If you got letters/packages, make sure they can be delivered before Friday.

Also, I wonder how this guy is doing.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is accusing Grindr of using a return-to-office (RTO) mandate as an attempt to block employee efforts to form a union.

About 80 of the 120 workers who were trying to unionize left due to the RTO mandate, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Grindr was said to have 178 employees when it announced the mandate, meaning it lost about 45 percent of employees overall.

The NLRB’s general counsel office followed up on Friday with a complaint against Grindr, saying that the RTO mandate was issued illegally in retaliation for workers unionizing, Bloomberg reported Monday. The NLRB is also accusing Grindr of breaking the law by not recognizing or negotiating with the union.

More than 33,000 Boeing workers reached a tentative agreement Monday night to end a weekslong strike that quickly became one of the costliest strikes in recent history—estimated to have cost the US economy more than $9.6 billion.

Through their unions, International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) Districts 751 and W24, workers in Washington state, Oregon, and California had previously rejected two inadequate Boeing offers while the company lost hundreds of millions daily. Negotiations had stalled until US Secretary of Labor Julie Su stepped in, IAM said in a press release, helping to restart talks and get to a deal that 59 percent of workers could agree on.

Under the proposed deal, workers will receive a 43 percent wage increase over four years, as well as a $12,000 bonus they can choose to receive in their paycheck, as a 401(k) contribution, or a combination of both. Additionally, Boeing agreed to match 401(k) contributions up to 8 percent.

Technocrat liberal meltdown in

Source https://xcancel.com/msainat1/status/1851268155928162411

https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/1gfdqas/an_amazon_warehouse_workers_thank_you_bag_for/

linky to post

cites https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/neom-line-workers-long-hours-accidents-anxiety

More thorough review of a book "blue collar empire" than in jacobin, gotta get my hands on a copy

The foundational 1935 labor law protecting workers is unconstitutional, according to major corporations and right-wing zealots who believe they have enough votes on the Supreme Court to overturn it. In the latest sign that anti-union forces will doggedly press the matter, a federal judge for the Northern District of Texas enjoined the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from processing any allegations of employer violations of workers’ rights. The National Review hailed the decision as ​“A Welcome Blow to the NLRB.”

..

But, in trying to repeal all the rights and protections workers gained during the New Deal, including the limited protections that workers currently enjoy for organizing and engaging in collective bargaining, killing the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (also known as the Wagner Act) would also mean the lifting of a host of restrictions on unions’ ability to carry out solidarity activism and effective economic sanctions.

..

Assuming that the Supreme Court sticks to its cowardly practice of dumping its most unpopular decisions in the last week of the term in which it hears arguments, we have 20 months until the NLRB is shut down. In some ways, that is a luxurious amount of lead time for unions, which are capable of a tremendous amount of coordination. But debate and discussion need to begin now, not one year from now when the Supreme Court majority tips its hand during oral arguments. The right wing could not be clearer about their intentions. We must be ready.

Algorithms can be employed to sniff out desperation for income based on the extremes people are willing to take on the job, such as high trip acceptance rates among Uber drivers. With this hoard of granular information, A.I. can calculate the lowest possible pay that workers across sectors will tolerate and suggest incentives like bonuses to control their behavior. While bosses have always offered so-called variable pay—for instance, paying more for night shifts or offering performance-based salary boosts—high-tech surveillance coupled with A.I. is taking real-time tailored wages to new extremes.

“Now you have machine learning trained on identifying the desperation index of workers,” Zephyr Teachout, a professor of law at Fordham University, told me. “When you move to the formal employment context, there is every reason to think that employers who can would be interested in tailoring their wages and using behavioral data.”

The clearest parallels can be drawn in other independent contractor roles, which make up around 15 percent of U.S. workers. Dubal has found that independent contractors working with Instacart and Amazon are similarly surveilled and receive personalized pay based on information including the times of day and length of time they work, along with the types of tasks they’re willing to accept.

feel like I'm encounterimg tip requests with increasing frequency, but not jazzed about the prospect of adding a 20% charge at every point of sale.

On this day in 1898, the Battle of Virden began when armed members of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) surrounded a train full of strikebreakers and exchanged fire with company guards. 13 people were killed, dozens more wounded.

After a local chapter of the UMW began striking at a mine in Virden, Illinois, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company hired black strikebreakers from Birmingham, Alabama and shipped them to Virden by train.

The company hired armed detectives or security guards to accompany the strikebreakers, and an armed conflict broke out when armed miners surrounded the train as it arrived in town. A total of four detectives and seven striking mine workers were killed, with five guards, thirty miners, and an unrecorded number of strikebreakers wounded.

After this incident, Illinois Governor John Tanner ordered the National Guard to prevent any more strikebreakers from coming into the state by force. The next month, the Chicago-Virden Coal Company relented and allowed the unionization of its workers.

"When the last call comes for me to take my final rest, will the miners see that I get a resting place in the same clay that shelters the miners who gave up their lives on the hills of Virden, Illinois...They are responsible for Illinois being the best organized labor state in America."

Mother Jones

• Oct. 12, 1898: Battle of Virden

• Battle of virden motherjonesmuseum

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The planemaker said the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers unit representing the workers had failed to bargain in good faith during the four-week work stoppage.

I'm not sure how much detail to give, I don't think anyone involved or in my town browses this website, but I don't want to give any specifics in case someone does a search and this shows up. Using an alt so I this won't be tied to my normal account. I'm probably posting more details than I should, so If you think I should delete something specific let me know.

First off: To anyone thinking of unionizing in the US, and are unsure of where to start, I recommend contacting EWOC. We had followed the typical guidelines of union formation: Stay secret and form an organizing committee from people representing as many areas of the store as you can (we got a signal chat and got consent from everyone before adding new people), map the store and figure out who we should absolutely not talk to, and then gauge support of the unionizing idea by having discreet convos with your coworkers as you feel comfortable, etc.

In our case we had trouble contacting unions, and got no repsonse from a lot of them. EWOC responded immediately and we got assigned a contact who helped us along with good advice and encouragement, and helped us settle on who to go with. They had just unionized an amazon warehouse they worked at, and they helped a lot when we had spent weeks getting frustrated with the lack of any response from unions.

When the time came to choose a union, it came down to a couple choices: UFCW and CWA. CWA doesn't typically unionize our type of workplace but they are branching out, and we've heard mixed things about UFCW so we were hesitant about them. Our contact at EWOC is a socialist and informed us that CWA has been spamming pro-biden/harris ads, while their UFCW local has refused to endorse because of the ongoing genocide. So that made things simple. UFCW it is.

I've worked at a local co-op for almost a decade. I started there thinking "aha! A co-op! This place will be much better than corporate!" and there are a lot of good things about it, but it was one of those co-ops formed by hippies way back when and who basically wanted natural foods and other hokum that tends to go along with that stuff. Basically a community owned whole foods type store. One of the cool things about it was that they were officially strongly pro LGBTQ and it was one of the founding values.

But it's a community co-op, not a workers co-op. Officially democratically run by the member-owners, but absolutely no democratic principles at play when it comes to managing the workforce, and over the years it's become obvious to me and a lot of other employees about how poorly managed it is. Lots of safety issues get ignored until someone gets hurt and the co-op is financially liable, lots of homophobic incidents get swept under the rug, managers are basically unaccountable to anyone underneath them unless they flagrantly violate labor law, etc. Your experience can be a good one if your manager likes you, if you are one of the favorites, but if not they can get away with almost anything and treat you like absolute shit.

Lately our general manager has been acting like a corrupt tyrant and their policies have caused numerous injuries and wide swaths of people to be put on disciplinary action for speaking up about working conditions, shockingly incompetent mismanagement, and transphobia in the workplace.

Upper management is tired of our complaints and has decided to crack down hard over the past few months for reasons detailed in the spoiler, and that has involved under-staffing the store to a dangerous degree and numerous injuries.

A lot us are fed up with it to the point that we are ready to burn the place to the ground, but since so many of the staff are fed up we have taken the more constructive path and started a union drive. We've been trying to keep it as secret as possible, but it becomes harder to maintain a lot of secrecy as you talk to more people. So management knows something is up, but not the extent of support.

There was one person from the organizing committee who was talking up the union and was getting people on board, and they just got fired for taking a long planned vacation. It’s all shady and most likely an unfair labor practice, but they aren’t pursuing action at this time. I wish they would, but they understandably want to just enjoy they time off at the moment. But they were friends with a small local online news reporter, and I guess the reporter decided it was time to publish news about the union because it relates to other drama involving the board of directors that has been making news here.

We really didn't want news of the union reported, and told them so, because with the way they've treated us this past year we were expecting them to go overboard with punishment and threats and didn't want to risk that bullshit yet, but management has taken the opposite approach and are now love-bombing us, LMAO.

Who knows how long it will last until they hire a union buster or something, and revert back to to making shit up to get us in trouble for, but since the news of a union drive is public they can't do anything flagrantly illegal without risk of the union we are working with hitting them with unfair labor practice charges, and since many of us have ongoing L&I claims, they can't retaliate without making it look like they are punishing us for being injured.

They are still in the dark about most of it, so we are sticking to our plan, but now we have the article to allow us to have conversations about the idea of a union with more people. It wasn't what we wanted, but it's going to work out. In the meantime we get the free pizza treatment.

This is a heavily unionized town with a strong majority of democrat to far left demographic. If they add union busting to the list of egregious behavior along with racism and transphobia, they are cooked. There is now also pressure for them to drop Israeli products because of the genocide, so that's something else they have to deal with.

We are absolutely going to win this thing and inshallah we’ll take down the people responsible for all this shit. I am doing everything in my power to make them suffer for it.

Not that its relevant anymore, but its a banger headline from fair and interesting article

linky

Hundreds of workers at the Samsung electronics factory in India’s Tamil Nadu state staged roadblocks and a sit-in on Monday, September 30 as their strike entered its fourth week. Thousands of cadres of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) from across Tamil Nadu also joined the call of the Samsung workers and risked arrest and police repression.

According to the news reports, over 900 striking workers were detained by the police in the Kanchipuram district. The police also detained the state president of the Centre of Indian Trade Union (CITU), A Soundararajan. They were released later that evening.

Over 1,300 workers of Samsung electronics factory in Sriperumbudur, part of the Kanchipuram district near Chennai have been on strike since September 9 under the leadership of newly formed Samsung India Workers’ Union (SIWU) demanding recognition of their union, a salary increase, an end of discrimination, and better working conditions at the factory.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/30176676

Amazon‎ .com has been accused by a U.S. labor board of illegally refusing to bargain with a union representing drivers employed by a contractor, the agency announced on Wednesday.

The complaint from the National Labor Relations Board claims that Amazon is a so-called "joint employer" of drivers employed by the contractor, Battle Tested Strategies (BTS), and used a series of illegal tactics to discourage union activities at a facility in Palmdale, California.

BTS drivers voted to join the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union last year, becoming the first Amazon delivery contractors to unionize.

The NLRB in the complaint, which was issued on Monday, said Amazon broke the law by terminating its contract with BTS after the drivers unionized without first bargaining with the Teamsters.

linky

“Dating back to World War 1, the ILA was always proud to note that ‘ILA Also Means Love America’ when it came to its “No Strike Pledge” in handling U.S. military cargo at all its ports,” said ILA President Harold Daggett, who served in the U.S. Navy and saw combat duty during the Vietnam War. “We continue our pledge to never let our brave American troops down for their valour and service and we will proudly continue to work all military shipments beyond October 1st, even if we are engaged in a strike.”

The ILA’s Military Consultant, Gen. (Ret.) Tim McHale, weighed in on the ILA’s “No Strike Pledge” for U.S. Military cargo: “The U.S. Government representatives I have been engaging with are very happy and satisfied with the ILA who have always been there in tough situations, and always successfully accomplished the mission. Our U.S. Military knows that the ILA will conduct military load out operations even if there is a strike by ILA.”

critical support to their strike and all, but example of international solidarity this aint

I've seen a few posts recently expressing frustration with neurotypical people and the secret implications an interaction can have. This might be obvious to a lot of people but I've been trying to figure out how I can be useful to others.

Just got out of an "attendance discussion" (quotes because it was scheduled electronically with that title) because i had a week off from covid (tested and documented) after being injured and having my compo claim accepted.

I brought a notebook with a folder in it and a pen. I wrote down the date and time of the meeting and the people present.

Just presenting that you're keeping a record of things is enough to change the entire dynamic between you and a supervisor. Unless you're being managed by the owner of a small company your supervisor has a supervisor and so on. When you show them that you are taking notes you are also showing them that you would have more credibility in a dispute that goes above their head.

Even if you're the dishwasher's assistant and you bring out a ratty looking notepad and scrawl something in it when your boss calls you into the office for being late. "Arrived 2:07pm for afternoon dish shift, dishpit empty, meeting with dylan"

I don't want to ramble too much but beyond this specific scenario of being in trouble you can use it to empower yourself at work. Writing down every day that you work and the times you show up and leave can help you defend a shorted paycheque or let you fudge the numbers a bit and go home early without approval because you keep a record "it says i left at 10pm bro I don't remember leaving early"

Use your phone if you want but older people will not respect your notes as much because they perceive electronic records to be more susceptible to manipulation than pencil on paper because idk. Better than no record, though. Plus when someone asks what you're doing in your phone you can say oh I'm just writing something down.

That's the post thanks

In a state without a wage floor of its own, allowing employers to default to the federal wage floor of $7.25 per hour, ADOC collects 40 percent of the inmates’ gross paycheck. ADOC also deducts fees from the inmates’ paychecks to pay for transporting inmates between the prisons where they live and the “free world” jobs where they work, as well as washing their uniforms.

ADOC calls the whole scheme “convict leasing.” But given inmates’ inability to quit when they want to without repercussions behind bars, the system is closer to involuntary servitude — i.e., slavery.