U.S. workers have not given up on unions-a survey of the workforce found interest in joining unions to be at a four-decade high. But few workers who don’t belong to unions will get to join one, since fewer than 1% will experience an organizing drive.
Boots Riley—Oakland activist, musician, and now film-maker extraordinaire—has made labor organizing in an almost entirely non-union industry seem doable and definitely worth the bother.
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.
Rebuilding the democratic infrastructure is too important to leave up to the consultocracy. Mobilizers only turn out people with whom they agree. Organizers engage these people in reaching out to other people with whom they don’t agree.
More than that, we hope to be a force for building greater strategic alignment and operational unity on a number of different levels: unity of the broadest possible coalition of forces against the Trumpist GOP; unity among the social justice forces that are striving to establish a durable progressive pole in mass politics; and unity between the sectors of the anti-capitalist left are engaged in these efforts and are working to rebuild a durable and fully inclusive working class movement for systemic change.
The election at the LA Times comes on the heels of a recent spate of successful media union drives.
Instead of being sufficiently innovative, says Seattle SEIU Local 775 David Rolf, most labor leaders have been “reinvesting and doubling down on our American system of enterprise-based collective bargaining since the union movement started to shrink in the early 1950s.” The result: “Through decades . . . we’ve seen unions grow weaker and weaker every year while continuing to repeat the same strategic directions.”
In an echo of national worker's rights movements such as Fight for $15 and OUR Walmart, New Orleans hospitality workers are coming together in an attempt to rearrange the building blocks of their industry. Both on their own and with the support of a union, workers are becoming their own advocates, in an effort to — as Marlene Patrick-Cooper, the local organizing director for the UNITE HERE union, often says — "turn poverty jobs into middle-class jobs."
UE, the union organizing the Second City workers, has recently helped run several successful unionization campaigns with service employees whose jobs are precarious and without benefits, including graduate student workers in Iowa and movie theater concession workers in New England.
The far right, racism, militarism, inequality, and poverty are all centered in the South. The majority of African Americans, the main protagonist of progressive politics in this country, live in the South. And the South has more electoral votes, battleground state votes, population, and congresspersons than any other region. The South is changing rapidly, giving rise to more progressive demographic groups - especially Black and Latino migrations...
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