Sandwich cafe workers at Homegrown, a Seattle chain, struck over the heat indoors. In their first contract with UNITE HERE Local 8, they won something innovative: heat pay. After an hour above 82 degrees in the shop, they earn 150 percent wages for the rest of the shift; above 86 degrees, double wages or the right to leave work with no punishment. Photo: Maris Zivarts
If you’re dreading summer on the job this year, you’re not alone.
Every month last summer was the most scorching on world record. Trapped under heat domes, dozens of metro areas busted their longest streaks ever of highs over 100 degrees. Phoenix afternoons were over 110 for a month straight.
On asphalt yards nearly hot enough to melt, bonus-hungry managers forced workers to keep up the usual pace. The results were lethal.
In 2022, the latest year for which we have data, 43 U.S. workers lost their lives to heat on the job. That’s up from 36 in 2021, and we can expect this cruel number to keep climbing.
But from warehouses to coffeehouses to construction sites, workers using solidarity and creative action—even without the protection of a union contract—have won shop floor fights to keep their co-workers safe and cool.
WEEKLY CHATS
Nosebleeds and heat exhaustion had become eerily normal at the massive Amazon San Bernardino air hub, east of Los Angeles. Outdoor workers on the tarmac had it worst. But when even an indoor worker was taken away in an ambulance last year, that was the final straw.
“The on-site medical department tried to say he just had lingering effects of Covid,” said warehouse worker Anna Ortega. “The paramedics told him it was heatstroke. That really kicked us off. We didn’t want it to get any worse, because people can even die from heatstroke.”
Workers were starting an organizing drive as Inland Empire Amazon Workers United, with support from the Teamsters. Before the day of the ambulance, “we had already made our own kind of health and safety committee,” Ortega said. “We’d meet weekly or biweekly, after work, and talk about what’s going on at the facility, what our co-workers are experiencing and saying to us.”
They realized the bosses weren’t following their own safety rules, like allowing workers to take short breaks if they felt early symptoms of heatstroke. “A lot of times, management announces these changes just once, and doesn’t keep track of who they need to get the information to,” Ortega said.
After the indoor worker collapsed, the committee realized enough people were ready to act. “We handed out flyers to co-workers on breaks. We marched on the boss with over 20 people. It was after that they finally installed fans.”
But workers wanted more than fans—they wanted those safety breaks. They kept up the breakroom conversations and public flyering, and they put in a complaint to the state job safety board—which sent inspectors and eventually cited the company for unsafe heat exposure.
“We won breaks and cold drinks,” Ortega said. “Our annual training got updated to say if we’re feeling symptoms of heat, we have the right to take a five-minute break. That’s something we pushed forward. It showed that we really could win, that they could have done it from the beginning. They didn’t have to wait until something terrible happened.”
MANAGEMENT NEGLECT
Bosses ignoring their own safety rules is a problem across industries. In steamy Jacksonville, Florida, the Electrical Workers (IBEW) won contracts that require bosses on construction sites to supply cool water all day. But contractors often conveniently forget.
When managers brought no water to a job wiring a Navy hangar last summer, tempers boiled. “One journeyman told the foreman he wasn’t working until there was water—and did so publicly in front of the entire crew,” said an apprentice from the site, who requested not to be named. “The crew refused to work. [The foreman] immediately folded and left to go get some.”
Meanwhile at a Starbucks in Prosser, in eastern Washington, overheating became the spark for a union drive.
Managers claimed the AC had been fixed, but “we put a fridge thermostat out on the counter and it’s reading over 80 degrees,” said barista Anthony Warwick. “This was in March, not the height of summer. It was hotter inside than it was outside, because we have 500-degree ovens, water boilers going all the time, fridges giving out heat. It goes up exponentially.”
His Starbucks co-workers (called “partners” in company lingo) were hesitant to come out in open conflict with management, but last August “the heat of the moment” changed everything, Warwick said.
Soaring temperatures were combined with severe wildfire smoke, even inside their cafe: “We were all choking, wearing masks but still suffocating as we worked. I talked to other partners, and we decided we couldn’t work.”
A callous store manager struck the final blow. When she came in to respond to workers’ request to close at least half the shop, Warwick said, “her first thing was to call out one of our partners for wearing something off-code. That’s when partners started walking out.
“There was nothing she could do. It was very spur of the moment.”
Since they all walked out together, “nobody got a write-up,” Warwick said. “That got people realizing, we don’t have to suffer through unworkable conditions.”
The group won a union authorization election the following month—and the manager finally hauled in fans.
HEAT PAY
For the budding union at Homegrown, a Seattle chain of sandwich cafes and caterers, heat was the clear unifying issue
In organizing committee meetings, “we found out every single person working can feel the heat, in front or back of house,” said Kai Ortiz, who preps pastramis and runs the register up front. “People going back home after a long day in the heat, you’re totally exhausted. Nobody wants to live like this.”
So the workers started using creative tactics to make management sweat. “At my store, we did a march on our boss,” said Ortiz. “We did flyering [of customers outside the store] on our breaks—in front of our managers. Pretty badass. We did sidewalk chalking. We asked an industrial hygienist to come to check out our conditions, and they set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people.”
Homegrown sandwich cafe workers brought in an industrial hygienist, who set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people about the dangerous heat inside. Photo: Mike Rodriguez
Homegrown sandwich cafe workers brought in an industrial hygienist, who set up a medical station in front of the store to interview people about the dangerous heat inside. Photo: Mike Rodriguez
After Homegrown managers responded with “Gatorade, visors, cut fruit, and a few more breaks,” Ortiz recalled, “we said, ‘That’s not enough.’” After a near-unanimous strike vote, in August 2022 they shut down the stores with a series of one-day strikes over heat.
Getting to that unanimous vote took time. “Workers who were on the fence, we brought them in,” Ortiz said. “These were intense conversations, not the easiest. We’ve got high schoolers and college students working in front, then often immigrants, older folks, and people with undocumented status working in back.”
The committee had to build enough trust among these groups to take a big risk together. And while heat was a unifying issue for the store workers, it turned out the catering workers already had decent AC and fewer ovens in their production area.
Still, they joined the strike wave after adding a demand to end a pay gap between distribution and catering drivers with similar jobs—“equal pay for equal work.” “Our student workers came out of school to cheer them on,” Ortiz said.
In the strikes, the workers won their most ambitious demand: the discretion “to close the stores if we had to, to keep us safe—if it got too hot, or smoky from wildfires.”
That fall, Homegrown workers won union recognition with UNITE HERE Local 8. And after a long contract battle and a three-month strike to reinstate a fired co-worker, they finally won their first union contract this March.
The contract locks in an innovative idea: heat pay. After an hour above 82 degrees in the shop, they earn 150 percent wages for the rest of the shift; above 86 degrees, double wages or the right to leave work with no punishment.
The point is to make management “cave and give AC so they don’t have to give double pay,” Ortiz said. And if management doesn’t, “we won the right to picket, flyer [customers] even [while we’re] under contract—to take the fight to the public.”
Those might be the most important wins, since these battles aren’t going away. “The company can get AC, but heat waves are going to get hotter and hotter,” Ortiz said. “Wildfires are going to get worse. This is going to be a workplace issue forever.”
A worker fulfills orders at a Walmart store on November 24, 2023. (Victor J. Blue / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The results are in on Denver’s pioneering anti-wage-theft law, which has already helped thousands of workers recover millions of dollars in stolen wages. Cities across America should follow suit and stop thieving employers in their tracks
In January 2023, Denver passed a sweeping anti-wage-theft law to help workers reclaim stolen wages. In the fight to pass Resolution 22-1614, commonly known as the Civil Wage Theft Ordinance, local unions and labor advocacy groups squared off against the Denver Chamber of Commerce and business interests, who cynically claimed the bill’s “unintended consequences” would hurt workers as well as “minority- and women-owned businesses.” However, a recent report from the Labor Division of the Denver Auditor’s Office examining the impact of the Civil Wage Theft Ordinance disproves these claims and highlights the benefit of anti-wage-theft legislation to the working class.
According to Denver’s 2023 Annual Wage Theft Report, last year was the “most impactful in the Denver Labor Office’s history.” Between November 1, 2022, and October 21, 2023, the office helped over thirty-five hundred workers recoup $2 million in unpaid wages, an 85 percent increase from the year prior. What’s more, as this reporting period started before the Civil Wage Theft Ordinance was passed, it does not reflect the full potential of a full year’s worth of wage restitution.
The report attributes this success to four ways in which the Civil Wage Theft Ordinance empowered the Denver Labor Office:
An expanded scope to investigate all forms of wage theft, such as violations of overtime, paid sick/safety leave, and rest breaks.
The ability to proactively investigate high-risk employers, saving workers from having to file a complaint that could be met with retaliation.
Increased penalties, enabling the office to pursue up to 300 percent of stolen wages from offending businesses.
Additional funding for the Labor Office to hire experienced employees to handle these cases.
Armed with the authority and staffing necessary to help Denver-area workers recover their stolen wages, the Denver Labor Office sees its recent results as only the beginning. “The numbers speak for themselves,” Matthew Fritz-Mauer, executive director of the Denver Labor Office, told Jacobin. “In 2023, we helped about 1,500 more workers and collected almost $1 million more in restitution than in 2022. We understand that this is just a fraction of all the wage theft out there, so we’ll continue to hire, refine our practices, and make it clear that in Denver, workers’ rights matter.”
The Bigger Picture
Not only does this report show the benefit the Civil Wage Ordinance has brought to workers in the Mile High City, but it also offers strong evidence labor groups can use to bolster similar efforts in other states and cities, with the ultimate goal of achieving federal anti-wage-theft legislation.
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that employers steal up to $50 billion in wages from American workers every year, exceeding violent theft and auto robberies combined. When the Department of Labor (DOL) studied wage theft in New York and California, it discovered that stolen wages reduced affected families’ incomes by 37 to 49 percent. This theft pushed fifteen thousand families below the poverty line and another hundred thousand families deeper beneath it.
Unfortunately, the DOL only recouped $3.24 billion in workers’ wages between 2017 and 2022, a pitiful 1.62 percent of the estimated $200 billion stolen over those four years. While many factors contribute to this low restitution rate, the predominant one is that the DOL is restricted from pursuing wage theft under the inadequate avenues offered under the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA limits workers to recovering only the federal minimum wage ($7.25 an hour) as opposed to their contracted wage, does not require employers to provide accurate paystubs, and has low penalties for violating employers that do not discourage repeat offenses.
According to the DOL, federal wage theft penalties are so weak that over one-third of offending companies return to wage theft practices. Alternatively, companies hit with civil suites are much more likely to stop stealing wages, as are nearby employers, regardless of their industry. Denver’s Civil Wage Theft Ordinance allows workers to pursue civil suits against thieving employers, a provision other municipalities would be wise to replicate.
National lawmakers have recognized the wage theft problem and tried to remedy it, though their efforts have stalled. In 2019, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act, which identifies and addresses issues with federal enforcement. Murray’s act emphasizes the need for stricter penalties, calling the current remedies “hollow threats” that fail to deter businesses from stealing wages. Unfortunately, the bill has been dormant for half a decade.
While instituting a powerful anti-wage-theft bill at the federal level is the ultimate goal, the current state of national politics poses serious obstacles to its passage. In the meantime, leftist groups and labor unions can focus their efforts on state and local efforts like Denver’s. Approximately 88 percent of all jobs are located in metropolitan statistical areas, i.e., cities.
Not only would city-level laws help workers reclaim lost wages for large numbers of workers at a time, but they could also create a positive ripple effect. Unpaid wages are untaxed, meaning money that should go to local programs and Social Security remains tucked away in employers’ bank accounts. According to a study on wage theft in Washington between 2009 and 2013, wage theft cost the state upward of $64 million in untaxed revenue.
Delivering material gains to the working class is also crucial to building a base of support for pro-labor politics, which is necessary to achieve federal anti-wage-theft legislation. At a time when the American Left is called to urgently offer alternatives to the neoliberal politics of centrist Democrats while stopping workers from drifting towards reactionary Republicans, a national push to bring anti-wage-theft legislation to every city in America is a valiant, actionable, and constructive goal.
Joe Mayall is a writer from Denver, Colorado. His work can be found at JoeWrote.com
Although Donald Trump has been eager to garner support from American labor unions for his re- election campaign, there are lots of reasons he’s not going to get it. Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement.
During his decades as a wealthy businessman, Trump clashed with unions repeatedly. And, upon becoming President, he appointed people much like himself―from corporate backgrounds and hostile toward workers―to head key government agencies and departments. Naturally, an avalanche of anti-union policies followed.
Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)―the federal agency enforcing the nation’s fundamental labor law, the National Labor Relations Act―led the charge. Instead of following the intent of the 1935 legislation, which was to guarantee the right of workers to union representation, the Trump NLRB widened the basis for denying that right. According to the NLRB, the nearly two million Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as other workers in the gig economy, were not really workers, but independent contractors and, as such, not entitled to a union. The NLRB also proposed depriving graduate teaching assistants and other student employees at private universities of the right to organize unions and collectively bargain.
When it came to the reduced number of workers still eligible to form a union, the Trump NLRB adopted new rules making it more difficult for them to win the employee elections necessary for union representation. The NLRB hindered union activists’ ability to organize workers during non-working hours and, also, allowed employers to gerrymander bargaining units. In March 2020, the Trump NLRB used the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic to suspend all union representation elections and, thereafter, allowed mail ballot elections only if the employer agreed to them.
Unlike their Trump-appointed managers, many NLRB employees, as career civil servants, resented the agency’s shift toward anti-union policies and sought to enforce what labor rights remained under the National Labor Relations Act. But the new management undermined their ability to protect workers’ rights by refusing to fill vacancies, thereby hollowing out the agency. As a result, the number of NLRB staff members dropped by nearly 20 percent.
Major federal departments moved in the same anti-union direction. Trump’s Department of Education scrapped collective bargaining with the American Federation of Government Employees and unilaterally imposed a contract curtailing the union rights of the department’s 3,900 workers. Trump’s Department of Labor removed requirements that employers disclose their use of “union-busting” law firms (a practice in 75 percent of union representation elections at an estimated annual cost of $340 million). And the Department of Justice, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Janus case, delivered what was expected to be a devastating blow to public sector unions.
Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 was the culmination of lengthy efforts by big business and reactionary forces to cripple unions representing teachers, firefighters, and other public servants by slashing their source of income: union dues. In the past, the courts had ruled that, even if a public worker chose not to join the union, the worker, in lieu of union dues, would still have to pay “fair share fees” to cover the costs of collective bargaining and administration of the union contract. In the Janus case, though, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, prohibited public sector unions from charging fees to nonmembers for representation. In this fashion, the narrow Court majority (including all three of Donald Trump’s appointees) established a significant financial incentive for millions of workers to stop paying union dues and become “free riders,” securing union benefits without paying for them. To widespread surprise, though, union-represented workers simply stuck with their unions and went on paying union dues, thereby foiling this Trump administration gambit.
In addition to relying on his appointees, Trump took direct action as president to undermine American unions. Kicking off Labor Day in 2018, he denounced the nation’s top labor leader, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, stating that Trumka’s policies explained “why unions are doing so poorly.” In 2020, after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act―billed by the AFL-CIO as “the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression”―Trump blocked the legislation from moving any further by threatening to veto it.
Trump’s disdain for the American labor movement continued in the years after he left office. In August 2023, attacking the newly-elected, dynamic leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), he told UAW members that “you shouldn’t pay those [union] dues because they’re selling you to hell. Don’t listen to these union people who get paid a lot of money.” That October, he insisted: “The autoworkers are being sold down the river by their leadership.” In fact, though, that November, UAW president Shawn Fain and his team led one of the most impressive nationwide strikes of modern times, securing wage raises for auto workers of at least 25 percent, as well as boosting retirement contributions and other benefits.
Not surprisingly, the UAW doesn’t have much respect for Donald Trump. In January 2024, the 400,000-member union endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, with Fain remarking that Biden “stood with the American worker,” while “Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class.” These remarks echoed Fain’s comments of a few days before, when he called Trump “a scab” who “stands against everything we stand for as a union.”
The AFL-CIO, which unites most of America’s unions, delivered a similar appraisal in a press release (“Donald Trump’s Catastrophic and Devastating Anti-Labor Track Record”) the preceding September. “Trump spent four years in office weakening unions and working people,” it maintained. “We can’t afford another four years of Trump’s corporate agenda to . . . destroy our unions.”
If Trump expects significant union support this November, it’s merely another of his many illusions.
Lawrence (“Larry”) Wittner was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, and attended Columbia College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University, where he received his Ph.D. in history in 1967. Thereafter, he taught history at Hampton Institute, at Vassar College, at Japanese universities (under the Fulbright program), and at SUNY/Albany. In 2010, he retired as professor of history emeritus. A writer on peace and foreign policy issues, he is the author or editor of twelve books and hundreds of published articles and book reviews and a former president of the Peace History Society. Since 1961, he has been active in the peace, racial equality, and labor movements, and currently serves as a national board member of Peace Action (America’s largest grassroots peace organization) and as executive secretary of the Albany County Central Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. On occasion, he helps to fan the flames of discontent by performing vocally and on the banjo with the Solidarity Singers. His latest book is Working for Peace and Justice: Memoirs of an Activist Intellectual (University of Tennessee Press). More information about him can be found at his website: http://lawrenceswittner.com.
IOWA CITY, Iowa—On June 3 the workers of Bruegger’s Bagels in Iowa City and Coralville filed papers with the National Labor Relations Board to be represented by Bruegger’s Workers United.
This week, People’s World interviewed Juniper Hollis, a representative of the workers in the Iowa City location, to talk about what led them to organize a union.
The impulse to organize started when Hollis asked co-workers about what their wages were and whether they were happy with what they were getting paid. What she found was that pay varied from worker to worker, with some struggling to survive on an unlivable wage and others going years without a pay bump.
“Many told me after years working with the company they had never received a raise,” she said. After discovering the conversations she was having with co-workers, management responded with typical union-busting tactics.
Some of the signs carried by Bruegger’s Bagels picketers. | Michael Powers / People’s World
“They started sending someone to the stores not to do any work or assist the store management but simply to watch the workers and report back about unionizing efforts,” Hollis recalled.
She and others started posting flyers about union activities and hearings next to the work schedule. In an attempt to scare the workers, management claimed it wasn’t allowed. “Another tactic used by management was to talk privately to some employees behind their co-workers’ backs in an attempt to scare or lie about the ones leading the union effort.”
The bagel workers were already feeling unfairly treated by management even before the talks about a union started. Hollis recalled a time when management told a worker to return to the store immediately after receiving health treatment at the hospital emergency room.
And as for Hollis herself, Bruegger’s Bagels has rewarded her with termination for her effort in trying to organize co-workers into a union.
The full list of demands the workers plan to put forward is still forming, but Hollis says better wages, better treatment from management, a fairer division of work responsibilities, and the ability to earn PTO after three months rather than six are all on the agenda.
The workers also have a pending lawsuit against the company for their unfair labor practices. Hollis said the workers have “not yet considered going on strike, but they will continue with building community support via protests outside shop location and fight against the union-busting tactics being used by management.”
Community support shown far in their early stages has been from workers at the only unionized Starbucks in Iowa, located in the downtown area of Iowa City, as well as from local activists. “More community support will help” in the fight for recognition and to force management to listen to the workers’ demands, Hollis said.
CHICAGO—After five years of talks since they unionized with the Chicago News Guild, workers for the Tribune chain’s papers—except the Tribune itself—and the Tribune Content Agency, which syndicates columns and features, achieved their first-ever contract. It was ratified 77-4.
In a telephone interview, Dave Mulcahey, one of the TCA bargainers, said one reason bargaining took so long was the Tribune’s new owner, Alden Global Capital, did not know newspapers and came in with an attitude that began with actual wage cuts.
The new contract led one Guild member—not with the Tribune or its papers or the agency—to exult, “We beat Alden!”
Alden’s first wage proposal was a two-year freeze and elimination of the corporation’s 401(k) match of 4%. That was an effective cut, Mulcahey said.
“And they took a long time” in bargaining “because they didn’t want to settle the contract. For Alden, no contract meant no concessions.”
“In the beginning,” negotiations were “a difficult job because there had been a status quo for so long,” he added.
Alden, now the second largest owner of newspapers in the U.S., has a reputation for swooping in, buying up distressed papers, firing carloads of staffers, cutting coverage to the bone, selling off real estate, sometimes closing papers, and walking away with the profits for its private equity fund. Staffers at the Denver Post dubbed Alden “Vulture Capitalists.” The nickname has stuck.
That’s what Alden did with the main Chicago Tribune and its papers. Alden bought up the Tribune Co., including the historically anti-union Tribune itself, while the chain was still shaking off the effects of bankruptcy under real estate magnate Sam Zell. Alden shrank the staff, moved the remnant out of the historic Tribune Tower, and sold the building. It’s now fancy, expensive condos.
To defend themselves, their families, and their jobs, the remaining staffers unionized with the News Guild in Chicago, and for the papers elsewhere in the U.S., other Guild locals. Except for the main Chicago Tribune staff, they all again joined together for bargaining.
Once in bargaining, Mulcahey said, the Alden bargainers “were fighting for things like management rights and to put off and put off and put off and put off” talking about substantive issues, especially economic ones. Indeed, Alden did not start talking money until the Tribune staff staged a one-day strike in February. Staff at the other papers and the agency, Mulcahey said, staged their own job action: They either struck or worked to rule.
“We could tell from the very start that it would come down to action” by the workers to take their cause public, Mulcahey explained. The workers also helped their cause with good and detailed presentations and by bringing in outside observers to their bargaining sessions.
Once Alden moved off its pay cut demands, it offered 3% yearly raises in a two-year pact and kept the 401(k) match. That tracked what the workers privately set as their minimum so the bargainers decided to accept it, Mulcahey added.
One complication in the talks was the sheer number of papers involved. The joint bargaining table included the Tribune Content Agency and workers from papers in Chicago’s suburbs, stretching from Evanston, Glencoe, and Highland Park in the north to Elgin and Aurora in the west and the Southtown Economist on the South Side and nearby suburbs.
Papers outside Chicago whose workers were also at the table included the Hartford Courant, the Orlando Sentinel, its suburban papers, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and papers in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake Bay areas of Maryland and Virginia.
That meant getting everyone to work together, but they all benefited in the end, forging close ties which Mulcahey believes will continue—especially since the joint health care plan covering all the workers expires in eight months.
Health care is a mandatory subject of bargaining but “they {Alden) unilaterally decided to change the health care plan” while the union and management were in talks, and that violated labor law.
The Chicago Guild had to file several charges of labor law-breaking, formally called unfair labor practices, against Alden. “We had open-and-shut cases and used those as leverage” to get coverage from a union-crafted health plan, Mulcahey said.
Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.
SAN FRANCISCO—In what may be the biggest joint grievance complaint in years—as opposed to a monster class-action suit several years ago by Wal-Mart workers charging job discrimination—some 15,780 Amazon drivers jointly filed grievances against the retail/warehouse monster over pay.
“We have no idea,” yet, how much the drivers lost in total, their lead attorney, Steven Tindall, said. Tindall and a partner at the pro-worker Gibbs law firm in San Francisco spent years gathering the drivers’ complaints. The drivers are from California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, where state laws are more favorable to such cases. Approximately 7,000 are from Illinois, Tindall said in a phone interview.
In California, even gig economy workers—except Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash drivers—legally must be paid time and a half for any hours over eight per day, just like federal law. Amazon didn’t pay for its drivers’ overtime.
And the California Department of Labor has spent years reclassifying “independent contractors,” particularly port truckers in Los Angeles-Long Beach, as “employees,” covered by state and federal labor laws. Those laws include, especially, the right to unionize. The Teamsters have been in a long campaign to organize the port truckers.
Amazon hires the drivers under its “Flex” program and pays them a set amount daily no matter how far they drive or how many deliveries they make. As a result, “some of the drivers drove thousands of miles,” unpaid, Tindall said.
Instead, Amazon monitored the drivers’ “delivery blocks,” according to the four years of complaints Tindall and his partner collected. Those blocks cover mileage driven and packages delivered. The drivers’ grievances say the set amount Amazon pays doesn’t cover the work they do.
The grievances are all for that. Meanwhile, gasoline, insurance, tires, and wear and tear are all supposed to be covered by a basic payment of 60 cents per mile, the Internal Revenue Service rate. The only way a driver could get more is if the driver kept every single receipt and document. Few do.
And individual drivers often don’t sue because it’s too expensive for them to do so. Few attorneys take such individual cases because, even if they win for their workers, arbitrations can take so long that the attorneys wind up breaking even, at best.
The Amazon drivers can’t sue as a class because they all signed—as a condition of being hired—agreements mandating arbitrators decide any conflict between the driver and Amazon or between the driver and the subcontractor Amazon hires to contract with the driver, Tindall notes.
Tindall expects hearings on the mass grievances to start this year, but he has no idea when there will be a conclusion. One problem is that the American Arbitration Association, the largest such firm in the U.S., literally does not have enough arbitrators to handle all the Amazon grievances.
Tindall, a veteran union- and worker-side labor lawyer in the Bay Area, has one more conclusion from this mass grievance case: The drivers would be a lot better off if they could unionize.
“This one of those examples of what individual workers undergo if they’re not represented by a union,” he says.
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
A security guard outside the Chevron refinery in Richmond, California, on April 11, 2022. (David Paul Morris / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Winning a just transition will require environmental activists to forge ties with labor unions around shared interests. That’s no easy task — but across the US, we’re seeing promising beginnings of a labor-climate alliance
Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir (The New Press, 2024).
Afamiliar scene played out in the city council chambers of Richmond, California, on May 22, 2024. For the last twenty years, since members of the anti-Chevron Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) first got elected to the council, any measure before that body affecting the city’s largest employer and business taxpayer has been hotly debated.
Local environmental justice organizations, like Communities for a Better Environment (CBE) and the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) mobilize their working-class members to attend and sign up to speak during the time allotted for “public comment.” To rebut the resulting complaints about pollution and arguments for stronger health and safety protection, the $290-billion company that operates Richmond’s massive 122-year-old refinery deploys its own defenders. They include refinery managers, public affairs people, leaders of nonprofit groups funded by Chevron, and leaders of conservative building-trades unions, which represent workers employed by contractors for the oil industry.
The latest battle lines have formed around a proposal to impose a new excise tax on fossil fuel products from a facility that generates, according to one RPA analysis, about $2 billion a year in profit for the company.
This Richmond Refinery Tax Act, proposed by two RPA leaders on the council, would generate an estimated $100 million a year for programs serving the city’s 110,000 residents. Chevron’s current annual tax bill is about $50 million, providing about 15 percent of Richmond’s total tax revenue. But the city currently faces a budget shortfall of $34 million in the next fiscal year.
Speakers for and against the measure packed the council chambers that Tuesday night in May. Among those in favor was Sandy Saeteurn, a Richmond resident and APEN member. She accused Chevron of “continuing to pollute our air, our environment, our health,” and argued that the tax hike would “make sure they’re investing in our city, investing in our residents, and the future of our community.
Many other community speakers echoed her comments, but Chevron spokesperson Caitlin Powell countered them in a written statement. Powell called the refining tax “a hasty proposal, brought forward by one-sided interests,” which would hamper the company’s ability to “to create a better quality of life for Richmond residents.”
Organized labor spoke, per usual, with more than one voice. Harry Baker, representing Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 1021, which has a Richmond city hall bargaining unit, told the council that “we strongly support the polluters-pay initiative. It’s not just a plan. It’s a necessity.”
Timothy Jefferies, representing the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, weighed in, as the building trades unions invariably do, on the company’s side. “We’re not against clean air,” Jeffries explained. But he argued against any hasty action on the proposed ballot measure because voter approval of it might adversely affect refinery jobs and all the other economic benefits that Richmond “enjoys because of those jobs.”
Adversaries to Allies
Richmond’s latest controversy involving Big Oil — and its local friends and foes — reveals the main political divide explored in the anthologyPower Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement. The collection began as a project of the Forge and was compiled by former Forge editor Lindsay Zafir, now academic director of Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice at CUNY, and Jeff Ordower, North America director for 350.org, It brings together more than a dozen case studies of environmental justice campaigns that have grappled with the challenge of enlisting labor allies and overcoming union objections to reducing fossil fuel extraction, transportation, refining, and use.
Their contributors include “blue-green” coalition builders like Norman Rogers, second vice president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 675 in Southern California; José Bravo, executive director of the Just Transition Alliance (JTA), which has been trying to bring union members and environmentalists together since 1997; and Tefere Gebre, former executive vice president of the American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), who now works for Greenpeace USA.
Other voices in the collection hail from North Bay Jobs With Justice, APEN, CBE, the Bay Area-based Climate Workers, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, state-level and multistate groups like Native Movement, Climate Justice Rhode Island, Good Jobs, Clean Air New Jersey, and the Center for Coalfield Justice, and national networks such as the Green Workers Alliance and Labor Network for Sustainability.
Not all of these projects have survived the fickleness of foundation funders or the shifting winds of union politics. Brooke Anderson, a former organizer for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, spent five years nurturing Climate Workers, a cross-union, rank-and-file formation of mainly low-wage workers backed by the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project. Summing up the lessons of that experience, she describes how hospitality workers and port truckers “who had contributed the least to ecological erosion and had the least resources to shoulder a just transition were asked to sacrifice the most to make their industries more ‘sustainable.’”
In her chapter, Anderson recounts one victory of particular significance, locally and nationally (although it remains subject to litigation). This was the labor-community fight against a coal export terminal in Oakland. She writes:
When it was proposed, many in labor deferred to the building trades, which supported the project. However, once unions with members in the path of the coal trains — often lower-wage, Black and Brown members — spoke out against the project, it put labor’s position back up for grabs. We eventually moved much of labor to oppose the terminal and the city of Oakland, followed suit, rejecting the proposal.
Asian American Activism
In Power Lines, well-deserved attention is given to APEN, which has rallied Richmond residents against Chevron for three decades from its base among Laotian refugees and other Asian American immigrants. Ordower and Miya Yoshitani provide a useful overview of this organizational history; the book also features an interview with APEN codirector Vivian Yi Huang and Amee Raval, its research and policy director, conducted by Yoshitani, who was APEN’s long-time executive director.
APEN has had some success building relationships with oil workers in Richmond who are direct employees of Chevron, as Ordower and Yoshitani observe. Their USW Local 5 represents workers at several other refineries in Contra Costa and Solano Counties. In the last decade, it has struck two of them, including Chevron’s facility for ten weeks in 2022 — the longest walkout there in forty years. During each of these national or local contract fights, local environmental justice groups joined strike picket lines and rallies, with Greenpeace even deploying several protest boats around Chevron’s mile-long pier on the Richmond shoreline.
After the dispute ended, Local 5 vice president B. K. White and four coworkers were fired, in retaliation for their strike activity and White’s aggressive public advocacy for refinery safety measures. While negotiating a settlement of his discharge case, White decided to retire from Chevron, after twenty-nine years. He took a new job as public policy director for Richmond mayor Eduardo Martinez, the longtime Chevron critic now pushing for a “polluters’ tax.” According to the mayor’s chief of staff, Shiva Mishek, White’s role in the mayor’s office is “to help us lead ‘just transition’ work and support union labor and workforce development in Richmond.”
An Adversarial Relationship
As Ordower and Yoshitani report, environmental justice groups like APEN have had “a more adversarial relationship” with conservative craft unions that, in 2015, even blocked a Contra Costa County Labor Council resolution in support of Local 5 strikers at a refinery in Martinez, California. These unions are affiliated with the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (SBCTCC), which speaks for five hundred thousand workers. Its affiliated unions have often backed management positions on refinery expansion or taxation, undercut campaigns for workplace safety led by the USW, and resisted stronger environmental protection for “frontline” communities.
The long-standing rift between the two wings of refinery labor is recounted in my book, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. It was on dramatic display several years ago when the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the powerful industry lobbying group funded by oil and gas companies, held its annual policy and strategy meeting at a swank beachfront resort in Orange County. The two-day event featured a keynote speech by then State Building Trades Council leader Robbie Hunter, president of Ironworkers Local 433 in Los Angeles.
As a fellow presenter at the conference (on a panel about the concerns of refinery neighbors), I saw Hunter get a standing ovation for his lunchtime address to several hundred oil industry managers and contractors, lobbyists from Washington and Sacramento, and friends in the state legislature. The labor leader spent nearly an hour praising Big Oil and criticizing the “enviros and NIMBYs and all the usual groups that just say ‘no’ to everything” that leads to more hiring of building-trades members to do refinery maintenance and modernization work.
According to Hunter, Richmond was ground zero for such obstructionism because its “city council got taken over by people who didn’t reflect the community” (like RPA). As a result of this political shift, he reported, Chevron is now constantly assailed by “groups with an activist agenda” who are “looking for any excuse to shut down these plants.” He pledged that his organization would continue to work with Chevron so it remains “the neighbor the city wants.” (For its part, WSPA has joined the opposition to Richmond’s proposed ballot measure, arguing that “any additional local taxes or regulatory programs could make [Chevron] operations more challenging and expensive, which could lead to higher costs at the pump for all.”)
An Oil Worker’s Concerns
Norm Rogers is a Southern California union official who has had to address rank-and-file concerns about the impact of refinery shutdowns — but in a different way than Hunter. As he explains in a chapter called “The Dream and the Nightmare,” the four-thousand-member USW Local 675 “is very much tied to its history as a local under the former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers” that was aligned with the late Tony Mazzocchi, the pioneering labor environmentalist and job-safety advocate who served as national secretary-treasurer and legislative director of the OCAW.
Local 675 joined a union coalition called California Labor for Climate Jobs that, according to Rogers, “successfully lobbied the state for a $40 million fund for displaced oil and gas workers and a $20 million fund for displaced extraction workers.” At Marathon Oil, a Local 675 employer, an ongoing “conversion to renewable diesel has already resulted in significant job losses . . . which is especially challenging for older workers who are too close to retirement for retraining.”
The funding obtained from the state is designed to support laid-off workers, where possible, through retraining programs, plus early retirement and wage replacement, and other services. Yet as Rogers suggests, this is little more than a pilot project in light of California’s plan to reduce crude oil production to 166,000 barrels a day by 2045.
“Currently, my refinery alone produces 360,000 barrels a day,” Rogers reports. “Refineries across the state produce more than one million barrels a day. The plan that’s currently in place doesn’t fully address how we could reduce production so dramatically or what the consequences of doing so would be — including loss of union jobs.”
By grappling with realities like this, Power Lines helps deepen the debate about how to unite and fight for a “Green New Deal” — or any better deal than the status quo, which will leave millions of workers at risk in the hottest summer ever in the United States. As Power Lines contributor Todd Vachon points out in a similar book, Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice, creating “a pro-worker clean energy economy” requires turning “just transition” rhetoric into reality, on a much larger scale.
If most fossil fuel workers believe they will end up on the trash heap — like underground coal miners or Rust Belt factory workers before them — business unionists will have little trouble rallying them based on that fear. Rather than becoming allies in the fight for a stronger social safety net for displaced workers and a sustainable future for all of us, they will, in a fashion very familiar in Richmond, be mobilized by their own unions and employers to protect the power and profits of corporate America.
Steve Early has been a DSA member for forty-two years, active in the Communications Workers of America even longer, and authored a book called Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Making of an American City, which profiled Jovanka Beckles and other leaders of the Richmond Progressive Alliance.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, speaks at The Sanders Institute Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024 | Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics? Because politics is completely dominated by corporations.”
If there is a chicken-or-the-egg question as it regards working class politics in the year 2024 and beyond, some of the boldest labor leaders in the United States have a very unified response: organized workers come first and then—and only then—can the progressive vision of a healthier democracy and more equal nation that meets the material needs of all its people finally come to pass.
“What we have to organize around,” says union leader Sara Nelson, “are the issues that really matter.”
President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), Nelson argues that what constitutes those specific “issues that really matter” has not changed very much since Franklin Delano Roosevelt promoted his Economic Bill of Rights nearly 80 years ago: a living wage and dignity at work, decent and affordable housing, universal healthcare, quality education for all, retirement security, and a life with recreation and leisure not just toil and labor.
“Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.” —AFA president Sara Nelson
While the Republican Party remains the chief political obstacle to achieving those goals, says Nelson—currently at the bargaining table representing her members in contract negotiations with several major airlines carriers—the Democrats also have a long way to go. Meanwhile, the corporate interests that pump massive amounts of money into both major parties can only be challenged by a more cohesive and strategically-minded working class.
“Democrats in general,” she says, “need to get back to talking about that Economic Bill of Rights fundamentally across the board. And that is what is going to attract people to the party—not just talking about it, but fighting for it and having actual demands.”
In a series of discussions during and after The Sanders Institute Gathering that took place in Burlington, Vermont on the first weekend of June, Nelson explained how being “pro-labor,” regardless of party affiliation, “has to be more than just not killing labor every single day.”
“It has to be more than that,” she told Common Dreams during a lengthy interview, “and it has to be more than politicians going to a rally and saying the same tired applause lines that they’ve been saying for 80 years—things like: ‘We like labor because you gave us the 8-hour work day.'”
“I promise you, politician,” she continued, “that the vast majority of people in the audience listening to you no longer have an eight hour day. Same with the line about the how it was labor who delivered the weekend. I promise you, the vast majority of people in the audience do not have their weekends off anymore. ‘Oh, labor that gave us sick leave and vacations!’ Same thing again. Stop doing bullshit applause lines and do real work on workers’ rights.”
In Vermont, Nelson explained to attendees at the Sanders Institute event that “the labor movement”—especially in a nation that is 90 percent non-unionized—”is the entire working class, not just people who currently have a union card.”
Sara Nelson: Let's not divide ourselves further from a corporate class who has been trying to divide us since the beginning of time…the labor movement is the entire working class. It is not just people who currently have a union card. [applause] @FlyingWithSarapic.twitter.com/JiQPaYNF3T
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
Saru Jayaraman, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and president of the advocacy group One Fair Wage, which she co-founded, explained to those at the Gathering how the approximately 13 million restaurant and food service workers her group represents are on the front lines of a largely non-unionized worker movement focused like a laser on improving the material conditions of individual, families, and the wider working class.
During her earlier organizing with the Restaurant Opportunity Center (ROC) in the decade after Sept. 11, 2001, Jayaraman said that workers wherever she went—”from California, to the Deep South, to the Midwest, and to the Northeast”—would all say the same thing: “It’s my wages, it’s my wages, it’s my wages.”
With a new book, titled “One Fair Wage: Ending Subminimum Pay in America,” and state-level ballot fights for wage increases this election season in Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, and elsewhere, Jayaraman says the organizing of workers making less than $15 in real wages is vital within the nation’s “absolute largest” private employer sector, the restaurant and food service industry.
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, speaking during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Saru Jayaraman, co-founder and president of One Fair Wage, speaking during the Gathering in Burlington, Vermont on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
After a show of hands from audience members in Burlington who had at one point worked in a restaurant, Jayaraman reminded them how “one in two Americans has worked in the industry at some point in their lives.”
“It is the largest private sector employer of women. It is the largest private sector of young people,” she said. “It’s the largest private sector employer of immigrants, formerly incarcerated individuals, people of color—pretty much everybody—but it is the absolute lowest-paying employer in the United States of America.”
With the lobbying power of the National Restaurant Association, founded in 1919—”we call it the other NRA,” Jayaraman noted—owners and investors in the food industry have generated massive profits for themselves by paying poverty wages and forcing tipped wages on their employees “for generations.”
What this “other NRA” has been able to achieve over the course of its existence, she said, is ensuring that millions of restaurant workers across the country are forbidden from earning more per hour than the $2.13 that such tipped worked currently receive.
.@SaruJayaraman: We are on the cusp of an incredibly historic moment and we decided it was time to go huge…We are going to raise 3.5 million workers wages because guess what, when minimum wage is on the ballot it never ever fails. Ever. pic.twitter.com/0TKWqmNmLK
— Sanders Institute (@TheSandersInst) June 1, 2024
In her book, Jayaraman writes, “Subminimum wages are subhuman. They are reflection of the value America has placed on the humanity of the people” who work in those sectors.
Those receiving this paltry hourly wage, still the law in 43 U.S. states, she said in Burlington, is “not some niche group. It’s where all of us worked, our kids work. It’s the largest employer in America, and it gets to pay $2 an hour because we’ve let it.”
And the current outrage among restaurant workers isn’t restricted to that. In context of the Covid-19 pandemic that shook the nation and the world in 2020, Jayaraman spoke with fury about the thousands of food industry workers who “died—no, the 12,000 workers who were murdered—because they were forced to go back to work before it was saved into an industry that the CDC named as the most dangerous place for adults to be during the pandemic.”
“They died because they were poor,” she roared. “For those that survived, 60% told us that tips went way down and the women, more than half of women told us harassment went way up. They said, I’m regularly asked, ‘Take off your mask so I can see how cute you are before I decide how much I want to tip you.'” Reports like that from workers, she said, are endless and continue to this day.
“The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming.” —Saru Jayaraman, One Fair Wage
It’s for these reasons and more that tipped workers are fighting for the Raise the Wage Act, a bill which passed the U.S House in 2021 but failed in the U.S. Senate despite support from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and other Democrats. After House Democrats lost their House majority in 2022, Sanders reintroduced the bill in the Senate last year, but it has no hope of passing until Republican opposition is vanquished.
Again, Jayaraman pointed to the restaurant industry lobby as the key villain in the workers fight.
“They’re the major opposition in every state,” she said. “They’re the major opposition at the federal level. And there can be no change at the federal level until we defeat the ‘other NRA’ and we are on our way.”
What she sees in her work among non-unionized restaurant workers fighting to destroy sub-minimum wages is that it’s workers that must lead.
“We are not trying to mobilize these hundreds of thousands of people in the same way,” Jayaraman told Common Dreams. “The only way it’s going to work is that we are going to have this huge base, the ability to mobilize them, but it’s got to be a thousand flowers blooming. That is how this moment of worker power has happened.”
It was workers on their own, she explained, who “started walking out of their restaurants and putting up signs saying: ‘We all left. The pay is too low.’ Nobody gave them a sign and trained them how to do that. There was a moment of power where they all collectively felt ‘I’m worth more’ and walked out.”
“There’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.” —Sara Nelson
Like Jayaraman, Nelson spoke about the lessons she learned after seeing corporate bosses willing to sacrifice the safety, and even the lives, of workers at the altar of profit.
Speaking passionately about her career in the airline industry—including close colleagues killed on the hijacked planes used in the 9/11 attacks—Nelson describes the AFA as a union that centers the needs of its members, but also one that recognizes its role in the broader fight for economic equality and the common good.
In the years after 2001, she saw firsthand how the industry exploited the horrific tragedy of 9/11 to undermine worker power while protecting owners and investors through a bankruptcy process.
“For me, that was real people, those were my friends and it was my friends who died too,” she explained to Common Dreams. It was painful, she said, “coming to grips with the fact that there’s no sympathy, there’s no humanity in capitalism, it’s only about extracting as much profit as possible from the entire machinery, which includes human beings.”
While the union fought to protect their pensions during that time, executives were clamoring for unlimited compensation packages, Nelson recounted. It was during those battles, she said, “that I got a firsthand experience in the four D’s of union busting: divide, delay, distract, and demoralize. And I saw workers go through all of those very divisive tactics.”
“So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.” —Les Leopold, Labor Institute
What Nelson, Jayaraman, and Leopold all argued in separate interviews with Common Dreams during and after the Gathering is that organized workers need to be at the center of fighting for their own economic wellbeing. A more unified and coordinated working class is also the key missing ingredient if the broader progressive agenda—from voting rights and democracy protection to the climate fight and economic battles over healthcare and housing—is ever to be won.
“There are all these organizations and we’re fighting all these good fights on all these issues,” Leopold said on the edge of the three-day event, referring to green groups, healthcare advocates, and organizers on a range of social justice issues gathered in Burlington. “So the first question is, why aren’t we winning? And the answer is we don’t have a working class base.”
Without workers in the fight in a deep and organized way, Leopold argued, progressives can’t win—”or can’t win substantially”—and that means new structures are needed to galvanize workers. In his book, Leopold identifies years of mass layoffs, driven in large part by stock buybacks and leveraged buyouts by private equity and other powerful investors, as evidence of the battering workers have taken from their corporate bosses and neoliberal capitalism.
The Labor Institute’s executive director Les Leopold addresses the audience in Burlington, as he called for a ban on compulsory mass layoffs for companies with federal government contracts. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
The Labor Institute’s executive director Les Leopold addresses the audience in Burlington, as he called for a ban on compulsory mass layoffs for companies with federal government contracts. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
“As Wall Street has routinized the financial strip-mining of productive enterprises,” Leopold writes in the book, “more than 30 million of us have experienced mass layoffs [over recent decades]. And even more have felt the pain and suffering as our family members lost jobs.”
Despite that, he says, the occurrence of mass layoffs has “become so commonplace, so normalized, so routinized, that for-profit and nonprofit executives alike do not hesitate to slash jobs whenever they feel it necessary.” But with a working class fractured and pummeled from the decades long corporate crusade against unionization, Leopold told Common Dreams in Burlington that he believes a fight against mass layoffs could be a way to help turn the tide.
“Why are working class people apathetic about politics?” asked Leopold. “Because politics is completely dominated by corporations and they’re totally alienated from that. We’ve got to fight the class war around politics. We have got to get working class control over politics.”
“The working class is going to save the working class. It’s never going to be a party.”
Nelson echoed that, saying the policies passed in Congress “are not going to be the policies we need until we extract money from our politics.”
Getting corporate money out of politics, can’t be won in Congress “because we don’t have the politicians in office that can vote it out because money is still controlling it,” Nelson said. “So the only way to get at it, the only way to change our politics is to have workers in a massive way organize their unions and take the money from capital so that they don’t have it to spend in our politics.”
In Leopold’s mind, a worker-centered politics and a “class war” framework is something “we can sell anywhere.” It can work with organized workers already with labor unions like Nelson’s AFA, the United Auto Workers (UAW), and other major trade unions. It can also be the linchpin for workers who are not yet organized within unions, like Jayaraman’s approach with One Fair Wage.
It can work for “Trump people” that have looked to the far-right because they saw Democrats year after year not fighting for their interests, he said, and it can work for “not Trump people,” who are simply looking for allies to stand with them in the demand for better wages, job security, healthcare, housing costs, and more.
(From left) Sanders Institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, AFA president Sara Nelson, the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold, and Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage pose for a picture together at the Gathering in Burlington, Vt. on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
(From left) Sanders Institute co-founder Jane O’Meara Sanders, AFA president Sara Nelson, the Labor Institute’s Les Leopold, and Saru Jayaraman of One Fair Wage pose for a picture together at the Gathering in Burlington, Vt. on Saturday, June 1, 2024. (Photo: Will Allen / via The Sanders Institute)
Offering a concrete example for workers to rally around, Leopold proposed in Vermont—something he has written about extensively in recent months, including for Common Dreams—is the idea of putting a target on mass layoffs and stock buybacks by large employers to help galvanize working-class power.
What he’s calling for is a provision which would prohibit any company that receives a government contract from carrying out a compulsory mass layoff—defined as the termination of 50 jobs or more at one time.
“Think about how easy it is to add one sentence to a federal contract, which says: ‘If you take this contract, no compulsory layoffs, no stock buybacks,” Leopold told Common Dreams. Having calculated the amount of money flowing through such contracts for large corporations at about $700 billion, he admits it’s not clear exactly how many jobs that could save—but it would be a significant number.
“Well, $700 billion worth of no layoffs is a lot of no layoffs,” he said, but even more important is this: “It would be a fight.” And if the Democratic Party was willing to put such a proposal into its 2024 platform it would be a signal that the party was willing to go to bat for working people in ways it has not done in a very long time.
“If they fight for that plank, people will hear them,” said Leopold. “It would show there’s a fight going on in Democratic Party on behalf of the working class. Then labor can rally. Then progressive organizations can rally. But there has to be a fight.”
“You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Last week, Leopold wrote an op-ed calling for President Joe Biden to intervene on behalf John Deere workers facing mass layoffs by the owners of the iconic tractor company. “Come on Joe, go to bat for these workers,” Leopold wrote. “Put the heat on John Deere and show the working class that you’re tougher than Trump when it comes to saving American jobs.”
And Nelson agrees that the onus is on the Democrats to be much bolder than they have been.
“The Democratic Party has to put working peoples central to its platform and put in its platform things like Les Leopold’s idea on mass layoffs,” she told Common Dreams.
“It’s a very simple idea,” Nelson continued, but it’s exactly on the right track. “You’re going to conduct a mass layoff or spend billions on stock buybacks while there’s layoffs, then you don’t get the federal contract. The federal government has a lot of power with the purse strings that they need to use.”
Despite the hopes for big labor’s abilities to get something dramatic accomplished in the coming months and years, both in their own contract fights and building up their own unions, Leopold said they also need to use their size and resources to help build “an organization for unorganized workers.”
Leopold happens to think the mass layoffs could be a vehicle for that, though he admits it’s not been tested and would need a much larger buy-in as a strategy before it could be proven effective. Jayaraman noted in her discussion with Common Dreams that low wages is a more likely issue for the broader working class to organize around.
“If we’re waiting for the law to change, we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Nelson recognized the value of a number of approaches, and said unions and the unorganized workforce must go much further than they’ve gone since Reagan busted the PATCO strike in 1981.
“We have to organize like never before,” she said, noting how large established unions like the UAW have been putting resources and energy into helping non-unionized works in the south, including Tennessee and Alabama, win recognition. “That’s important,” Nelson explained, “but it’s also not enough if we’re really going to do the kind of organizing that can truly put a check on capital and change the political environment.”
When it comes to the Pro Act, or Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which would enhance workers rights and that Democrats tried but failed to pass during the first half of Biden’s term, Nelson said it is very much “a chicken and egg situation.” The legislation, she said, “is not going to come before we organize more workers” in order to tilt the political scales that would make passage possible.
“So if we’re waiting for the law to change,” she warned, “we’re just going to keep waiting until we’re completely extinct.”
Referencing an effort by United Auto Worker’s president Shawn Fain to align as many contract fights as possible around May 1, 2028 in an effort to further create broader worker solidarity and increase pressure across various trade and service union sectors and industries, Nelson expressed hope for Leopold’s mass layoff idea and what Fain has proposed.
Both show, she said, “the working class that there is a way to be strategic” and can wake people up to “the power we have in standing together,” whether it be on wages, firings, union card campaigns, or contract fights.
And it may not take as long as May of 2028, Nelson added. “The moment may come to us before then, but talking about and really defining the problems—which we’re doing over and over again—is key, showing that these are not isolated issues,” she said. “The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“The issue with housing, the issue with gun violence, the issue with healthcare, the issue with education and debt—these are not isolated issues. The issue is pure and simple corporate greed, and that’s what we have to organize against.”
“Solidarity is our power,” Nelson explained during her interview with Common Dreams. “And so the strike is not itself the most powerful weapon here. It is the consciousness of worker power and the threat of the strike that is going to make change in our economy and in people’s lives.”
In a podcast interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders earlier this week, Fain of the UAW spoke along similar lines.
“We have to harness that power” of working class power led by organized labor, Fain said to Sanders.
“Union or not, we have to bring workers together all over, not just in America, but all over the globe,” Fain continued. “We want to see working class people all over this globe come together. The only way we’re going to beat the corporate global fight is by standing together globally and fighting for better standards for everyone and standard wages for everyone. So we lift everyone up everywhere. And to a lot of people, that seems like a pipe dream. I don’t believe it is.”
It was during the panel discussion in Burlington that Nelson looked out at the audience where Sen. Sanders—”our organizer-in-chief,” she called him—was seated and thanked him for the leadership he showed in both 2016 and 2020 while seeking the Democratic nomination for president.
“We want to see working class people all over this globe come together.” —UAW president Shawn Fain
“One of the reasons that unions are one of the most popular ideas in this country is because Bernie Sanders went around this country telling people that the trade union movement is the only way for us to lift up the standards for the working class,” Nelson said. “It is the only way to get back to the issues that we were talking about a hundred years ago and pushing forward on them. It is the only way to build the power that we need to change our politics. It is the only way to give working people agency to feel the democracy is something that they own, not what the capital class does.”
While speaking of Trump—who “lives the very antithesis of what it means to be union”—and his Republican Party with outright contempt as enemies of working people everywhere, Nelson was clear that nobody should think the Democratic Party is riding courageously to the rescue of the tens of millions of workers who toil and sweat to provide themselves and their families a decent life.
“The working class is going to save the working class,” she said. “It’s never going to be a party. We are going to bring politics to us if we do our jobs right. It doesn’t happen the other way around.”
Amazon Labor Union members in Staten Island, N.Y., are preparing to vote this weekend on joining forces with the Teamsters. | Photo: Teamsters for a Democratic Union via X
DETROIT—A merger between the Teamsters and the independent Amazon Labor Union is looming on the horizon.
Teamsters President Sean O’Brien jumped the gun in early June by telling his executive council, meeting in D.C., that it was a done deal. Before, the Teamsters set up their own Amazon Department, with the explicit goal of crafting an organizing drive at the monster warehouse, retail, and delivery firm.
But the ALU, the bottom-up worker-organized union which broke through Amazon’s blockade to organize the 8,000-worker JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island, N.Y., must take the pact to its members before there’s a final decision. So O’Brien’s announcement was premature.
The ALU’s merger vote started in mid-June. In July, members will elect a new leadership team.
Connor Spence, until recently a worker at JFK8, and an ALU organizer, is challenging incumbent Chris Smalls for the presidency. Like Smalls, Spence supports the merger with the Teamsters, he tweeted. Amazon fired Spence in December on trumped-up charges—just as it previously did to Smalls.
“Exploring options for affiliation has long been part of our reform platform because we know full well bringing Amazon to the table is a national fight, and JFK8 can’t do it alone. We’re beyond excited for this fresh start,” Spence tweeted.
Estimates of Amazon’s total workforce in the U.S. range from 800,000 to 1.1 million. One of the world’s richest men, Jeff Bezos, who is virulently anti-union, runs Amazon. The Teamsters view the company’s leadership as “an existential threat,” to use O’Brien’s words, to their core constituencies.
Only JFK8 and one small subcontractor trucking firm are unionized, so far. ALU plans to file union recognition cards elsewhere, including at warehouses near Los Angeles International Airport and in the Kansas City area. In an indication of Amazon’s hatred for unions, when the owner of that trucking subcontractor, in the L.A. area, stayed neutral during organizing, Amazon pulled his contract.
Working conditions are the key issue in other ALU organizing drives, just as they were in JFK8. There, Amazon fired Smalls for leading a lunchtime walkout at the height of the coronavirus peril in New York over Amazon’s refusal to tell workers when colleagues became ill—and thus possibly exposed them—or give out any further health information.
In the new campaigns, key workplace issues are low pay, long working hours in extreme conditions, discipline only for just cause, lack of protection against disabilities from occupational injuries, forcing pregnant workers to stand on their feet for hours against medical orders, and protected water and bathroom breaks.
Smalls and his allies, including Spence, struck back by founding ALU, almost literally on a shoestring.
Smalls, who signed the pact on behalf of his union, hailed it in a tweet. But others objected to its being rushed through before the ALU holds its own leadership vote.
“Today is an historical day for labor in America as we now combine forces with one of the most powerful unions to take on Amazon together. Our message is clear: We want a Contract and we want it Now. We’re putting Amazon on notice that we are coming! #Hotlaborsummer,” Smalls tweeted.
Before signing the tentative affiliation pact with the Teamsters, the ALU discussed affiliation with several other unions, including the Postal Workers (APWU) and the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU), a virtually autonomous UFCW sector.
RWDSU tried, twice, to organize the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala. It lost the first time due to rampant and massive company labor law violations—so many that the National Labor Relations Board threw the results out and ordered a rerun. The rerun was inconclusive, with challenged ballots exceeding the margin of RWDSU’s loss.
Meanwhile, APWU is reportedly on the verge of organizing Amazon workers at a warehouse in Detroit. And Teamsters for a Democratic Union just claimed the Teamsters won at a big warehouse near the Louisville, Ky., airport.
The Teamsters would bring financial stability to the Amazon Labor Union while still giving it a wide degree of independence. Under O’Brien’s predecessor, Jim Hoffa, and much of the Hoffa-dominated board, that independence would not have occurred. O’Brien’s reform slate defeated Hoffa’s hand-picked successor in a one-Teamster-one-vote election in late 2020.
And while the Amazon Labor Union would become ALU/IBT Local 1, any other Amazon facility that employs more than 1,000 people would also get its own ALU/IBT local. “We can build ALU as its own democratic union within the Teamsters,” one ALU activist says.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but tough when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.
FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va.—Over 27,000 Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) workers won union elections for both of their bargaining units on Monday under the Fairfax Education Unions (FEU).
Around 14,000 teachers and 13,000 support staff will now be represented by an alliance of the Fairfax County locals of the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). This win increases union density in Virginia by at least 15%, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The election victories were for the two bargaining units within the FEU: the Licensed Instructional Unit, covering all workers requiring a license, such as teachers, counselors, social workers, psychologists, librarians, and speech language pathologists; and the Operational Unit for workers such as various kinds of assistants, cafeteria workers, custodians, transportation workers, and front office staff.
Anyone with hiring or firing power are not in these bargaining units and will seek their own representation.
String of recent wins
The wins are part of a flurry of union organizing activity in the Commonwealth lately, particularly in Northern Virginia with the Northern Virginia Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, headed by Ginny Diamond. Around 15,000 public and private workers have been organized in Virginia over the past five years, not including yesterday’s election.
In the public sector, the Teamsters organized county service workers; SEIU has done likewise in Fairfax and Loudon counties; at schools and college campuses, AFT, NEA, AAUP, and CWA have all had successes. Fire departments in a number of cities, including most recently in Richmond, have concluded collective bargaining agreements under the IAFF.
As for the private sector workforce, Unite Here organized 1,500 college food service workers; Workers United has organized 30 units (mostly Starbucks stores); the Operating Engineers have brought in 19 more units; SEIU organized airport workers at Dulles and Reagan; IBEW unionized 1,000 new workers; and the NewsGuild organized journalists at Politico. These are just a few of the several unions that have been growing and organizing.
Bring back the unions
Fairfax County Public Schools is the ninth-largest school district in the country, and Fairfax County is one of the richest counties in the country. While the Virginia General Assembly and governorship change hands between Democrats and Republicans regularly, the unique combination of a Democratic majority win in the statehouse in 2019 and a lame duck Democrat governor and pressure from local labor federations across the Commonwealth led a law which had banned collective bargaining by public sector employees to be repealed in 2021.
This also gave local governments the option of granting the right to collective bargaining to their employees. It took another two years of pressure from organized labor on the Democratic-supermajority FCPS School Board to finally extract collective bargaining rights for education workers in 2023.
These dual wins will mark the first time FCPS has had a union contract since 1977. Almost 50 years ago, organized labor in Virginia was attempting to repeal right-to-work, but workers and their allies fell just short of being able to do so.
In retaliation, segregationist Democrats (Dixiecrats) and Republicans chose to punish the unions for daring to challenge employer power. Since Virginia was already a right-to-work state, the only thing the right wing could do to make things more hostile to unions was to make it illegal for any government within the Commonwealth to recognize a union or have a contract.
In the interim, while collective bargaining was banned, some education workers did join the NEA or AFT, but the repressive legal atmosphere forced the unions to operate more along the lines of a solidarity union. Workers still had to rely on internal employer HR frameworks and court systems for any kind of labor disputes.
Over the rest of the 1970s and ’80s, most of the Dixiecrats completed their defections over to the Republicans, and the Democrats reconstituted themselves primarily in areas with larger numbers of people who were college-educated, Black, immigrants, in the military, from out-of-state, or some combination thereof.
These areas generally had the fastest economic expansion and the largest number of unionized workers, which also formed the Democratic voter base in places like Northern Virginia, Richmond, Tidewater, and Charlottesville.
Labor looking for allies
While the new Democrats who came in weren’t the Dixiecrats of old, they weren’t necessarily always the best on labor either. Despite having a solid Democratic majority and the governorship, it still took four years for FCPS workers to get their union: two years to repeal the collective bargaining ban and another two to ultimately to actually have the right to unionize be explicitly granted. This was all from Democrats who claimed to always support collective bargaining.
Many unions are on the hunt for stronger political support; extreme-right Republicans are openly hostile to organized labor, while many neoliberal Democrats at the state level say they back labor but don’t show much initiative without pressure from below. Given this political situation and the fact that three-quarters of recent union gains are in the public sector, labor could be one or two bad elections from having the right that made the Fairfax County victories possible stripped away once again.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
TN Long is a software developer and is active with the Communist Party in Northern Virginiav
There were many young workers at the CPUSA Convention and they discussed, among many other things, latest developments in the labor movement. | Taylor Dorrell/PW
CHICAGO—The “resurgence of militant, class struggle unionism,” led by movements which installed new leaders in both the Teamsters and the Auto Workers, “is catalyzing reform” within organized labor, the CPUSA says.
And that in turn “indicates a major shift in the balance of forces between the working class and monopoly capital,” says the labor resolution the party’s convention in Chicago adopted on June 8.
Nevertheless, with union density at only 6% in the private sector, 33% in the public sector, and just over 10% overall, many people are suffering under capitalist domination.
“The pressure you may be feeling is the boot of capitalism pressing down on your chest,” Kooper Caraway, formerly of South Dakota and now from Connecticut, said during a panel discussion on the measure. The party’s goal “is to take that boot off the neck of the working class and put our foot on the neck of the capitalist class.”
Panelists and speakers from the floor described various ongoing labor struggles—the Auto Workers against the Detroit 3 and at Volkswagen in Chattanooga, Tenn.—and at places such as Starbucks and Amazon. Struggles among nurses and among low-paid workers were also described.
Many of the coming struggles, participants at the convention noted, will be in professions like health care, fast food, warehousing, and other super-exploitative occupations. But not all: An African-American woman from Houston described how the Republican Party has used school takeovers there and elsewhere to both harm students of color and hamstring unions.
New, younger workers involved
And many struggles, participants noted, will involve new, younger workers, a majority of them women, who have known much about corporate exploitation and oppression and are fed up with it and are unwilling to take it anymore. So they’re voting against bosses in two ways: Organizing into unions, or taking a hike from low-paying and often dead-end jobs.
Another way to grow the labor movement requires navigating U.S. labor law. Organizing has been restricted ever since congressional Republicans emasculated the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act by turning it into an obstacle course for workers at the NLRB and through the courts via the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act.
The Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority, would remove almost all obstacles Congress and courts have erected to benefit the corporate class. That class has also funded Republican opposition in the Senate which stopped the PRO Act in its tracks.
Those groups include farm workers, who were excluded on racial grounds—then as now most were Spanish-speaking—in 1935, and domestic workers, who were mostly Black women and excluded from the law for the same racist reason, to appease Southern segregationist senators.
“On farms, we’ve got young children breaking their backs working in the fields” starting at sunrise, Caraway said. “Then they go to school, then back to the fields” with only a few hours to spare to do their homework. “We have the moral obligation to go where people are hurting.
“Why should we follow laws that exploit our people and protect the capitalist state?”
Education and pressure can pay off. A participant from Atlanta said pressure—including strikes—by Waffle House workers in the Carolinas and Georgia, members of the Union of Southern Service Workers, an SEIU affiliate, forced company concessions.
“They told us we couldn’t beat a corporation like Waffle House,” an Atlanta Waffle House worker said on June 8. “They told us we couldn’t organize in the South, with its history of exploiting Black and brown workers. They were wrong: When we come together, united, taking collective action, we can shift the balance of power.”
They got $3 an-hour raises, increases in their base tipped wages and seniority raises. But they’ll keep fighting for the whole package, Erica promised the Chicago convention.
White-collar workers can be oppressed, too. A Houston teacher told delegates that 93 of the 107 school districts which the Lone Star State’s schools chief has taken over—including the Houston Independent School District—have majorities of “low-income students who are Black or brown.”
That’s no coincidence. The takeover law is a favorite of white right-wing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the white Republican majority in the heavily gerrymandered legislature of the nation’s second most populous state.
“Most of those districts fail because the community doesn’t have a voice” in running them, Mary said. Similar Republican takeovers occurred in Philadelphia—though a later Democratic governor revoked it–and New Orleans. There the entire city school system has been privatized via so-called charter schools.
While panelists didn’t mention it, the conversion to charters literally destroyed the Teachers’ (AFT) New Orleans local, the largest in the South. It sued to overturn the privatization and get teachers’ jobs back, but lost in federal courts, all during the Republican George W. Bush administration.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
Press Associates Inc. (PAI), is a union news service in Washington D.C. Mark Gruenberg is the editor.
Demonstrators during an Amazon Labor Union rally outside an Amazon warehouse in the Staten Island borough of New York, US, on April 11, 2023. (Paul Frangipane / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
This week, the Amazon Labor Union and the Teamsters announced an agreement to affiliate. If ratified, the agreement would charter a new New York City local, Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters
The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) and the Teamsters have signed an affiliation agreement.
“Today is an historical day for labor in America as we now combine forces with one of the most powerful unions to take on Amazon together,” wrote ALU President Chris Smalls on Twitter/X. “We’re putting Amazon on notice that we are coming!”
Smalls and Teamsters president Sean O’Brien signed the agreement on June 3, according to a copy I obtained.
The affiliation agreement charters a new local known as Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ALU-IBT Local 1) for the five boroughs of New York City. That may signal that Amazon workers will not be integrated into existing locals with other Teamster crafts.
The ALU is the fledgling independent union that sent shock waves through the labor movement two years ago when it won a landmark election to organize eight thousand workers at Amazon fulfillment center JFK8 on Staten Island, New York.
The Teamsters announced the affiliation in a tweet, saying the agreement had been approved unanimously by its board. The ALU’s rank and file hasn’t yet voted on it.
Surprise Announcement
The union’s reform caucus supports the affiliation, but was surprised that the Teamsters had announced the news publicly before rank-and-file members had voted.
“Ultimately, the agreement reflects what we would have wanted out of this process,” said Connor Spence, who’s running for president of the ALU and was one of the key organizers of the successful union drive at JFK8. “We would have liked a different timeline, namely holding the vote after the leadership elections, but we’re going to organize in support of the agreement either way.”
Leaders of the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus, including Connor Spence, Brima Sylla, Kathleen Cole, and Sultana Hossain, and current and former members of the ALU Executive Board, including Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, Claudia Ashterman, and Arlene Kingston, met with O’Brien and other Teamster officials in Washington, DC, on May 20, after weeks of conversations about what an affiliation would involve.
Since its blockbuster win in 2022, ALU’s efforts to make inroads at other Amazon facilities have gone down in defeat. The union has also faltered in efforts to bring Amazon to the bargaining table.
These organizing failures gave rise to the caucus, which won the right to hold democratic elections for the union’s top spots.
As the ALU struggled to advance further at Amazon, workers at the air cargo hub KCVG in Northern Kentucky voted to affiliate with the Teamsters in April and will redo their ALU union affiliation cards. They made the decision after the tug and ramp workers at a nearby DHL facility joined the Teamsters and won a lucrative first contract in January.
Teamsters launched an Amazon Division last year to bring together various Amazon organizing efforts under one big tent.
“If we’re going to bring Amazon to the table, we need to build a national movement of Amazon workers who are strike-ready,” said Spence. “Trying to build that without some kind of institutional backing is a long shot.”
Amazon Teamsters have extended picket lines to other Amazon facilities after the Teamsters organized delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, last April. These eighty-four workers were nominally employed by an Amazon contractor, the Southern California company Battle-Tested Strategies — one of 2,500 “delivery service partners” that carry out package deliveries while Amazon retains full control.
Since then, more of the independent groups organizing at Amazon have worked with the Teamsters, hoping its backing can help them organize their own facilities.
New Elections
ALU will hold officer elections in July at the JFK8 facility. Eligible voters will include all current employees who are not seasonal workers. The affiliation agreement says the Teamsters “will provide resources to effectuate an internal election for ALU-IBT Local 1 in a manner so that potential officers may reach, with equal access, as many eligible members in JKF8 as possible.”
The internal election became possible only after the ALU’s reform caucus sued the union last year for violating the ALU’s constitution because it “refused to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”
The ALU was supposed to hold elections within sicty days after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified the union. But before the NLRB certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership, changing the time frame for officer elections to after the union ratified a contract with Amazon. The reform caucus asked a Brooklyn court to compel union leaders to hold an election.
Luis Feliz Leon is a staff writer and organizer with Labor Notes
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 