• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Labor/Workers movements thread

Labor unions are going to have to fight like they never have before to keep their members employed after this re-opens. Even strong unions like the UAW are going to get pinched.
 
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/graduate-students-austerity-conditions/

Universities to Grad Students: Drop Dead
“Academic workers worldwide perform the labor that makes our institutions run. We deserve basic labor protections, especially during this pandemic.”

As student workers organize for better working conditions on campus, many have attempted to reason directly with their respective universities’ administrations. At the University of California in Santa Barbara, where graduate students have been on strike since the fall quarter of 2019 to protest low wages and insufficient housing, the administration has yet to formally acknowledge that any protests have taken place. Instead, the dean of the Graduate Division wrote a letter encouraging upset students to seek support at the campus’s counseling services.

“We have been met with a ruthless cold shoulder,” said Matt Harris, a sixth-year PhD candidate. “The administration at UC Santa Barbara has not responded to us or acknowledged that there was even a strike.”

Though they did not communicate with student activists, the administration was closely following what they did. According to recent reporting from Vice, the California National Guard provided military surveillance equipment to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Police Department in order to surveil striking students at UC Santa Cruz, UC Santa Barbara, and other schools in the UC system during the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) strike in February. As a result of the protest, many of the students involved were fired from their teaching positions.

According to Harris, student workers at UC Santa Barbara have been fighting for a COLA so that they can afford housing, food, and health care security. While these conditions were already precarious in 2019, Covid-19 and the move to online teaching via Zoom has only furthered these economic and housing crises. “To make ends meet, many graduate students picked up side hustles like tutoring or working at the public library or a coffee shop, but now those extra gigs have diminished or disappeared,” Harris said. “We simply cannot afford to continue to live here and work here and pretend that everything is good.”
 
meanwhile Pitt's BoT just approved a seven-figure salary for a new hire
https://pittnews.com/article/157963/news/board-committee-sets-salary-for-new-health-sciences-chief/

Shekhar will receive a $1-million base salary in 2020 and be eligible for an annual performance bonus of at least $300,000 up to a maximum of 40% of his current base salary. He will also receive an additional $100,000 every year for his first five years, but the $500,000 total will be paid in 2025, as an incentive for Shekhar to stay in his position for that long, similar to a clause in Chancellor Patrick Gallagher’s contract that expired in 2019. Dr. Arthur Levine, his predecessor who is transitioning to a research-oriented role at Pitt’s Brain Institute, is set to earn a base salary of $911,730 in 2020.

Gallagher said at the meeting that Pitt calculated Shekhar’s salary by using a peer group of leaders for other top-funded National Institutes of Health centers for universities with medical schools that receive NIH funding. He said the median total compensation for this group is $1.65 million, and minimum compensation is about $1.1 million.

it's all good though because he's giving some of his salary to students, they can have a little treat

Gallagher added that Shekhar has volunteered to donate 10% of his salary to students, matching the actions of the seven other senior vice chancellors. Shekhar’s salary will also be fully paid by Pitt, a departure from when part of the position’s salary was paid by UPMC.
 
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/6/united-electrical-workers-workplace-organizing-dsa

Something Is Stirring in the Labor Movement

A coronavirus-era partnership between the United Electrical Workers and Democratic Socialists of America has given birth to what may be the most innovative labor organizing campaign since the '30s: the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee.

If you have to work during this pandemic, it’s best if you have a union. Research from the Columbia University Labor Lab found that essential workers who belong to unions were more likely to receive testing for COVID-19, be provided protective personal equipment on the job, practice good social distancing at work, and be guaranteed paid sick leave in the event that they contracted the virus despite all precautions.

Unfortunately, the US unionization rate is at a historic nadir. And with lives on the line and time of the essence, workers facing danger on the job can’t simply snap their fingers and get unionized to protect themselves, their families, and the broader public from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, non-unionized essential workers need to improvise.

Enter the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, founded to provide logistical support to workers who want to organize for better pandemic-related working conditions, but don’t have a union to rely on. EWOC was started and is run by a group of independent members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and organizers for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE).

Colette Perold, EWOC’s National Coordinator and a member of DSA, says many of the initial EWOC organizers had gotten to know each other on Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. That’s also where many of them became familiar with the “distributed organizing” model that they’re using to help workers across the country mount pressure campaigns and win demands on the fly.

“The people volunteering to do EWOC include a lot of former Bernie staffers and volunteers and a lot of members of DSA,” two groups with significant overlap, says Perold. “Many of these people have no labor organizing experience, but we’ve created a structure to train them and equip them with the organizing tools to help run a project like this at scale.”

When people sign up to volunteer for EWOC, they’re asked to give information about their organizing background “so we can place you where you’ll be of the most use and gain the most out of EWOC,” says Perold. “For those without organizing experience, you’re doing initial intake calls with workers, meaning you’re getting an initial assessment of the situation. But we don’t want to put any workers at risk by having someone without experience work on their campaign. So if you’re inexperienced, you’re not escalating anything with them.”

Not at first, anyway. EWOC also has a comprehensive training program, an organizing curriculum complete with assignments and assessments. Then there’s a shadowing and mentorship program to prepare trained volunteers for organizing in the field. For socialists and other committed pro-worker activists who want to learn how to coordinate workplace-based campaigns, EWOC functions as a sort of ad hoc school of labor organizing.
 
Good on ya, Target: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/17/tar...to-15-an-hour-months-before-its-deadline.html

ETA: in my opinion, for a company the size of Target, $15 an hour and decent benefits is a floor. But this paragraph gives me some hope for the model companies must emulate if financially viable:

Target’s margins have been under pressure from pandemic-related expenses. Along with added labor costs, the company sold fewer high-margin items, such as apparel and accessories, in the first quarter. Customers’ shift to online shopping cut into profits, too, as the company had to ship more items to homes or get them ready for curbside pickup.
 
Which is to say, we've seen margins threatened at businesses around the world during the covid crisis, but we've also seen some companies step up and value their workers at this time--the balancing act has been tough to manage for lots of owners.
 
 
 
 
That should be a no-brainer.
 
Maybe unions should go after Chik-Fil-A and groups that operate multiple venues for other fast food chains. Going after operators of one or two sites will be much more expensive and have less impact. Once the big guys have been organized, the small operations will have a road map and success to grow from.
 
Yeah, because organizing a bunch of 16-year olds across the South into dues-paying union members is an easy thing to do.
 
RJ that is pretty dumb idea. Chick-Fil-A's workforce is like 50% teenagers. Much bigger fish to fry out there.

That being said when I worked for the W-S Journal in HS as a stringer and occasional HS olympic sports reporter, a buddy and myself use to joke about creating a part-timers union. One slow night we got bored and made a flyer demanding a union and put it on the sports editor's desk. We get called in early two days later because some corporate big wig had walked by and freaked out and thought the whole newsroom was about to go on strike. Luckily the sports editor was a contrarian dickhead (in the best way) and thought it was hilarious, so we got to keep our jobs.
 
RJ that is pretty dumb idea. Chick-Fil-A's workforce is like 50% teenagers. Much bigger fish to fry out there.

That being said when I worked for the W-S Journal in HS as a stringer and occasional HS olympic sports reporter, a buddy and myself use to joke about creating a part-timers union. One slow night we got bored and made a flyer demanding a union and put it on the sports editor's desk. We get called in early two days later because some corporate big wig had walked by and freaked out and thought the whole newsroom was about to go on strike. Luckily the sports editor was a contrarian dickhead (in the best way) and thought it was hilarious, so we got to keep our jobs.

People on this thread were talking about unionizing fast food workers. It's not "pretty dumb" to go after big companies in that arena. ALL I was responding to was fast food workers being unionized.

You don't need have a Pavlovian response to my name.

If you have paid any attention over the years, you would have seen that from Day One of the boards, I have been a staunch, unapologetic support of unions.

Noun, verb, RJ is dumb...got it...there's no sense to look at CONTEXT....

P.S. My first union card was gained when I was 18...
 
That's cool about your card. What union were you in? This was while you were at Wake?

(Also, please stop referring to yourself in the third person, RJ.)
 
 
Back
Top