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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

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      ‘We’re peons to them’: Nabisco factory workers on why they’re striking

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      US unions‘We’re peons to them’: Nabisco factory workers on why they’re strikingWhile the CEO of Nabisco’s parent company is paid nearly $17m a year, plants are closing, jobs outsourced to Mexico, and older workers are unable to retire on weakened pension benefits Michael SainatoMon 23 Aug 2021 06.00 EDTLast modified on Mon 23 Aug 2021 06.01 EDTThe pandemic drove many people to the cookie jar and helped Nabisco, maker of Oreos, Chips Ahoy!, Fig Newtons and other sweet treats weather the worst of the outbreak. But as the company’s profits continue to recover, workers at its US plants are striking over the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico and concessions demanded by their employer in new union contract negotiations.On 10 August, about 200 workers in Portland, Oregon, represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers (BCTGM) went on strike. Union workers in Aurora, Colorado, began their strike on 12 August, followed by those in Richmond, Virginia, on 16 August and Chicago, Illinois on 19 August.Through the pandemic, Nabisco’s parent company, Mondelēz International, has recorded billions in profits; in the second quarter of 2021, the company reported more than $5.5bn in profits and spent $1.5bn on stock buybacks in the first half of 2021. The CEO of Mondelez International received $16.8m in total compensation in 2020, 544 times the company’s median employee annual compensation of $31,000.“It’s greed. They don’t have any respect for their workers that gave them the opportunity to make that kind of money. We’re peons to them, and everyone is at the point where enough is enough,” said Darlene Carpenter, business agent of BCTGM local 358 in Richmond and a former employee at the plant. “We’re at the point where we’re saying this is how the cookie is going to crumble now because we can’t do this.”According to Keith Bragg, president of BCTGM local 358 who has worked at the Nabisco plant in Richmond for 45 years, during a discussion about contract negotiations with management, the company said that when the company does well, employees do well.He took offence to this notion, citing his concerns about the treatment of workers over the past few years and the recent concessions being asked of them. During the pandemic, many workers had to work 12-hour shifts, six to seven days a week for several months and were praised as “heroes” for their roles as essential workers. But now workers are being asked to give up overtime pay and concede to a two-tier healthcare system, Bragg said, which would downgrade benefits for new employees and cut overall wages.“They’re doing well, we’re losing all the way around,” said Bragg. “They shut down two plants this year, they’re cutting overtime, they’re making profits, but we lost half of our union membership. How is it that we’re doing well?”In 2012, Kraft Foods split into two companies, with Mondelēz International formed as the parent company of Nabisco. Since the split, the union has been pressed to accept concessions during drawn-out contract negotiations, such as eliminating union pension contributions in May 2018 and switching to 401 retirement plans.“A lot of folks were very close to retirement, and were able to do so under the old plan, but when the company pulled out that basically meant that they had to continue working, they were no longer eligible to retire,” said Mike Burlingham, who has worked at the Nabisco plant in Portland since 2007 and serves as vice-president of local 364. “It impacted all of us in a way that we can no longer count on this as being a place we can retire comfortably from.”Mondelēz International has shuttered several Nabisco plants in the US over the past several years, offshoring much of the work to Mexico. The plight of its workers briefly became a campaign issue during the 2016 election cycle, with both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump attacking plans to shift jobs overseas. “I’m not eating Oreos any more,” Trump told voters in New Hampshire.But despite the political heat the trend has continued. In 2021, Nabisco plants in Fairlawn, New Jersey, and Atlanta were closed, resulting in the loss of about 1,000 jobs. Mondelēz International denied that jobs from the two plants shut down in 2021 were offshored to Mexico, but a petition for trade adjustment assistance alleging outsourcing by the union at one of the plants is under review by the Department of Labor. In 2016, hundreds of workers were laid off at the Nabisco plant in Chicago and a plant in Philadelphia was shut down in 2015.“We can’t compete with the Mexican workers,” said Cameron Taylor, business agent at Local 364 in Portland. “They just want to exploit cheap labor. If we were to accept all of what they want us to, accept all the working conditions and the two- tiered system of healthcare, this job would turn into a job not even worth fighting for.”In 2016, the union launched a “check the label” boycott campaign that was endorsed by the AFL-CIO, asking consumers to refuse to buy Nabisco products that are made in Mexico. Workers have frequently reported finding Nabisco products for sale near their plants that were produced in Mexico.“We are disappointed by the decision of the local BCTGM unions in Portland (OR), Richmond (VA) and Aurora (CO) to go on strike,” said a spokesperson for Mondelēz International, noting the company has a continuity plan in place at the facilities where workers are on strike. “Our goal has been – and continues to be – to bargain in good faith with the BCTGM leadership across our US bakeries and sales distribution facilities to reach new contracts that continue to provide our employees with good wages and competitive benefits, including quality, affordable healthcare, and company-sponsored Enhanced Thrift Investment 401(k) Plan, while also taking steps to modernize some contract aspects which were written several decades ago.”TopicsUS unionsUS politicsCoronavirusMondelēznewsReuse this content More

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      Americans are more pro-union – and anti-big business – than at any time in decades | Emily DiVito and Aaron Sojourner

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      Today, public feeling toward labor is more positive, and public feeling toward big business more negative, than at any time in five decades. What’s more, workers increasingly want to be in unions: over half of Americans say they would vote for a union at work, while only 11 percent of US employees currently belong to one – largely because labor laws remain stacked in favor of big business.Americans’ rising affinity for organized labor and antipathy toward big business opens up new possibilities for a more balanced economy and society – but not without reform to the labor laws that hold workers back. For instance, because penalties are negligible, Amazon management has repeatedly violated workers’ rights when workers acted collectively to improve their working conditions. When workers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, recently started to unionize, management seems to have acted illegally again and the unionization effort failed. By making an example of one person, bank robbers can control a whole crowd; too many managers have felt free to follow that logic with impunity.Between 1964, when the American National Election Studies (ANES) began collecting data, and 2012, Americans’ sentiment toward labor unions and big business trended together, each suffering public opinion surges and dips in tandem. But by 2016, these sentiments had unlinked: Americans’ feelings toward big business chilled, while feelings toward labor unions warmed. ANES just released data from late 2020, and it reveals that this post-2012 trend continued into the pandemic.Today, all political and all age cohorts hold record or near-record positive views favoring labor over big business. Looking across generations, Americans born after 1975 have particularly strong positive feelings toward labor unions over big business. Democrats and independents have always felt more positively toward labor unions and less positively toward big business than Republicans, and that pro-union bent has risen to record heights since 2012. But even among Republicans, the union versus big business sentiment gap rose quickly between 2012 and 2016, and hit a record high in 2020.So, why the recent public sentiment uptick? Since 2012, workers have organized and engaged in highly publicized minimum wage and union fights, which helped populist wings ascend and anti-labor, pro-business wings weaken within each party. Since 2016, Senator Bernie Sanders, long a vocal advocate of labor and antagonist of big business, has helped solidify a strong pro-labor constituency in the Democratic party and within the broader political landscape. Sanders’s prominent presidential campaigns served as an organizing vehicle for a pro-labor left, and he continues to help garner public support for union efforts. As president, Biden has taken unprecedented pro-labor stances and helped consolidate liberal support for unions.The left isn’t the only reason why union support is up nationwide. Ironically, for all of Trump’s atrocious anti-labor and pro-corporate policies, his phony populism may have realigned labor-business opinion among Republican voters. His red-herring bloviating in support of unions and against corporations could be partly responsible for broadening labor and declining big business sentiment, especially among some Americans on the right.The shift of public opinion in favor of organized labor comes against a backdrop of decades of declining union membership rates but rising union interest among workers. As such, the representation gap – the difference between the share of workers who’d like to be in a union and those who are – is wider than it’s been in decades.Beyond the impact unions have on their members – including higher wages, better health, retirement and other fringe benefits, and reduced racial resentment – unions benefit non-member workers, too. Higher pay in union firms can increase competition for labor such that nonunion firms raise wages. Strong unions reduce inequality, and they increase voter turnout, the election of working- and middle-class Americans to public office, and charitable giving.Unions also help workers establish and leverage a collective voice to raise concerns and demand better protections, making them especially valuable to workers when the Covid-19 pandemic has upended long-held expectations of workplace norms. Indeed, evidence from the pandemic suggests that union members had safer workplace practices and conditions than nonunion members, and risk of Covid led to greater interest in unionization and greater willingness to engage in workplace collective actions, like going on strike or joining a protest.The combination of the public’s heightened sympathy for unions and the widening representation gap underscores how biased our current labor laws are against workers. Because unionization pulls power toward workers and away from managers and owners, employers go to extreme lengths – from outright intimidation to illegally firing leaders – to suppress unionization. Penalties for violating workers’ rights to organize are negligible, letting managers violate workers’ rights with impunity.New legislation – like the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act – can help rebalance bargaining power in the labor market, supporting workers’ ability to bargain on more-equal terms with representatives of concentrated wealth. If passed, the PRO Act would repeal state laws that undermine unions, institute tougher penalties for employers who violate workers’ rights to organize, and recognize gig workers’ right to collectively bargain.Independent of the PRO Act’s legislative future – a future made uncertain by the Senate’s long history of obstructing progressive labor reform – the swelling public support for labor and simultaneous declining support for big business suggests a transformational shift in terrain. While previously, public perception of organized labor and organized capital was balanced, that no longer holds. These days, Americans worry far more about organized capital than organized labor.
      Emily DiVito is program manager for the corporate power program at the Roosevelt Institute
      Aaron Sojourner is a labor economist at the University of Minnesota, a Roosevelt Institute fellow, and a former senior economist for labor at the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Obama and Trump More