Nearly 50,000 striking auto workers remain on the picket lines after close to two weeks, and the Detroit Free Press reports that a tentative deal is likely at least a week away. Meanwhile, teachers in Chicago are gearing up for a strike.
The striking UAW workers are fighting to regain ground after they made concessions when General Motors faced bankruptcy in 2009. They want livable raises and affordable health care, sure, but they also want to reduce the use of temporary workers who get a much worse deal, chip away at the two-tier system in which newer hires make less money, and re-open plants that the company has “unallocated,” a weasel word for closed. And make no mistake that this is about what the mass of workers want: “The tentative agreement they negotiate will have to be good enough to sell itself," Wayne State University’s Marick Masters told the Free Press. "The (UAW) leadership will not be able to sell an agreement that the membership will ratify, because they will not have confidence in the leaders.”
In Chicago, 94% of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) voted in favor of a strike, which could start as early as October 7 and draw the support of 7,000 school workers who are members of SEIU. Teachers are looking far outside the classroom to improve the schools for their students and communities. They want a raise, and deserve one, but they also want a nurse at every school and at least one social worker for every 50 students in high-trauma areas; more “community schools” that feature wrap-around services such as health care and GED programs; protection against ICE for immigrant students and families; and taxes on the wealthy to provide funding for affordable housing. “The money is there,” CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates told Labor Notes. “Our city leadership makes choices. They choose to give $1.3 billion to build development in what they call a ‘blighted area’ in one of the richest parts of Chicago.”
● An expected strike by 80,000 Kaiser Permanente workers was averted thanks to their unions and management reaching a good deal:
As part of the tentative agreement, the nonprofit health care giant will provide members of the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions with annual pay increases of percent — 3 percent a year for workers in California — and create a program to reduce the national shortage of health care workers.
The unions also had sought concessions on outsourcing, and Kaiser agreed to a list of jobs that will not be outsourced over the life of the contract. Labor relations expert Rebecca Kolins Givan said that, although the coalition had a number of victories with this contract, the terms on outsourcing are perhaps the biggest win.
● Workers at a Portland pizza parlor are unionizing.
● A group of nearly 80 Google contract workers in Pittsburgh unionized.
● Poultry workers and allies organize in the wake of anti-immigrant raids.
At the Pioneer Valley Workers Center in western Massachusetts and Massachusetts JwJ, we sent Cecilia Prado, one of our volunteer hotline responders, to join the team on the ground in Mississippi. There she volunteered as an organizer and case manager. “Most of us [volunteers] were Latinx and were familiar with the stress surrounding the immigration system,” she said, “so we were able to relate to the community and gain their trust.”
The organizers worked from early morning to late at night. “We would flyer in churches and communities and let people know about the resources,” Prado said. Churches housed legal clinics and distributed humanitarian aid.
● Trump’s new Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia will be a catastrophe for workers' rights.
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