This week saw two winning union votes with big margins and special significance. Workers who’d been organizing at a Manhattan REI store voted to unionize by an 88 to 14 margin. REI has 170 stores, and as we watch Starbucks stores unionizing—with three out of four that have voted so far having voted yes, the most recent one by a big margin—you have to wonder what supposedly progressive retail or food service chain is next.
The number of workers at the REI store was significantly larger than the number of workers at a Starbucks store, but much smaller than the other workplace I want to talk about here. Tech workers at The New York Times voted to unionize, 404 to 88. Tech is an important industry to think about organizing, and the Times tech workers are now the largest union of tech workers with bargaining rights in the country, they say.
Union density in the U.S. isn’t going to go up if organizing happens one 100-person REI or 30-person Starbucks or even one 600-person media tech team at a time. But as workers and unions show that organizing can happen in these places, and if unions gain a toehold in new places that remind people that unions aren’t just for auto workers or Teamsters, it may help set the stage for something larger.
● Workers at the Gizmodo Media Group are on strike, and asking you not to click on Gizmodo, Jezebel, Jalopnik, Kotaku, Lifehacker, or The Root.
● Two important pieces of Right to Recall news out of California. The state cited Terranea Resort $3.3 million for not rehiring workers laid off during the pandemic. And Long Beach made Right to Recall permanent for hospitality and janitorial workers.
● 'This is a historic opportunity': Oregon advances bill extending overtime pay to farmworkers, writes my colleague Gabe Ortíz.
● Many Massachusetts hospitals are short-staffed. The culprit may not be a shortage of nurses. (It’s because no one wants to work under those conditions.)
● The Charlotte Observer voluntarily recognized its workers' union.
● Striking workers at Great Lakes Coffee filed unfair labor practice charges against the company.
● Nice:
● Workers say they breathe polluted air at a "green" insulation facility, Mindy Isser reports.
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