“For decades, the labor movement’s efforts to halt its long slide have been – to speak plainly – an utter failure” writes Steven Greenhouse in The American Prospect (6/13). “The U.S. has gone from having 35 percent of its workforce unionized in the 1950s to 20 percent in the 1980s to just 10 percent today. But now, finally, comes a burst of unexpected hope” in the wake of union organizing across the country.

But this has created a challenge for established labor unions as so much of then union activity is coming from independent unions formed outside the traditional labor organizations. The challenge is similar to the 1930’s when the drive to organize the workers in mass production industries was scorned  by the AFL, representing skilled trades workers. They looked down upon workers in steel mills and auto plants and shunned the idea of organizing thousands of factory workers into one union rather than organizing separate unions by their particular crafts. It was union leaders like United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis, Amalgamated Clothing Workers President Sidney Hillman and others who saw the future in the new wave of organization and formed the CIO that welcomed the new unions into its ranks.

Greenhouse writes that although the AFL-CIO’s President Liz Shuler, who is slated to be elected to a full-four year term, wants the nation’s unions to do considerably more to help today’s surge of unionization grow, “many unions in the federation feel little urge or compulsion to help.” In particular, although the biggest unions in the federation are saying all the right things, they “haven’t yet stepped up to provide the money, lawyers, and other resources that are required to turn the current burst of unionization into a far larger, more lasting wave.”

Today’s labor leaders and their unions have a crucial decision to make, he declares. “Will they remain mere spectators to these efforts, thereby increasing the chances that this very promising moment will peter out? Or will they heed the example of John L. Lewis, and join in solidarity with the most pro-union generation this nation has seen in 80 years? Will they put up the money and resources required to turn this into a watershed moment for labor?

“If not now, when?”

The American Prospect, 6/13

All Three Joint Councils of the Teamsters Union  in New York State have urged the state legislature to pass two laws aimed at protecting workers in warehouse industries like Amazon from some of the notorious corporate abuses they have suffered.

In letters to the legislature and in a rally and two press conferences at the Albany state capital, they urged the adoption of the Warehouse Worker Protection Act and the 21^st Century Antitrust Act. The first would create a plan to reduce injuries at

large warehouses that result from repetitive movements and unsafe practices, empowering  the state Department of Labor to enforce worker safety regulations more effectively. It also protects workers from firing or disciplinary measures based on secret or unfair production quotas.

“Amazon’s growth in New York is endangering workers,” the Teamster statement said. “The rate of serious injuries at Amazon warehouses in New York was six injuries per 100 full-time employees, 50 percent higher than New York’s warehouses overall.”

The 21st Century Antitrust Act is intended to update New York’s antitrust laws to meet the growing concentration of some giant corporations in the state. As one example, the Teamster statement said, since Amazon opened its first facility eight years ago, it has expanded to 78 facilities statewide, a situation that is endangering workers, given its poor record on worker safety. The proposed act would lower the very high threshold that now exists for proving that a company has monopoly power over the labor market and empowers the state Attorney General to review potentially harmful consolidations and mergers that affect labor markets.

“Amazon has undercut good jobs by paying half the union rate and lengthening the workweek,” the Teamster letter declared. “When a company is this big, and it is non-union, then the employer can dictate wages and working conditions unilaterally for its own workers, and those bad conditions trickle down to the rest of the industry as well.”

Teamsters.org/Amazon

Graduate school workers at Indiana University went on strike April 13 demanding recognition of their union in the face of the university’s refusal to recognize it.

The walkout came after the union, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition, a unit of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers (IGWC-UE) obtained a strike authorization vote by a margin of 1,008 to 23, or 97.8 percent of the ballots cast. The walkout is intended to demonstrate that the union has, in fact, the support of a majority of the 2,500 graduate workers and a majority who will participate in collective action.

They were joined on the picket line the first day by undergraduate students who walked out at noon in solidarity with the graduate workers. A number of faculty members also are backing their demand for recognition and bargaining rights.

Graduate school workers perform various duties like rating student exams and papers, aiding in research of faculty members and sometimes teaching classes. They are, most often, vastly underpaid.

Workers in the state of Indiana have few rights to organize unions in the private or public sectors since the state is one with the so-called “right-to-work” laws.

The UE has become one of the leading forces in the drive to organize these workers, recently organizing a large unit at MIT in Boston (see item on this website’s Labor News page)  and others in universities around the country. While UE has been doing this for a number of years, the number of grad workers in its membership has soared in the past year.

UE Website,  Jacobin, 4/13; Who Gets the Bird, 4/16

 

In a huge win for union organizing, workers at Amazon’s Staten Island, NY warehouse voted by a large margin to be represented by the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), the first victory for a union at the mammoth company.

Hailing the workers victory, ALU President Christian Smalls said: “We want to thank Jeff Bezos (Amazon’s anti-union chief) for going to space because when he was up there, we were signing people up.”

Biggest Union Win on a Generation

Amazon is the nation’s second largest company, employing about 1.1 million workers in the U.S. and a half-million more around the world, and one of the fiercest union-busters in the country. It is second in size only to Walmart, also a fight-to-the-death foe of unions. The Amazon vote was 2,654 for the union to 2,131 against it, a winning margin of better than 10 percent. The union will represent over 8,300 workers at the New York facility, the biggest union win in a generation.

Although Amazon widely heralded the minimum wage of $15-an-hour it paid, workers called the pay highly insufficient for the heavy work they do. They cited a culture of fear with intense monitoring of their productivity – another name for speedup – that sparked their need for a union.

The victory came in the face of a full scale attack on the unionization effort by the company. It mandated attendance at anti-union meetings, repeatedly texted employees with anti-union messages, and spent some $4.3 million nationwide, including at the Staten Island facility (known as JFK8), on anti-union consultants to help plan their strategy.

Grass Roots Organizing Paid Off

The effort appeared to pay off for a different organizing strategy. Instead of the traditional method where a national union sent in professional organizers, the ALU organized workers from the ground up, with workers on the job starting the drive by talking to other workers and forming their own union. The grass roots worker-to-worker effort built confidence that they were joining with others who worked alongside them, instead of some outside entity. After enough of the had signed up, they started wearing shirts and masks with the union’s logo in the warehouse and even set up a working shop outside with a barbecue grill to pass out meals to workers.

A big question for the labor movement now is the extent to which they will help the independent ALU fight potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract by providing resources and legal talent.

“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers.

For Amazon, the stakes are high. Like Starbucks, a successful union effort at one workplace tends to stimulate similar unionizing efforts at others and other Amazon facilities are also starting to organize.

Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.

“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”

Krugman: “Maybe a Turning Point”  

In his New York Times column April 6  Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman dealt with the significance of the union victory at Sraren Island.

Linking the decline in the standard to living  of most  workers and the subsequent growth of economic inequality to the decline in the power of labor unions, he writes that the union win at Amazon could have very significant positive consequences for other American workers and for the economy as a whole.

“Maybe, just maybe, it represents a turning point,” he declares hopefully. “If America manages to steer itself toward becoming a more equal, less insane polity, future historians may say that the turn began on Staten Island.”

NY Times, 4/1; Paul Krugman, NY Times, 4/6