On January 29th, Uber had reduced fares in more than eighty cities in the U.S. and Canada. Drivers in some of those cities, including San Francisco, San Diego, Tampa, and New York City, have reacted with strikes and protests.
As more states feel they’ve been put at a competitive disadvantage by their right-to-work neighbors, the pressure only increases to follow suit and enact their own right-to-work laws. And after a while, a national right-to-work law might not be far behind.
“I suspect that will happen within the next decade,” says Marquita Walker, an associate professor of labor studies at Indiana University.
Today, the Supreme Court handed down a decision striking a Massachusetts law that protects patient access to abortion clinics. The Court, upheld the historically broad interpretation of the president's recess appointments power, and opened the door to new forms of Senate obstruction by ruling that the president's recess appointments were invalid because the Senate had used "pro forma sessions" - sessions in name only - to avoid going into recess.
If the union wins a dispute over whether two engineers in Miami can join the union that represents more than 25,000 workers at Boeing and other companies, it becomes much easier and less costly for the union to organize workers outside metro Puget Sound. That means the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace has a better chance of re-unionizing the more than 4,000 engineering jobs that Boeing has moved, or plans to move, out of Washington.
If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of a lawsuit filed by the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, every state in the country would essentially turn into an anti-union "right to work" state, which would be a significant blow to public sector unions' collective bargaining efforts and also complicate thousands of existing contracts between organized workers and municipalities, cities, counties, and states across the country.
The 2,135 graduate assistants will become the largest union on the campus, followed by the faculty with about 1,700 members, and the staff union which has about 1,600 members. About 85 percent of UConn’s employees are unionized.
“The university has been, and will continue to be, neutral with regard to this effort,” Stephanie Reitz, a spokeswoman for the university, said. “Individual graduate students are free to make their own decision.
The AFL–CIO is a multifaceted institution composed of scores of autonomous unions, so President Richard Trumka’s leadership can hardly turn around this cumbersome vessel all that quickly. But the new emphasis is clear: the unions should ally with progressive partners and devote more energy to make the kind of changes in social policy that can benefit millions of poorly paid and insecure workers.
The decision on Friday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected a 2011 rule that required employers to post, physically or electronically, a notice describing workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act. It was the second time in as many months that a federal appeals court has rejected the rule, after the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals said last month the poster rule violated employers' free speech rights.
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