Brief Updates
According to a Gallup poll taken last August, 68 percent of Americans approve of labor unions, the highest number in more than 50 years.
As of late May, the latest count in the drive to unionize Starbucks is 79 stores where the union won the election and only nine where they lost it. Now, at one of those nine locations, at Camp Road in Hamburg, NY, a regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, has recommended that Starbucks be ordered to bargain with the union, citing a blizzard of labor law violations by the company to intimidate workers at the store to vote no. Among those violations cited was the firing of pro-union workers, disciplining and spying on others, and closing stores and changing work policies where they feared the union was winning. The NLRB official, Linda Leslie, made the rare request that the company be compelled to bargain rather than simply recommending a new election. It is an indication of the extent of illegal tactics Starbucks used and the lack of confidence that it will refrain from doing it again.
The Eastern Atlantic States Regional Council of Carpenters is betting on the jobs that will be created by the transition to renewable energy. In February, they purchased a diving school near Philadelphia, where their members – carpenters, millwrights, and piledrivers – are scheduled for training to work underwater doing welding and other skills needed for the construction of offshore wind turbines. The union is anticipating the creation of millions of high-paying union jobs that will be added to the economy by the deployment of clean energy facilities to confront climate change.
Staff members of the U.S. House of Representatives are one step closer to gaining union representation after the house, on a party-line vote with Republicans voting no, approved the measure to grant them the right to unionize. The Senate does not have to approve the measure.
