Portside

Many UAW members said they voted against the proposed contract because of fear of plant closures and because it failed to provide entry-level workers with a full path to the $28-per-hour average wage that workers hired before 2007 make..

Autoworker expectations for the 2015 UAW/Big Three contracts were to end the lower-tier wage that the union agreed first agreed to in 2007, at the time of the economic crisis. Over the last decade the higher-tier workers lost four dollars an hour to inflation and have been looking for a raise, and perhaps a restoration of the Cost-of-Living-Adjustment (COLA) that had been suspended.

The UAW and Fiat Chrysler reached a tentative agreement Tuesday night that puts more money in workers' pockets and invests $5.3 billion to update plants. The investment is part of the automaker's five-year product plan and involves shifting the geography of where many Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Fiat vehicles are made.

The UAW is back in bargaining with the Big 3 Automakers. Will they end the two-tier wage and benefit system they agreed to 8 years ago? And if they do, can they end it by raising up the bottom tier, rather than taking cuts for the top tier?

Volkswagen is touting a University of Tennessee study that determined controversial incentives from the state of Tennessee for the expansion of VW’s assembly plant in Chattanooga are, in fact, a damn good investment for the state. The sunny conclusions of the report may even be mostly accurate, at least with some context. Problem is, Volkswagen paid for the study. Greg LeRoy of Good Jobs First said he believed numbers for created jobs were exaggerated.

Fast-food and retail workers demonstrating in record numbers, cities across the country raising their minimum wage under public pressure, student athletes gaining recognition as employees of their universities, the labor movement has seen some important—and, at times, unexpected—victories this past year.

Virtually all labor organizations face the expanded challenge of recruiting and maintaining members in already unionized workplaces where the decision to provide financial support for the union has, for better or worse, become voluntary.