POLITICS
Trump’s new NAFTA labor rules to be tested
NW Labor Press
June 2, 2021
The AFL-CIO and Service Employees International Union have filed the first ever labor complaint under the trade treaty President Trump negotiated to replace NAFTA. According to the complaint, workers at the Tridonex auto-parts plant in Matamoros—just across the border from Brownsville, Texas—haven’t been able to elect union leaders or ratify a contract, and 600 were fired in acts of retaliation for union activity. Those things violate labor rights commitments that Mexico made in the treaty.
JOINING TOGETHER
Biden administration will expand union rights for 46,000 TSA officers
KFGO
By Thomson Reuters
June 3, 2021
The U.S. Homeland Security Department said on Thursday that 46,000 Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officers will be eligible for expanded union rights and the department will move to boost pay for frontline airport screeners. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka called the announcement “a critical victory for tens of thousands of hardworking union members and will finally allow @TSA workers to bargain for their future like other federal workers.” He urged TSA “to immediately come to the table to reach a fair contract, and we call on Congress to finally codify these workers’ bargaining rights into law by passing the Rights for the TSA Workforce Act.”
Student researchers are the backbone of the UC system. They deserve equal protections (Opinion)
The Sacramento Bee
By Hannah Holzer
June 3, 2021
A recent unionization effort among student researchers was backed with support from UAW 2865, which represents UC teaching assistants, tutors, readers and graduate student instructors, and UAW 5810, which represents UC post-doctoral students and academic researchers. The effort gained momentum in the last year as student researchers at each campus began to discuss their unequal working conditions. Student researchers are some of the last graduate students to unionize — over 180,000 employees across the UC are already represented by unions. On May 24, after months of outreach and organizing, student researchers submitted over 10,000 signed union cards — a supermajority of student researchers — to create Student Researchers United-UAW. Union cards were collected at all ten UC campuses as well as at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
UNION BUSTING
New York Times Workers Are Fed Up With the New York Times' Union-Busting
Vice
By Seth Smalley
June 3, 2021
In April, when a group of more than 650 software engineers, product managers, and data analysts at the New York Times tried to unionize, leadership not only declined to voluntarily recognize their union, but began to hold mandatory anti-union meetings. (Management, of course, had known about the union months before it went public.) The strangest thing about this, say Times workers, was how contrary the current approach runs to the Times' own long-held positions on union recognition—a contradiction the paper has not addressed, and seems unwilling to.
IN THE STATES
The Chronicle
By Milla Surjadi
May 26, 2021
Marybe McMillan, president of the North Carolina State American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, stated her support for the gathering and expressed that “over 120,000 union members across North Carolina” were also standing in solidarity with the workers’ efforts to unionize. McMillan pointed out recent union victories in North Carolina, including the formation of the Duke Faculty Union, the first faculty union at a private university in the South, and the unionization of 1800 nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville last fall, which was thought to be the largest union win in the South in a decade. “I am confident that [the DUP Workers Union] will make history by organizing the first University press in the South,” McMillan said.
Sioux Falls' Smithfield union threatens to strike if plant doesn't agree to new contract
Argus Leader
By Makenzie Huber
June 3, 2021
The president of the Sioux Falls Smithfield Foods workers stated in a news release Wednesday afternoon that workers were threatening a walkout if the international meatpacking company doesn't agree to new four-year contract terms by June 7. The Sioux Falls meatpacking plant quickly became one of the largest outbreaks in the country in spring 2020, with at least 1,294 employees contracting the coronavirus and four employees dying, according to a report from OSHA. "Some of our proposals are being denied by the company," said UFCW Local 304A President B.J. Motley. "We feel that during a pandemic year and after calling Smithfield workers heroes for coming to work on a daily basis to feed America, they haven't shown that appreciation at all during negotiations."
House Kills GOP Touted Right-To-Work Bill
In Depth NH
By Garry Rayno
June 3, 2021
“These bills are nothing more than out of state, corporate interests looking to take advantage of our lawmakers, our businesses, and our workers,” said AFL-CIO New Hampshire president Glenn Bracket. “They deprive workers of their freedom to join together and form strong unions if they choose to. And they have no business being a part of how we do things here in New Hampshire.”