cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1462704

We are not talking about the "New Jim Crow."

We're talking about the old one.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/1456239

Check it out.

Gimme your general thoughts, ig

The org I'm in is just too small and doesn't do much (not going to tell you who because no doxxing for you)

Anyway I want to join a more active leftist org but I'm scared of joining a shitty lib one by accident.

Any suggestions from our downunder comrades?

The story: https://labornotes.org/2023/12/inspired-strike-wins-1000-volkswagen-workers-sign-union-cards

Volkswagon is the first of many organizing victories that will come in the wake of the UAW strike. Militancy builds support!

From the article:

NEW YORK—Earlier this year, Jessica Wang was forced into an impossible choice: Her baby or her career.

“I was forced to choose between my baby and doing research that furthers science and my career,” she told the Auto Workers, who represent her and 500 other postdocs at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital’s medical school.

“I chose my baby. But no one should have to make that choice.

“I had to give up my career as a scientist, My PI lost her leading researcher in the lab, and Sinai lost the discoveries I may have been able to make in my research project.”

In these days when lawmakers keep agitating for paid medical and family leave, no one should be faced with that.

But Wang, now a former post-doctoral cardio-pulmonary researcher, had to make that choice and sacrifice her career.

Why? Wang, and Sinai’s members of UAW, don’t have a first contract after more than a year of bargaining with hospital bosses.

And when Wang called its HR department on her own before leaving, to ask about Sinai’s paid family and medical leave, much less paid maternity leave, the answer was a blunt “no.”

The hospital doesn’t offer its postdocs paid family and medical leave and refuses to do so.

It’s attitudes like that—and management intransigence on everything from access to lower-cost on-campus housing to refusing to provide company-paid child care—that led the fed-up postdocs out on strike on December 6.

And since the bosses won’t bargain, this isn’t just any economic strike, but one over their multiple instances of labor law-breaking, formally called unfair labor practices. That means, the union says, the strike—which opened with a picket line at East 99th St and Madison Avenue in Manhattan—will continue until the hospital settles.

The strike joins the Sinai postdocs to the growing legions of exploited, ill-paid, mistreated, and oppressed workers—fast food workers, retail workers, adjunct professors, graduate RAs and TAs, port truckers, and warehouse workers—who in the past two or more years have taken to the streets and to joining unions, saying “We’ve had it up to here” with corporate greed and the ultrarich class leeching off their efforts and productivity, leaving them little.

But it’s not just a matter of parents, especially mothers, and children. It’s much more, says their UAW union, the SPOC-UAW.

“Sinai has illegally threatened international workers, made unilateral changes to housing practices” and slowly and grudgingly handed over information the union needs to bargain, SPOC-UAW said in announcing the picketing.

It also warned its members, in its first morning picketing notice, of yet another pressure tactic by Sinai bosses.

“We are aware Sinai has circulated a form asking for information on postdocs working schedules. This is a unilateral change to working conditions,” which is another labor law violation. “We issued a demand to Sinai to cease this requirement and bargain over the change.”

“Sinai has rejected proposals to offer childcare subsidies so parents can afford to stay on the job, and to extend access to campus housing, even as New York City’s housing crisis worsens.”

“We love our work, and did not want to strike,” said ob-gyn post-doc Andrea Joseph and a member of the SPOC-UAW bargaining team. “But after more than a year of bargaining in which Sinai has behaved unlawfully, we have to stand up for ourselves.

“Sinai’s current policies make it nearly impossible to both afford childcare and live in New York City. They hold out a ‘Need Not Apply’ sign to single mothers, parents, and people from disadvantaged backgrounds.

They have already forced too many people—like Wang—off their career paths simply because they cannot afford to participate. Our goal is to make Sinai a more equitable place to work, and that is what we will insist on.”

“Postdocs make essential contributions to the world-class research conducted at Mount Sinai, but many of us still struggle to pay high housing and other costs in New York City, lack secure rights in the workplace, and face increasing uncertainty about our futures given the precarious nature of science funding and unstable regulation of visas and work authorization in recent years,” the union’s mission statement elaborates.

“We join a growing national movement of researchers and other academics forming unions with the UAW to improve our lives and our work.” The union says UAW postdocs and grad student workers nationally advocate not just for themselves but for science research, fair immigration policies “and better working conditions in all academic institutions.”

I didn't know even researchers were getting a lot of hardship in this economy. I mean, we're talking about actual scientists, actual researchers. It's quite dark, I gotta say.

What do you all think?

This takes a look at the history of labor militancy on scales smaller than strikes, and advocates for guerilla labor actions as a solid foundation for larger actions like strike.

It's a really good look at practical examples from history of how to make gains at work even when you are between contracts or maybe even don't have a union.

In the latest development of the ongoing Tesla strike in Sweden, Scandinavian solidarity grows stronger as Denmark’s 3F union joins the sympathy action against the electric car giant, forming the beginnings of a Nordic port blockade. The move follows the footsteps of Finnish and Norwegian counterparts, signaling a united front against Tesla’s refusal to sign a collective bargaining agreement.

Harbor workers and drivers at Denmark’s 3F union announced their decision to halt the unloading and transportation of Tesla vehicles destined for Sweden. This comes as a sympathetic response to the ongoing strike led by Sweden’s IF Metall union, resulting in a coordinated effort by Nordic transport unions to impede Tesla’s operations.

Finland’s Transport Workers’ Union is set to convene this week to discuss their potential involvement in the strike, while Norwegian dockworkers have already expressed their intent to refuse unloading Tesla vehicles destined for Sweden.

https://web.archive.org/web/20231206152432/https://www.wired.com/story/amazon-air-pilots-vote-strike-delays/

Amazon deliveries could be headed for some turbulence in the new year. Pilots for US-based Air Transport International, a cargo airline that ferries Amazon packages from its fulfillment centers to airports nearer to its customers, voted to authorize a strike last month. During the three and a half years the union has been negotiating with ATI, wages in the industry have soared, and ATI’s pilots complain that their pay has fallen behind. Meanwhile, they say ATI is facing record attrition as pilots jump ship to better-paying carriers.

A strike could throw a wrench in Amazon’s logistics network. ATI, owned by holding company ATSG, operates half of the 80 US aircraft currently in service for Amazon, according to an estimate by Planespotters. But the pilots, who are represented by the Air Line Pilots Association union, can’t walk out until at least next year.

Federal law requires airline labor disputes to be mediated by the US government’s National Mediation Board, which will implement a 30-day cooling-off period if it determines the parties have reached an impasse and they refuse arbitration. If a resolution isn’t reached during that time, the pilots can walk off the job or the airline can lock them out. Some 98 percent of ATI’s 640 pilots participated in the vote and only one didn’t vote to authorize the strike.

In what has been portrayed as the largest fight in decades to save Sweden’s union model from global labour practices, the powerful trade union IF Metall has been leading a strike across eight Tesla workplaces in Sweden for five weeks.

It is the first time workers for the US carmaker have gone on strike and on Thursday, Musk, the tech billionaire and chief executive of Tesla, made his feelings clear, writing on X, formerly Twitter: “This is insane.”

He was responding to a social media post about secondary, or sympathy, strikes by Swedish postal services that are preventing licence plates reaching new Tesla cars.

The Tesla strike has attracted secondary action from eight other unions and is threatening to spread to neighbouring Norway, where Fellesförbundet (the United Federation of Trade Unions), the country’s largest private sector union, said it was prepared to take sympathy action.

The strike has gained support from transport and harbour workers, who have refused to load or unload Tesla cars in all Swedish ports; electricians who have refused to carry out service or repair at Tesla’s workshops; and charging stations and painters, who will not work on Tesla cars. Other sympathy strikes include those by service and communication workers, who have stopped distributing post and shipments to Tesla.

The strike took place following months of protest from Indian farmers, a response to three farm acts passed by the Parliament of India in September 2020. According to protesters, the farm acts would leave small farmers, the vast majority, at the mercy of large corporations. Poor farmers were already desperate before the laws were passed - in 2019 alone, 10,281 agricultural workers committed suicide.

Dozens of farm unions began organizing protests demanding the repeal of these laws. After failing to get the support of their respective state governments, the farmers decided to pressure the Central Government by marching to Delhi en masse.

The farmers arrived at Delhi on November 25th, 2020 and were met by police, who employed the use of tear gas and water cannons, dug up roads, and used layers of barricades and sand barriers to try and stop their march.

On November 26th, 250 million workers from all over the country initiated a general strike in solidarity with the farmer's struggle. According to Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, trade unions issued a twelve-point charter of demands which included "the reversal of the anti-worker, anti-farmer laws pushed by the government in September, the reversal of the privatisation of major government enterprises, and immediate [Covid] relief for the population".

Farmer protests continued for more than a year, featuring mass marches, clashes with police, and many failed negotiations between farmers' unions and the government. Rakesh Tikait, a leader with Bharatiya Kisan Union (English: Indian Farmers' Union) stated in October 2021 that approximately 750 participants have died in the protest.

Among the dead was a Senior Superintendent of Police in the city of Sonepat, who committed suicide, saying he could not bear the pain of the farmers. His suicide note read "Bullets fired from the guns kill only those whom they strike. The bullet of injustice, however, kills many with a single stroke... It is humiliating to suffer injustice."

In a televised address on November 19th, 2021, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stated that his government would repeal the three acts in the upcoming winter parliamentary session in December. The national spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, Rakesh Tikait, stated the protests would only cease once the laws were repealed.

The film actor Deep Sidhu also joined the protests, and was quoted as having told a police officer the following: "Ye inquilab hai. This is a revolution. If you take away farmers' land, then what do they have left? Only debt."

We Are Grass. We Grow on Everything: The Forty-Ninth Newsletter (2020).

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#MakeAmazonPay

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8603900

Nearly 900,000 Americans sitting down to Thanksgiving dinner this week will have unions – and the double-digit pay increases they won – to thank.

That’s how many unionized workers have won immediate pay hikes of 10% or more in just the last year, according to an analysis by CNN.

And the pace of increases of that size have been picking up. More than 700,000 of those workers won pay hikes over the course of the last six months, and of that group, nearly 300,000 saw deals reached in just the last six weeks.

“I would say this is the best run of wage increases won by labor since the period right after the end of World War II,” said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations in Buffalo.

This “Power and Strategy” course seems interesting!

Does anyone know where I can find it?

Anyone, it's good that they taught them people like W.E.B. DuBois and the Combahee River Collective's own texts.

Definitely give the article a read-through or at least a skim-through.

Also goes through some labor and union news.

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Thanks!