Dutch IKEA worker supports Virginia union

 

In Virginia Swedwood plant

IKEA workers vote 3-1 for union

Unionists world-wide call for equality for U.S. workers

"The IKEA vision is to create a better everyday life for the many people," the classy Swedish furniture company boasts on its website. Thanks to IKEA, "I learned that I have the right to express my opinion, to be heard," says a child promoting the company's foundation.

But at the IKEA's only U.S. factory, the Swedwood plant in Danville, Virginia, workers weren't being heard. They began to organize for a union a year after the plant opened, and the company then hired Jackson Lewis, a notorious union-busting firm, to help change their minds. At least two workers who spoke out for the Machinists union (IAM) were fired.

IKEA's corporate conduct is supposed to be guided by its IWAY Standard, which outlines environmental, social and working rules. But those high corporate standards stopped at the U.S. border. "You should not be able to reap the economic benefits of an image if that image is not true," says Bill Street, director of the Wood Works Department of the Machinists union.

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Spotlight on grant recipient

We'll present $10,000 Edna Award to winner October 18

Panel of national leaders in social causes reviews over 400 entries

Liz Shuler heads judging panel

We were delighted to receive over 400 applications for our new Edna Award. The award will be presented October 18 at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., and you can find out who's the winner on this web site as soon as it's announced.

Elizabeth H. Shuler, Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO leads a judging panel of extraordinary women that includes: Valerie Ervin, President, The Montgomery County Council; Mary Kay Henry, President, Service Employees International Union; Terry O'Neill, President, National Organization for Women; and Carol D. Rothman, Secretary-Treasurer, The Newspaper Guild, CWA.

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25,000 flight attendants choose AFA-CWA at merged United Airlines

United in one union after merger with Continental Air

When United Airlines merged with Continental last year, flight attendants were split between two unions — the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which had represented them at United, and the International Association of Machinists representing those from Continental.

This June they voted 55% to 45% to be all represented by a single union, the AFA-CWA. Turnout was high — 88%. AFA now represents some 25,000 active and retired flight attendants at the merged company. This is the biggest private sector organizing victory in years.

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Spotlight on grant recipient

How meeting hundreds of tradeswomen inspired young women

Grant sent over 100 pre-apprentices to Women Building the Nation conference

Pre-apprentice group from the Cypress Mandela Training Center in Oakland, CA

Vanessa Casillas is in her third year of apprenticeship training with the Bricklayer's Union in Chicago, in an era where women are still just 2% of all workers in the construction trades. She is also a Native American. Imagine Casillas' amazement when she not only met 600 other women working in the construction trades, but also ran into another Native American skilled tradeswoman.

Casillas was attending an amazing first-in-a-decade conference for women skilled construction workers held in California April 19 to May 1. When the national AFL-CIO Building and Construction Trades Department agreed to co-sponsor the annual California construction trades conference, they let it serve double duty as the first "Women Build the Nation" conference.

Casillas found the experience "very inspiring" and was especially "impressed with the diversity of the tradeswomen." That diversity got a big boost from the Berger-Marks grant that helped tradeswomen Inc. bring Casillas and over 100 other young women to the conference, and design four workshops for them. All are just getting started in careers in the skilled trades through pre-apprenticeship programs or exploring a career in the trades. Many of the Berger-Marks- sponsored delegates came from disadvantaged backgrounds.

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What decision means for workers & consumers

High Court throws out lawsuit for 1.6 million women at Walmart

Majority ignores proof of widespread discrimination

PAI

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be... an elephant? That seems to be the Supreme Court's reaction, after being presented with convincing proof of widespread inequality for women working at Walmart.

Even in cases where the women have more seniority and are more highly qualified, Walmart pays them less. And it doesn't promote them as often or as quickly as male employees. Women fill 70 percent of the hourly jobs, but only 33 percent of management positions. And women are often treated in humiliating ways, as workers from one Walmart superstore after another testified. Top management often refer to female associates as "little Janie Qs."

So ten years ago, a group of female Walmart employees, led by Betty Dukes, filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of all 1.6 million women associates at Walmart. If they had won the case, all Walmart women employees who've been underpaid might have gotten back pay, and the company could have been ordered to stop discriminating.

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OUR Walmart goes public with rally at corporate headquarters

Presents managers a Declaration of Respect

On June 16, nearly 100 Walmart workers from around the country traveled to company headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. to give management a workplace declaration of rights. When Karen Casey, Walmart's Vice President for Global Labor Relations, came out of her office to hear their concerns, she pledged that the company wouldn't retaliate against employees working for change.

Walmart management has aggressively kept the giant chain non-union, but its workers have not been silenced. OUR Walmart — which stands for Organization United for Respect at Walmart — had quietly signed up thousands of members before taking this public step. Groups of 10 to 80 workers had gotten together in Dallas, Seattle, Los Angeles and other cities, meeting inside churches, fast-food restaurants and employees' homes, where they could talk openly about how they'd like to improve Walmart. At the same time they launched a website and Facebook page.

"I believe we did make an impression," recalled Charlene Sandoval Fletcher, a California Walmart worker who met with managers in Arkansas. "I believe we made Karen Casey nervous by catching her off guard with how many OUR Walmart associates were there."

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Sen. Richard Blumenthal gives strong support to T-Mobile family

 

First T-mobile workers in U.S. unionize

Campaign reaps global support for all U.S. T-Mobile workers

Fifteen technicians and switchboard operators working for T-Mobile in Connecticut were the first to break through the company's anti-union armor, as they voted in July to join the Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 1298. That marked a "great victory for telecommunications workers," said William Henderson, the Local president. He praised them for having "the guts and wisdom to stand up to protect their own interests."

T-mobile is headquartered in Germany where its workers have long been unionized; but in the U.S. it has pursued a brutal anti-union strategy. That's kept all of 3,000-plus American T-Mobile workers non-union — until now.

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1,200 Allstate Insurance agents vote on whether to go union

Leaders of professional group want to join up with OPEIU

Insurance agents at Allstate have a professional organization — but they have no power to fight company plans to cut their pay by 20%. Allstate also threatens to get rid of as many as 3,000 of the 12,153 "independent agency owners." That power balance could change, however. Those who belong to the National Association of Professional Allstate Agents, Inc. (NAPAA) are voting on whether to affiliate with the union movement, by becoming a guild within the OPEIU union.

The group's Board of Directors decided to ask members to vote on union affiliation not only because of looming pay cuts, but also because agents are "tired of being controlled as employees and defined as independent contractors " and "feel threatened with the loss of their businesses." In fact Allstate had employed agents directly as company workers until the late 1990s, when it fired them all, and then took most back as independent contractors.

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Savoring victory at St. Vincent Medical Center

 

In California, Connecticut, Massachusetts

Hundreds of nurses & emergency health care workers vote union

Backus Hospital nurses win union after losing peanut butter

Nurses at Backus Hospital in Norwich Connecticut turned to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) for help soon after management brought in an "efficiency expert" who "started cutting everything, from night pay down to removing peanut butter from the kitchenette," recalls RN John Brady.

"That got one of the oncology nurses mad," explained Brady. "She said that for extremely ill patients, sometimes they have only half-an-hour to get food into them" before the patient gets too sick to keep food down. To make sure her patients get as much protein as possible, the nurse needed that peanut butter. After it was yanked, she joined the union organizing committee.

Now that they've voted to join AFT Connecticut on May 11, the 450 nurses have a say over what defines "efficiency."

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Jobs for Justice rally for workers' rights

Barb Ingalls

 

Justice delayed is justice denied

Why NLRB wants to modernize & speed up union elections

& why unions think it's about time

Workers would have a much better chance to join the union of their choice if the rules for union campaigns and elections were modernized and streamlined, says the National Labor Relations Board. That would prevent the months and even years of delays and battles that can cripple the rights of workers to freely choose a union.

When the Board asked the public to comment on its proposed changes through hearings held July 18 and 19, it got an earful from workers, academics and political leaders who are fed up with the corporate manipulation of delays that deny workers a fair vote. The Board was showered with more than 5,000 comments, and more than 50 people showed up to testify at the hearing.

SEIU hand-delivered a letter co-signed by 15,000 workers and activists in support of the NLRB plan. Veronica Tench, a nurse at St. Vincent Medical Center in L.A., told the harrowing story of how it took nurses 13 years to win their SEIU union after management blatantly violated the law to pervert their first union election, and then manipulated NLRB processes to delay a re-vote.

A Steelworker organizer explained how his union often has to make a painful choice between fighting for the right of each individual worker to unionize when management challenges their eligibility as a delaying tactic, and getting a union election before it's too late.

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Grad students could regain union rights at all private universities

As NYU teaching assistants move closer to union recognition

NYU grad workers rally: Recognize us now!

If graduate assistants vote decisively to join a union, they get to be union members, right? Absolutely not, the National Labor Relations Board told Brown University teaching assistants back in 2004, when the Board was dominated by Republicans. The Board claimed that graduate research and teaching assistants, who often teach the bulk of classes at large universities, were actually not employees.

When the research and teaching assistants at New York University voted to join the Graduate Student Organizing Committee/UAW Local 2110 last year, the Labor Board decided to take a fresh look at the 2004 ruling that denied them the right to unionize, and ordered a new hearing.

The hearing held this June gave those 1,800 graduate student employees new hopes of getting the union they wanted. Acting NLRB Regional Director Elbert Tellem agreed with their key claim that they are indeed university employees. "These graduate assistants are performing services under the control and direction of [NYU], for which they are compensated," he explained. The case now moves to the full NLRB, which has the power to overturn the 2004 precedent.

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Innovative Bay Citizen News website goes union

New model in journalism leads in workplace democracy too

Lead organizer Sari Gelzer

It was an important historic move when a nonprofit group launched a web site to counter the alarming shrinkage of news available to the public, as commercial newspapers keep cutting back and dumbing down coverage to make up for ad losses and mismanagement.

That new non-profit web site, the Bay Citizen, made history again in July, when it became the first start-up news site in the nation to unionize.

"We believe The Bay Citizen, as one of the pioneering exponents of new civic journalism, should also be a leading example in the area of workplace democracy," the editorial staff told the website's CEO. They had won support from union journalists at The New York Times and KGO radio, which both get news content from The Bay Citizen.

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Writers & interpreters win union rights, good first contracts

The Onion TV shows & 1,600 Washington state interpreters are union

Russian-Arabic Interpreter Diana Noman in Seattle helped win her union

The comedy writers of the Onion News Network, who have penned shows like "Social Security Reform Bill Encourages Americans to Live Faster, Die Younger," joined the Writers Guild of America, East in late July. They quickly won a collective bargaining agreement covering the show, whose second season will return to air on the Independent Film Channel in September. More than 70 Guild members from other comedy shows signed a letter supporting the ONN writers, and hundreds of Guild members sent emails to the producers.

The same week that Onion News writers joined WGAE, writers and producers of nonfiction TV shows like "Monsters Inside Me" and "Worst Cooks in America" also joined the union. Those employees of the Optomen production company had voted to join WGAE back in December 2010, but the final vote count got hung up in procedural delays.

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Airport screeners choose AFGE as their union

Big recruiting job needed to win fair standards

After airport security workers voted to unionize in April, all that was left was to choose which union would represent the 43,000 eligible TSA employees. In a month-long runoff vote that ended in June, screeners narrowly favored the AFL-CIO-affiliated American Federation of Government Employees over the rival National Treasury Employees Union.

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New website explains unions & collective bargaining

It's fun, funny and informative

From ironic video on negotiating

Who Needs a Pension When You Can Have a Pizza Party? That's one of the humorous videos you'll find on a new AFL-CIO website designed to give union families and potential members the low-down about collective bargaining, the "union advantage" and labor law.

The Collective Bargaining Facts website features short videos mocking management positions and actions, a Real Jokers quiz on the outrageous things politicians are up to, and facts on how unions operate to help working people.

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AFL-CIO invites young workers to 2nd Next Up Summit

Registration ends Sept. 1

Hundreds of young workers, activists and leaders will come together for the second annual Next Up Young Workers Summit, Sept. 29-Oct. 2 in Minneapolis. The gathering is part of the AFL-CIO's long-term outreach effort to workers 35 and younger, and builds on its inaugural Young Workers Summit last year, where 400 young workers shared ideas and input with the labor federation.

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700 delegates launch new group to improve elder care jobs

Organizing workers is key to meeting future needs

Caregiver Marlene told her story on Caring Across Generations website

One "Baby Boomer" turns 65 every several minutes — and as they age, the U.S. will need 2 million more paid caregivers by 2016, says a new coalition that has become alarmed at how ill-equipped our current system is to provide the care they'll need.

The group wants to to improve community and home-based long-term care by recruiting millions of people who give eldercare and helping them improve their jobs and rights — including the right to organize.

Home-care workers are too often underpaid, work under difficult conditions, and — thanks to a U.S. Supreme Court decision — don't even qualify for the minimum wage or overtime. They can organize only if they're in a state that sets up "employers" with whom they can negotiate.

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Republicans sacrifice crucial agency in drive to kill union rights, rural service

FAA shutdown cost millions, inspectors worked without pay

For two weeks airport inspectors were asked to work without pay — zilch — and even had to pay the costs of traveling to inspect worksites out of their own pockets. They did so, because they were more concerned about public safety than their own welfare. Too bad Republicans in Congress don't feel the same way.

Republicans had few qualms about taking down this vital government agency when they refused to pass a bill reauthorizing FAA funding unless it cut subsidies that support rural airport service and crippled workers' rights to a democratic union vote. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had to lay off some 4,000 federal workers, along with tens of thousands of private construction workers.

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