Dear friends,
Labor Day is one of those holidays that should not be confined to a single day. On Labor Day itself, I wrote about the resurgence of the labor movement in New York and around the nation.
Today is the deadline that labor leaders set for a new contract before railway workers will strike. The dispute involves 115,000 workers who belong to 12 unions. The president’s Emergency Board has been at work this summer to resolve the dispute. The Board
called for 24% raises and $5,000 in bonuses in a five-year deal that’s retroactive to 2020.
One of the major issues has been highly restrictive attendance policies that penalized workers for taking unpaid time off and provided 0 sick days. The deal includes an additional day of paid leave day each year, and the end of most penalties for taking unpaid time off to seek medical care. The raises are meant to offset the outrageous absence of sick leave.
“Everyone knows you can get more money in the freight industry. But it’s what we would call blood money,” Kaminkow [general secretary of the Railroad Workers United] said. “It’s almost impossible to predict when you are going to be off and when you can attend to various life issues like family, like children, like an appointment.”
One of the 12 unions, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers District 19, voted to reject the tentative agreement this week, and has agreed not to strike before 9/29. Six unions have tentatively accepted the agreement, and have yet to vote, and two others voted in favor of the deal.
Averting a huge, costly, and disruptive strike is a good thing AND it’s important to recognize the limitations of the deal and the continued jeopardy that workers face. One of the twelve unions, the Brotherhood of Maintenance and Weight, lost 35 of its members to Covid at the height of the pandemic.
For an administration touting itself as the most pro-union in history, negotiating a deal with no paid sick time (and allowing workers to still be disciplined if they are sick four of the seven days in a week), with a pharmaceutical deal with no limits on costs to the workers, with health insurance demanding absurdly high premiums is not even close to enough.
Read Jane McAlevy’s piece about the status of labor and what’s at stake:
[C]onditions for American workers are horrible, period. The pandemic has taken a massive toll on nurses, on educators, on the whole of society. Too few staff and too much work is decimating the quality of life of most workers, while shareholders and the super-rich are buying yachts and building second and third homes—even their own personal rockets. [F]rontline workers who keep “the economy” moving are being badly abused, from nurses to railroad employees to stagehands and millions more—think farmworkers who feed the nation in California, where Gavin Newsom just vetoed a bill to help them to unionize.
The freight industry is booming and profiting tremendously from the demand created by pandemic-era shipping. It appears that the crisis has been averted AND it is also the case that US labor law needs revision.
Read Jamelle Bouie’s excellent column about the history behind the current railroad labor dispute.
Here’s a good explainer for the PRO Act [Protecting the Right to Organize] from Human Rights Watch. Bouie is correct that Democrats do not have the votes to get this legislation passed yet. Still, it’s good to remind our legislators what we want.
Sign this petition in support of the PRO Act from the Communications Workers of America.
Somehow, I missed Fashion Week. However, I learned that models, unions and lawmakers are calling the passage of the Fashion Workers Act, which would regulate an industry that is rife with abusive labor practices.
Before the pandemic,
the fashion industry employed 4.6 percent of New York City’s workforce.
Tell your NYS representatives that models, stylists, makeup artists, hair stylists, influencers, and other creative artists deserve basic labor protections.
The anti-union playbook is pretty familiar. This account of Chipotle’s shitty labor practices is remarkably like what Starbucks has done.
Chipotle closed the store permanently on 19 July, right before a hearing with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on the union election, leaving workers saying they were blacklisted from being hired at other locations in the area. Chipotle claimed the store was shut down due to staffing problems. Workers have filed unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB over the store closure.
And the pattern has been seen across industries, with workers reporting mass firings when corporations are faced with burgeoning organizing efforts. According to the NLRB,
the number of charges filed for unfair labor practices increased 16% in the first three-quarters of 2022 compared with 2021.
The No Tax Breaks for Union Busting Act would end the taxpayer subsidization of anti-union activity by corporations. The bill would classify business’ interference in worker organization campaigns as political speech under the tax code and therefore not tax deductible.
Sign the petition to deny tax breaks to union-busting corporations.
in solidarity and with love,
L