Portside

After several short strikes and on-going organizing, workers at Amazon in Italy signed a contract that improves conditions and pay. This is the first time in Europe that Amazon has been forced by worker pressure to sign a union contract.

The Outside In unit will consist of about 125 workers in about 50 separate classifications. Alongside the vote to unionize, Outside In employees who hold advanced degrees also voted 21 to 7 to be in the same AFSCME bargaining unit.

“If you look at the strongest unions today, they are our public sector education unions and these are unions that by and large are made up of women with women leaders,” says Lily Eskelsen García, the National Education Association president. “We aren’t not sitting by and accepting the status quo.”

To understand the insurgency, we need to look at economics, and at political economy specifically. But we especially need a labor-movement analysis.

For his work as a production manager at Falling Sky overseeing a team of brewers and working up to 65 hours a week, Timms made what came out to a little over $40,000 a year. Frustrated, he quit his brewing job in early 2018, convinced that craft brewers were getting shorted across the industry.

Although tasers are frequently identified by police as a necessary alternative to avoid deadly force, a 2017 Reuters investigation found that, since the early 2000s, more than 1,000 people have died after the police stunned them.

Garment and textile workers are organizing to improve their pay. They are amongst the least paid in the country, often earning less than $1.00 per day.