strike, 1,400 Kellogg workers have walked out, as well as a walkout threatened by more than 30,000 Kaiser Permanente workers, all inflamed by a profound disconnect between labor and management.America’s strike wave is a rare – and beautiful – sight to behold | Hamilton NolanRead moreMany frontline workers – after working so hard and risking their lives during the pandemic – say they deserve substantial raises along with lots of gratitude. With this in mind and with myriad employers complaining of a labor shortage, many workers believe it’s an opportune time to demand more and go on strike. It doesn’t hurt that there’s a strongly pro-union president in the White House and there’s more public support for unions than in decades.But some corporations are acting as if nothing has changed and they can continue corporate America’s decades-long practice of squeezing workers and demanding concessions, even after corporate profits have soared.This attitude doesn’t sit well with Chris Laursen, who earns $20.82 an hour after 19 years at Deere’s farm equipment factory in Ottumwa, Iowa. Laursen is upset that Deere is offering just a one-dollar-an-hour raise and wants to eliminate pensions for future hires even when Deere anticipates a record $5.7bn in profits this year, more than double last year’s earnings.“We were deemed essential workers right out of the gate,” Laursen said, noting that many workers racked up lots of overtime during the pandemic. “But then they came with an offer that was appallingly low. It was a slap in the face of the workers who created all the wealth for them.”Many Deere workers complain that the company offered only a 12% raise over six years, which they say won’t keep pace with inflation, even as the CEO’s pay rose 160% last year to $16m and dividends were raised 17%. Deere’s workers voted down the company’s offer by 90% before they went on strike at 14 factories on 14 October, their first walkout in 35 years.“We really showed up during the pandemic and kept building equipment for them,” Laursen said. “Now we want something back. The stars are finally lined up for us, and we had to bring the fight.”Thomas Kochan, an MIT professor of industrial relations, agreed that it was a favorable time for workers – many corporations have substantially increased pay in response to the labor shortage. “It’s clear that workers are much more empowered,” he said. “They’re empowered because of the labor shortage.”Kochan added: “These strikes could easily trigger more strike activity if several are successful or perceived to be successful.”Robert Bruno, a labor relations professor at the University of Illinois, said workers have built up a lot of grievances and anger during the pandemic, after years of seeing scant improvement in pay and benefits. Bruno pointed to a big reason for the growing worker frustration: “You can definitely see that American capitalism has reigned supreme over workers, and as a result, the incentive for companies is to continue to do what’s been working for them. It’s likely that an arrogance sets in where companies think that’s going to last for ever, and maybe they don’t read the times properly.”Kevin Bradshaw, a striker at Kellogg’s factory in Memphis, said the cereal maker was being arrogant and unappreciative. During the pandemic, he said, Kellogg employees often worked 30 days in a row, often in 12-hour or 16-hour shifts.In light of this hard work, he derided Kellogg’s contract offer, which calls for a far lower scale for new hires. “Kellogg is offering a $13 cut in top pay for new workers,” Bradshaw said. “They want a permanent two-tier. New employees will no longer receive the same amount of money and benefits we do.” That, he said, is bad for the next generation of workers.Bradshaw, vice-president of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers union local, noted that it made painful concessions to Kellogg in 2015. “We gave so many concessions, and now they’re saying they need more,” he said. “This is a real smack in the face during the pandemic. Everyone knows that they’re greedy and not needy.”Kellogg said its compensation is among the industry’s best and its offer will help the company meet competitive challenges. Deere said it was determined to reach an agreement and continue to make its workers “the highest paid employees in the agriculture industry”.There are many strikes beyond Deere and Kellogg. More than 400 workers at the Heaven Hill bourbon distillery in Kentucky have been on strike for six weeks, while roughly 1,000 Warrior Met coalminers in Alabama have been on strike since April. Hundreds of nurses at Mercy hospital in Buffalo went on strike on 1 October, and 450 steelworkers at Special Metals in Huntington, West Virginia, also walked out that day. More than 30,000 nurses and other healthcare professionals at Kaiser Permanente on the west coast have voted to authorize a strike.Sixty thousand Hollywood production employees threatened to go on strike last Monday, unhappy that film and TV companies were not taking their concerns about overwork and exhaustion seriously. But seeing that the union was serious about staging its first-ever strike, Hollywood producers flinched, agreed to compromises, and the two sides reached a settlement.Noting that Kaiser Permanente, a non-profit, had amassed $45bn in reserves, Belinda Redding, a Kaiser nurse in Woodland Hills, California, said, “We’ve been going all out during the pandemic. We’ve been working extra shifts. Our lives have been turned upside down. The signs were up all over saying, ‘Heroes Work Here’. And the pandemic isn’t even over for us, and then for them to offer us a 1% raise, it’s almost a slap in the face.”Redding is also fuming that management has proposed hiring new nurses at 26% less pay than current ones earn – which she said would ensure a shortage of nurses. “It’s hard to imagine a nurse giving her all when she’s paid far less than other nurses,” Redding said.Kaiser said that its employees earn 26% more than average market wages and that its services would become unaffordable unless it restrains labor costs.Many non-union workers – frequently dismayed with low pay, volatile schedules and poor treatment – have quit their jobs or refused to return to their old ones after being laid off during the pandemic. In August, 4.2 million workers quit their jobs, part of what has been called the Great Resignation. Some economists have suggested this is a quiet general strike with workers demanding better pay and conditions. “People are using exit from their jobs as a source of power,” Kochan said.As for unionized workers, some labor experts see parallels between today’s burst of strikes and the much larger wave of strikes after the first and second world wars. As with the pandemic, those catastrophic wars caused many Americans to reassess their lives and jobs and ask: after what we’ve been through, don’t we deserve better pay and conditions?Professor Bruno said that in light of today’s increased worker militancy, unionized employers would have to rethink their approach to bargaining “and take the rank and file pretty seriously”. They can no longer expect workers to roll over or to strong-arm them into swallowing concessions, often by threatening to move operations overseas.Bruno questioned whether the surge in strikes will be long-lasting. He predicts that the improvements in pay and job quality will be long-lasting, adding that that was more likely than unions substantially increasing their membership. He said that if workers see others winning better wages and conditions through strikes, that will raise unions’ visibility and lead to more workers voting to join unions.Despite the recent turbulence, Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at City University of New York, foresees a return to the status quo. “I think things will go back to where they were once things settle down,” she said. “The labor shortage is not necessarily going to last.” She sees the number of strikes declining once the labor shortage ends.In her view, union membership isn’t likely to increase markedly because “they’re not doing that much organizing.“There’s a little” – like the unionization efforts at Starbucks in Buffalo and at Amazon – “but it’s not as if there’s some big push.”A big question, Milkman said, was how can today’s labor momentum be sustained? She said it would help if Congress passed the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would make it easier to unionize workers. That law would spur unions to do more organizing and increase their chances of winning union drives.“That would be a real shot in the arm,” Milkman said.TopicsUS unionsUS politicsnewsReuse this content More