The Weekly Download

“Before California’s fast food workers get a minimum wage hike to $20 an hour in April, the state will grant them another historic avenue to advance their interests.  A first-in-the-nation fast food council will offer workers and labor advocates a way to set industry working conditions, hammering out rules directly across the table from franchise owners and representatives of restaurant chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King. The council is supposed to start meeting by March 15, and its decisions will be sent to state labor agencies to decide if they’ll become real regulations. Gov. Gavin Newsom will have a hand in how the discussion plays out: He’s responsible for appointing seven of the council’s nine members; legislative leaders will appoint the other two. The positions are unpaid, except for $100 per day for council business.”

“But Colorado was different. The state’s union membership rate ticked up, at least from a low point in 2021. Last year, the number of union members increased 6.2% to 189,000 workers. Union members make up 6.9% of the state’s employed population. A year earlier it was at 6.7%, which is below the national average. The state added 11,000 union members last year, and 13,000 in the prior year. Those included baristas at Starbucks and staff at Urban Peak, the first unionized shelter for unhoused people in Colorado. Momentum, especially among service workers, continued this month with more filing with the National Labor Relations Board to start a union, including 238 employees at the Denver Art Museum, about 180 workers from Alamo Drafthouse Cinema locations in Westminster and Denver and five at the CobbleStone Car Wash in Lakewood.”

“Over 10,000 autoworkers across 13 non-union companies have signed union cards with the UAW, as momentum builds across the auto industry for better wages, benefits, and rights on the job. The major milestone comes less than 90 days after UAW members ratified record contracts at the Big Three.”

“Today, a supermajority of restaurant workers at The Bazaar by José Andrés in Washington, D.C., have announced their intention to form a union with UNITE HERE Local 25. The celebrity chef’s highly-rated restaurant is located within the Waldorf Astoria Washington DC hotel, the same federally-owned former Post Office that previously housed the Trump International Hotel.”

“Workers at the Lush Cosmetics store in Lexington, Ky., recently joined UFCW Local 227 for a better life. This organizing win marks the second unit of Lush Cosmetics workers in Kentucky to join UFCW Local 227. Workers at the Lush Cosmetics store in Louisville made history by becoming the first Lush Cosmetics store in the U.S. to unionize when they voted to join UFCW Local 227 last April.”

“Trader Joe’s is facing a litany of union-busting charges before the National Labor Relations Board. The agency’s prosecutors have accused the company of illegally retaliating against workers, firing a union supporter and spreading false information in an effort to chill an organizing campaign. But in a hearing last Tuesday, the grocer’s attorney briefly summarized a sweeping defense it intends to mount against the charges: The labor board itself, which was created during the New Deal and has refereed private-sector collective bargaining for nearly 90 years, is ‘unconstitutional.’ The argument would appear to fit inside a broader conservative effort to dismantle the regulatory state, which has taken aim at agencies tasked with enforcing laws to protect workers, consumers and the environment.”

“Appalling as it may sound, this is far from the first modern instance of Republicans calling for a return to 19th-century labor laws. The right has lately been seeking to slash regulations so that businesses from retail, restaurants and assembly lines, to meatpacking plants and agriculture can staff their operations with low-paid, pliable, sometimes undocumented teenagers. Arkansas, under former Trump spokesperson and now-Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has been at the vanguard of this regressive effort, but its effects have spread across the nation. Tragically, poverty in the U.S. is such that many children, immigrant children chief among them, are themselves incentivized to obtain underage employment out of necessity. A recent spate of fatal accidents involving children on the job is simply an inevitable outcome of two related trends: deteriorating social welfare and unethical corporate practices aimed at maximizing profits. The result is that, in the latest low point of neoliberal excess, we find ourselves confronting an issue that many would assume was resolved by the tail end of the Industrial Revolution.”

"Fresh off of trying to replace education with child labor, Florida Republicans have another bright idea that’s sure to improve conditions for workers in the Sunshine State. They’re out to ensure that workers don’t have any right to protection when toiling outdoors in the heat.”

“The St. Louis Housing, Urban Development and Zoning (HUDZ) voted Jan. 17 to advance a tax subsidy supporting the remodeling of the struggling Oyo Hotel in downtown St. Louis, despite lingering concerns about the developer’s position on union Labor and workers organizing. Maryland Heights-based Midas Hospitality plans to spend $46 million to turn the run-down Oyo Hotel on South 14th Street near the Enterprise Center into an upscale Sheraton.”

“From credit card terms of service to employment contracts, millions of people are trapped in agreements that only allow them to challenge corporate abuse through a private system of arbitration rather than in a court of law. Now, the biggest player in that private system has posted a 25-fold increase in its filing fee — a move that experts say could prevent consumers and workers from holding corporations accountable.”

“I think simple questions about fundamental life activities are often the most profound. Asking “what work is” to anyone who works is one of those queries. My book What Works Is provides answers from thousands of workers. In many years of teaching, I have had the opportunity to talk with workers from different occupations. These workers largely earn middle class wages or salaries. The large majority are union members. Some have college degrees; most don’t. They are a collection of races, nationalities, genders, ages, and political ideologies. They are a diverse representation of America’s working class. None own any of the productive capital that controls the economy. My worker-students have only their labor to sell. With it they make a life and a world possible.”

“Labor law enforcement in the United States faces a crisis. Workplace rights violations are rampant. Wage theft dwarfs most other types of theft. Minimum wage violations alone, estimated to be $15 billion annually, account for more theft than all offenses such as robbery, burglary, and motor vehicle theft combined. A recent ProPublica and Documented investigation found that from 2017 to 2021, “more than $203 million in wages had been stolen from about 127,000 workers” in 13,000 cases of wage theft in the state of New York alone with most of the money still owed and yet to be collected. The total amount stolen from working people is ‘almost certainly a significant undercount.’”

“In this country, the rights you get as a worker—like overtime pay, a safe workplace, and the right to organize into a union—depend on a seemingly simple question: Are you an employee? If the answer is yes, you get a plateful of rights and protections under federal and state law. If the answer is no—meaning you’re an independent contractor in business for yourself—the plate is empty.”

“Following the Congressional Labor Caucus’ relaunch for the 118th Congress and hiring of its first Executive Director, the Caucus today announced a slate of key legislative endorsements. These bills, which will raise standards for and protect the rights of workers, represent core legislative priorities for the Caucus in the 118th Congress.”

“AFSCME members strongly support a bill reintroduced in Congress today that would provide employees of the federal government a much-needed 7.4% pay raise in 2025. The Federal Adjustment of Income Rates (FAIR) Act was introduced by Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly and Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz. The lawmakers, both Democrats, have introduced versions of the bill in previous sessions.”

“The Family Budget Calculator estimates the resources families need to make ends meet across the United States. This report explains how policymakers, employers, and advocates can set meaningful living wage standards using the calculator.”

“Today, Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien demanded Anheuser-Busch deliver its last, best, and final offer, after the company wasted another negotiating session putting forth an unacceptable proposal that threatens to kill Teamster jobs by closing breweries and permanently laying off Teamsters systemwide. After refusing to commit to protecting Teamster jobs since mid-November, Anheuser-Busch executives returned to the bargaining table this week with an offer to butcher the good-paying jobs behind its products. If the company does not reverse course and come to terms on an agreement that rewards and protects workers, 5,000 Teamsters will be forced to go on strike as soon as March 1.”

“Production workers at Nickelodeon’s Animation Studio are fighting for their first contract alongside already-organized artists (writers, designers, colorists, storyboarders and background painters) who have been working under an expired contract for two and a half years. The workers collectively produce animated shows: The Loud House, Rugrats, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Spongebob SquarePants. The artists have been members of IATSE Local 839, The Animation Guild (TAG) since 2002, and 3D computer graphics staff joined in 2013.”

“Unionized editorial staff at Forbes are walking off the job through Monday in protest of the business magazine’s attempts to prevent union members from exercising their rights as well as slow-walking contract negotiations. This the first walkout for the Forbes Union, and the first known work stoppage in the magazine’s 106-year history. It occurs during the production of its February/March print issue.”

“Journalists at New York’s Hometown Newspaper, the Daily News, walked out Thursday — the first walkout since the end of their historic strike in 1991 — fed up with chronic cuts ordered by the paper’s owner, the ‘destroyer of newspapers’ Alden Global Capital.”

“The closure was devastating to Belvidere, a small town of 25,000 residents built around the Kishwaukee River in northern Illinois. Several restaurants and a grocery store near the plant have already closed, and workers, many of whom had families in the local schools, had grown up in the town, or had moved there for their positions, found themselves out of work, and staring at the possibility of being uprooted. The company’s willingness to walk away from a plant, and a town, where it had operated since 1965 became a symbol of corporate callousness during the UAW’s fall 2023 Stand-Up Strike against the Big Three automakers—Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. It was a source of outrage on picket lines and at rallies. But then something stunning happened. UAW’s strike resulted in a 2023 contract that says Stellantis must reopen the plant to produce mid-sized trucks by 2027, though the language does not specify how many jobs will be created. And there’s more: Stellantis also committed to locating a parts distribution hub, as well as a brand-new electric vehicle battery plant, in Belvidere.” 

“Members of RWDSU/UFCW Local 374 who work at the Post Cereal plant in Battle Creek, Mich., also known as “Cereal City,” recently ratified a new contract that strengthens wages and benefits. The three-year contract includes an immediate $1.50 per hour raise for maintenance employees, who will receive an additional six percent increase over the life of the agreement. Employees in other departments will see an 8.75 percent increase.”

“Lainey Newman and Theda Skocpol’s Rust Belt Union Blues makes a compelling case that left-wing success in the rust belt depends on reviving the presence and stature of unions — and the sense of social connection they offer — in local communities.”

“Chris Bohner’s recent essay in these pages, ‘Direct Elections for Labor Leaders Make for More Militant Unions,’ lays out an argument that at one level is so uncontroversial that it should be a platitude — unions should be democratic. No one who believes in organized labor in the United States (or anywhere in the world) can disagree with the sentiment. Nevertheless, Bohner is right to say it, because even seemingly obvious truths bear repeating.”