Thousands of municipal workers have won the right to form unions, but a new collective bargaining law stops short of allowing them to strike and the number of public employees now eligible to join a union falls well below what unions ultimately seek.
Politicians who have delighted in the moxie of the Staten Island Amazon workers need to help them and others by fixing the broken labor laws in this country that allow employers to make getting and keeping a union so difficult.
Petitions to organize have come faster than even those involved first believed possible, according to Richard Bensinger, union organizer with Starbucks Workers United and a former organizing director of the AFL-CIO.
Workers started the unfair labor practice strike over claims of bad faith bargaining by Warrior Met Coal over a new union contract. The strike has cost the company an estimated $6.9 million.
For a vast majority of Americans democracy ends when work hours begin. Most people in this country are subject, as workers, to the nearly unmediated authority of their employers, which can discipline, sanction or fire them for nearly any reason
“This is the single biggest new union filing in any industry, definitely this year if not this decade,” said UC Berkeley student researcher Tanzil Chowdhury. “Seventeen thousand new workers just joined the labor movement, which is historic.”
Some 40,000 child-care workers across the state will receive a 15 percent raise in their new contract. The contract settlement coincided with a state budget agreement to fund 200,000 child-care slots over five years.
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