• More than 600 employees at Yosemite and Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks have unionized.
• The vote to organize comes after National Park Service endured mass firings and staff departures, affecting morale of employees.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/32605

On Tuesday, August 19, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), representing more than 10,000 Air Canada flight attendants, announced that a tentative agreement had been reached with the airline following a four day strike. The tentative deal secures at least one hour of ground pay before each flight, which was a key sticking point in the strike. 

“Unpaid work is over”

One of the workers’ main grievances is that Air Canada flight attendants receive no pay for the work they perform prior to takeoff. Ground pay would compensate flight attendants for work performed while on the ground, such as carrying out safety checks and helping passengers, both before boarding and after deplaning.

The issue of ground pay is a key struggle for airline workers across North America, where it is common practice to not pay workers for labor done before takeoff. In the United States, flight attendants at United Airlines rejected a USD 6 billion tentative labor agreement because it failed to include pay for time spent on the ground before boarding and after deplaning.

“Unpaid work is over,” CUPE said in a statement announcing the tentative agreement, celebrating “achieving transformational change for our industry after a historic fight to affirm our Charter rights.” In Canada, Charter rights refer to the rights and freedoms guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Charter protects workers’ ability to form unions, bargain collectively, and pursue workplace improvements together. 

Less than 12 hours into the strike, the Canadian government stepped in to resolve the dispute between Air Canada and the flight attendants’ union by attempting to crush the strike. Jobs and Families Minister Patty Hajdu invoked Section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, mandating binding arbitration and directing employees to return to work. CUPE denounced this move, accusing the government of “crushing flight attendants’ Charter rights.” The strike continued in spite of the Jobs Minister’s order.

The post “Unpaid work is over”: Canadian flight attendants reach tentative agreement with airline appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

From Peoples Dispatch via this RSS feed

Thousands of power loom, textile, and kiln workers across Punjab’s industrial hubs of Faisalabad and Gujranwala have sustained protests since late July 2025, demanding the implementation of Pakistan’s increased minimum wage and urgent improvements to their working conditions.

The demonstrations, met with illegal factory lockouts by owners, mark a critical standoff between labor and capital in the region’s vital textile sector. 

The unrest follows Punjab’s June 2025 budget announcement, which included a revised minimum monthly wage of Pakistani rupee 40,000 (140 US dollars). 

Though considered highly inadequate by unions which had demanded a minimum wage of PKR 70,000 (245 US dollars), workers report persistent resistance from factory owners and local authorities toward implementing even the promised wage, a pattern compounded by deteriorating workplace safety and withheld benefits. This systemic non-compliance ignited the current wave of workers’ mobilization. 

The workers, particularly in Faisalabad’s power loom sector, which employs roughly 25% of Pakistan’s textile workforce, endure severe conditions: 

Insufficient wages, often below PKR 15,000 per month12-hour shiftsHazardous working conditions plagued by electrical faults, fire risks, and absent safety protocols

Many are denied social security registration, blocking access to healthcare, pensions, and injury compensation, while kiln workers face a form of bonded labor through coercive advance payments.

Workers fight back after owners slash wages 30%

The immediate trigger came in July, when factory owners in Faisalabad and Gujranwala unilaterally slashed wages by 20-30%, citing global market pressures, while further neglecting safety and social security obligations. 

Workers swiftly mobilized under the leadership of established labor organizations, the Labour Qaumi Movement (LQM), founded in 2003 to combat exploitation, and Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP), a leftist socialist party of Pakistan. 

Mass protests paralyzed industrial zones by mid-July. In Faisalabad, workers blockaded key corridors, chanting “Kam do ya jaan do!” (Give work or give death!), crystallizing five core demands: 

Implementation of the legal minimum wageMandatory social security registrationImmediate factory safety overhaulsAbolition of bonded laborFormal union recognition

Factory owners retaliated with a lockout of over 300 factories in Faisalabad, chaining gates, freezing wages, and barring workers, a move later declared illegal by the labor court. Outcomes diverged sharply between cities. 

In Gujranwala, weeks of strikes and protests forced local authorities to broker a provisional agreement, reversing the wage cuts and committing to address other demands. Strengthened by this victory, Faisalabad’s protests escalated.

Since August 1 to date, hundreds of workers, including significant numbers of women and children, have maintained continuous protests outside the Faisalabad Deputy Commissioner’s office, demanding state intervention. 

Leading the effort is Baba Latif Ansari, LQM chairman and HKP Punjab president. Ansari, a former religious activist who redefined “jihad” as workplace justice and survived a 2014 assassination attempt by factory owners, today bridges grassroots mobilization with legal strategy for workers in Faisalabad. 

The HKP amplifies the struggle nationally, challenging lockouts in courts and framing demands for state action against exploitation. Internationally, Punjab’s workers embody a global fight for dignity, resonating with global movements. A victory here could inspire marginalized workers across the Global South supply chains. 

As of August 12, Gujranwala workers are monitoring their agreement’s implementation while Faisalabad’s protests persist. 

The provincial government faces a pivotal choice: enforce labor laws and ensure wage implementation or endorse the owners’ illegal tactics. The workers’ resolve echoes the cry of an LQM organizer: “Toh Hum kya chahte? Azadi!” (What do we want? Freedom!).

When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.

cross-posted from: https://thelemmy.club/post/32958804

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/26282

From Liberation News – The Newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation via this RSS feed

Across the United States, a new generation of workers—dubbed Generation U—is rewriting the rules of class struggle. More than 500 Starbucks cafés have unionized despite relentless corporate retaliation. Amazon workers in Staten Island, New York, defeated one of the world’s richest corporations to form the first union in the company’s history. Teachers, nurses, and warehouse workers have been walking out in numbers not seen in decades. These workers aren’t just fighting for better wages—they’re challenging the fundamental power dynamics of capitalism itself.

Yet, as many examples show, unions alone cannot overcome the structural obstacles that workers face. We need a revolutionary strategy that transforms workplace struggles into challenges to capitalist rule. One great example comes from the workers of Zanon, Argentina’s occupied ceramics factory, which has operated under workers’ control for over two decades. Their story—of clandestine organizing, militant union takeovers, factory occupation, and community solidarity—provides a living blueprint for how today’s labor movement can fight to win.

Full Article

A group of United Auto Workers members is seeking to oust President Shawn Fain ahead of an election next year, a sign of frustration among some in the two years since the labor group secured landmark contracts with U.S. automakers.

Workers at a Stellantis NV truck factory in suburban Detroit and an engine plant in southeast Michigan voted over the weekend to start the union’s process to remove its leader, said two UAW members involved with the effort. The votes join earlier ones by four other local UAW chapters, reaching the threshold needed for Fain’s opponents to bring allegations of financial mismanagement, workplace retaliation and other issues against him to the federal monitor overseeing the union for potential discipline.

Representatives for Fain and the UAW didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The move increases pressure on Fain, the bombastic labor leader who led a 2023 strike against Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Stellantis that helped secure significant wage gains for workers. Fain won a close runoff earlier that year, the first direct vote by union members in the UAW’s 90-year history.

Now, ahead of the union’s next leadership elections in 2026, Fain is facing blowback from some members for layoffs at Stellantis factories, claims he retaliated against two fellow board members who disagreed with him and accusations that the union has mismanaged its funds.

“I supported Shawn, but his spending is out of control and he’s retaliatory,” David Pillsbury, a worker at GM’s Flint, Mich., truck plant who started the petition to remove Fain, said in an interview. “The transparency Shawn promised hasn’t happened.”

Although a small fraction of the UAW’s more than 600 locals, the groups seeking to oust Fain represent a vocal contingent that have been hurt by layoffs. Fain still has strong support among the legions of graduate student teaching aides who are also members of the union, said Art Wheaton, director of labor studies at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

The effort to remove Fain was started by two UAW members who have criticized Fain for a lack of transparency. Pillsbury and Brian Keller, a Stellantis worker who intends to run against Fain next year, plan to take their proposal next to a pair of plants in Ohio and Fain’s home plant in Kokomo, Ind., Pillsbury said.

Turnout at some locals has been small. At the Sterling Heights plant that voted over the weekend, 63 workers showed up with all but one voting to oust Fain, Pillsbury said. The plant has 6,200 employees.

If the union challenges any of the victories because of low voter turnout or for any other reason, he said he wants enough wins to maintain the six victories needed to push ahead.

Some UAW workers are angry over thousands of layoffs at Stellantis factories since the 2023 contract was ratified, moves the company took to tame inventory amid declining market share. The contract that Fain negotiated allowed Stellantis to fire hundreds of temporary workers, and it has since been replacing them with part-time summer employees, said Eric Graham, president of UAW Local 140.

“They told the people that ‘this is the best contract ever,’ and it was — incentive-wise,” said Graham, who represents workers at a Stellantis assembly plant in Warren, Michigan, where more than 1,500 people are currently laid off. “But when you pressure the company the way they did and make the company spend money they didn’t want to spend,” it puts jobs at risk, he said.

Five of the six locals that voted to begin removal proceedings represent employees of the Jeep maker, where Fain worked as an electrician before moving up the ranks of UAW administration.

Dissent over Fain’s leadership also centers on his decision to strip duties from two of the union’s elected vice presidents. There were about 1,900 UAW members still on layoff at the end of July, a Stellantis spokeswoman said.

Fain retaliated against UAW Treasurer-Secretary Margaret Mock after she refused to approve certain expenses, according to a report by Neil Barofsky, the federal monitor appointed by the Justice Department to oversee UAW governance after two past presidents were convicted on corruption charges.

After the monitor issued that report, Fain and 10 other board members shot back in a letter saying Mock had obstructed funding for critical organizing efforts. They also blamed the financial management issues on her, saying the monitor is looking into management of union investments during her tenure as treasurer.

The monitor is also probing similar allegations made by the other vice president, Rich Boyer, who was the UAW’s chief negotiator with Stellantis before Fain removed him from the union’s Stellantis department.

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/7135

From MR Online via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/6285

In a gut punch to the base, National Education Association leaders lickety-split dismissed a motion passed by a majority of the NEA’s 7,000 delegates not to partner with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for curriculum or professional development. In a possible violation of the union’s Standing Rules, evidence suggests the leadership failed to solicit written rebuttals and oral presentations from dissenting state and local affiliate presidents. Instead the Board of Directors seemingly rubber-stamped the NEA Executive Committee recommendation to not implement New Business Motion (NBI) (39), passed by the Representative Assembly (RA) July 5th in Portland.

All it took were a few hundred emails from the Israel lobby and an announcement from ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt– the guy who compared a keffiyeh to a Swastika – that he personally spoke to union President Becky Pringle to urge abandonment of the motion.

On a Friday night, July 18, less than two weeks after the NEA Representative Assembly (RA) voted “not to use, endorse or publicize any materials from the Anti-Defamation League,” Pringle, president of the 3-million member union, issued a statement.

“After consideration, it was determined that this proposal would not further NEA’s commitment to academic freedom, our membership, or our goals,” wrote Pringle, a former middle school science teacher who heads the largest teachers union–and the largest union– in the United States. “There is no doubt that antisemitism is on the rise. Without equivocation, NEA stands strongly against antisemitism.”

Ironically, it was a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, delegate Judy Greenspan of California, who introduced the ADL motion that emerged from the NEA Educators for Palestine Caucus.

In response to the NEA Board of Directors’ decision to nullify the RA vote, Greenspan said, “We are disappointed that the NEA not only violated a significant tenet of trade unionism by denying our democratically elected vote but also lost an opportunity to speak out against a harmful resource in our schools.”

Critics of the ADL point to its pro-Israel curriculum that links to hand-outs attacking Jewish Voice for Peace and the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel for its occupation of Palestine.

“The ADL is not a neutral body. It is a bully pulpit that is used to disrupt, dox, and target supporters of Palestine, and opponents of racism, transphobia and oppression,” said Greenspan. “ We will continue to speak out and rise up in NEA until justice is served.”

Quick to celebrate subversion of union democracy, the ADL, together with the Jewish Federations of North America welcomed the NEA Executive Committee and Board of Directors’ decision “to reject this misguided resolution that is rooted in exclusion and othering, and promoted for political reasons.”

Nora Lester Murad, a member of the founding team of the Drop the ADL from Schools campaign, said the NEA board made a mistake by caving to a bully. “If the NEA thinks that capitulating to the political demands of the ADL will protect its members from Israel lobby attacks, they are wrong. Educators and union members need the NEA, the largest union in the country, to speak the truth about political organizations masquerading as educational partners.”

Those who wonder whether the Board’s decision will backfire need only read the full ADL statement, which suggests there will be more demands coming down the pike. In a finger-waving scold, the ADL statement adds that the NEA “must redouble efforts to ensure that Jewish educators are not isolated and subjected to antisemitism in their unions and that students are not subjected to it in the classroom.”

The ADL’s definition of antisemitism as anti-Zionism, however, confuses the public and leads to inflated statistics, say critics. In 2024, Wikipedia editors agreed. They called the ADL an unreliable source on antisemitism and Israel/Palestine and told its contributors not to cite the ADL in articles on those topics.

In a Wikipedia discussion, a username Loki who has edited thousands of Wikipedia articles, said, “The ADL is heavily biased regarding Israel/Palestine to the point of often acting as a pro-Israel lobbying organization.” In fact, the ADL in 2024 spent nearly $1.5 million dollars on lobbying, pushing legislation to center criticism of Israel in examples of antisemitism.

The NEA Board decision to side with the ADL drew adjectives like “shameful” and “anti-democratic” on the union’s Instagram account, where a smattering of backers of the ADL fenced with a flood of infuriated union members. One commenter wrote, “If this is what democracy looks like within the NEA, then we’ll take a hard pass. The irony is that this is very Trump like …”

Also troubling to anti-genocide teachers is the NEA’s passage of a Jewish Affairs Caucus NBI (52) to “educate” members about the US State Department’s definition of antisemitism. The State Department has adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) examples which conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Any attempt to “educate” members would chill the speech of teachers and students. Meanwhile, NBI (26) was referred to the Executive Committee to adopt a “Screening Out Hate” checklist, also aligned with the IHRA, because “it cannot be accomplished without further staff and resources.”

Despite President Pringle’s refusal to implement the motion to reject the ADL, she conceded in her statement that this decision is “in no way an endorsement of the ADL’s full body of work,” adding words of warning to the litigious lobby group. “We are calling on the ADL to support the free speech and association rights of all students and educators. We strongly condemn abhorrent and unacceptable attacks on our members who dedicate their lives to helping their students thrive. Our commitment to freedom of speech fully extends to freedom of protest and dissent, whether in the public square or on college campuses.”

NEA’s commitment to free speech may be tested should the ADL object to teachers introducing lessons on the history of Zionist erasure of Palestine. NEA delegate Merrie Najimy, former President of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, points out that rank and file delegates also passed Amendment 5 to support the teaching of “accurate” Arab-American history. Scholars, such as authors Rashid Khalidi and Ilan Pappé, write Arab-American history encompasses the Nakba, the Arabic term for the “catastrophe” of 1948 when Zionist terrorist militias massacred Palestinian villages to impose a Jewish state.

Passage of an Arab-American history motion would have been unheard of several years ago, according to Najimy, a Lebanese-American who co-founded the NEA’s Educators for Palestine Caucus. In reflecting on the Board’s rejection of the ADL motion, a buoyant and ever-optimistic Najimy said, “What matters most is the passage of the motion in the first place because it represents a sea change in people’s understanding of who the Palestinians are and what their struggle is all about.”

The post NEA Teachers Still Reject ADL Despite Board Capitulation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

From CounterPunch.org via this RSS feed

“He’s very disappointed, but it’s a strike dynamic. You strike to try to get your maximum effectiveness,” Spear said in an interview. “The point of the strike is to create enough discomfort to get them to meet as many of the demands as we can get them to meet, but at some point, then the threat of the injunction kicks in.”

Philadelphia’s last major municipal strike in 1986 ended shortly after a judge ruled that sanitation employees had to return to work to prevent a public health crisis due to the build-up of trash. The maximum point of leverage, he said, is likely well before that point.

“As time goes on, the clock is ticking, so at some point the courts — unfortunately, in this country — are going to overwhelm the will of the membership,” Spear said.

Santa Maria’s city center, with its gritty mix of old Western-wear stores and chain mall outlets, is the place where the valley’s farmworker marches always start or end. A grassy knoll in a small park, at the intersection of Broadway and Main, provides a natural stage for people to talk to a crowd stretching into the parking lot and streets beyond.

This March 30, the day before Cesar Chavez’s birthday, a high school student named Cesar Vasquez walked up the rise. He was surrounded by other young protesters, all from Santa Maria farmworker families, 80 percent of whom are undocumented. He turned to face the several hundred marchers who’d paused there, and began reciting a stream of consciousness poem, fierce gestures punctuating his emotion-filled words. The noisy crowd before him grew silent.

“We’re meant to work in the fields,” he cried out. “[And told,] ‘Don’t be too loud because then you’re seen as just the angry brown kid ’ . . . The system has pushed us onto our knees into the rows of dirt where the berries lie. We are tired of being called essential workers but not even treated as essential humans . . . We are going to do something about it . . . We can no longer be suffocated. It is our time to breathe, our time to rise, our time to fight!”

Brave words, given that he’d helped organize the day’s march to counter pervasive fear in Santa Maria of immigration raids and detentions and worry over how growers are hiring more and more temporary guest workers from the H-2A visa program.

Concepcion Chavez, who went on strike briefly in 2024, described that impact. “The company always keeps them [the H-2 workers] separate from us. If we don’t work hard, the supervisors say we will be replaced, they will send in the H-2As.”

Full Article

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39994633

Their new contract includes raises of 20 percent over four years and an additional $2,500 signing bonus.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31040306

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/39995024

Unionized quality assurance testers at video game holding company ZeniMax announced Friday that they have reached a tentative contract agreement with Microsoft, which acquired ZeniMax in 2021.