Illinois Farm Bureau Sees ‘Moral Obligation’ to Protect Livestock from Extreme Weather. It Opposes Temperature Standards for Workers. By Sky Chadde
April 22, 2026
Introduction:
(Investigate Midwest)
• No federal heat protection standards exist. If signed into law, the legislation would make Illinois the eighth state to implement requirements for employers related to extreme heat. It would make Illinois just the third state to have standards related to cold temperatures.
• Extreme temperatures affect workers across Illinois’ food system, from crews detasseling corn in rural areas to sanitation workers cleaning frozen pizza factories in Chicago.
• Organizations representing employers across Illinois’ food system have argued the legislation’s requirements, such as paid water breaks at a certain temperature, could impact supply chains.
Since last year, worker advocates and industry representatives in Illinois have negotiated over a potentially groundbreaking piece of legislation that would require employers to protect laborers from extreme temperatures.
In private discussions, the Illinois Farm Bureau, a powerful lobbying organization for the state’s agricultural industries, voiced concern that the bill would impede farmers’ ethical duty to care for their livestock. But, to some participants, one thing seemed to be missing: No mention of workers.
After Three-Week Strike, JBS Concedes to Meatpacking Workers By Caitlyn Clark and Lisa Xu
April 23, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) Last month, 3,800 meatpacking workers in UFCW Local 7 in Greeley, Colorado launched the industry’s first major strike in 40 years.
The three-week unfair labor practice strike was the first time workers had ever struck the JBS Greeley beef packing plant, one of the company’s largest. ULP charges against JBS included the illegal termination of a member of the bargaining committee and surveillance and intimidation of workers for participation in union activity.
With 57 languages spoken under one roof, the strike united the plant’s largely immigrant workforce to take on the biggest meatpacking company in the world.
The local had spent nearly a year in negotiations following the contract’s expiration last July. JBS returned to the bargaining table after the strike—and when the dust settled, the company had conceded to almost every demand.
WON PROTECTION
In addition to $1.50 an hour in wage increases over the short two-year agreement, workers won a groundbreaking policy on personal protective equipment, challenging JBS’s previous system of garnishing wages to replace necessary PPE when it was lost, damaged, or stolen. JBS was charging workers up to $1,100 to pay for mesh vests, gloves, arm guards, and knife sharpeners.
Counter Manufacturers are Killing Workers with Silica Dust, Safety Group Charges By Jenny Brown
April 28, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) Silicosis is a lethal workplace illness that killed thousands each year up through the 1960s. In recent decades, thanks to union workplace safety fights, it became much rarer. Annual deaths dropped to the hundreds. The disease affected mostly older workers with longer exposures.
So it was hard for stonecutter Gustavo Reyes Gonzalez, 35, to get a clear diagnosis in 2019 when he first developed a cough and shortness of breath. It wasn’t until two years later that he was told he had silicosis—and only had a year to live.
Reyes Gonzalez had worked for 15 years in a fabrication shop cutting and shaping the manufactured stone now commonly used for countertops and showers (also known as quartz or engineered stone).
Around the time Reyes Gonzalez started working as a stonecutter, the material was becoming popular in the U.S. as a cheaper, more durable replacement for natural stone (marble or granite). But manufactured stone, which is made of crushed quartz and resin, contains much more silica–it comprises up to 95 percent of the material, compared to 5 percent for marble or 10 to 50 percent for granite. This makes manufactured stone much more hazardous for workers to cut, grind, and polish. These processes release silica particles that can embed themselves in the lungs, causing scarring and ultimately lung failure.
As many as two million workers may risk exposure, from manufactured stone as well as from mining, quarrying, sandblasting, and another new hazard, “frac sand” used in hydraulic fracturing in the oil and gas industry.
‘Hands Off Our Pensions’: Belgian Workers Take to the Streets in General Strike Against Austerity Measures By Stephen Prager
May 13, 2026
Introduction:
(Common Dreams) Much of Belgium ground to a halt on Tuesday as tens of thousands of workers flooded the streets of Brussels as part of a general strike against government austerity measures.
Schools closed, public transit operated with reduced service, and flights out of major airports were grounded as workers walked off the job. Instead, they marched through the capital clad in red and green, the colors of Belgium’s major labor unions, with some carrying signs that read, “Hands off our pensions” and “We will not pay the price of their wars.”
According to Morning Star, as many as 100,000 people took part in the strike, which was called by the nation’s three biggest trade unions in protest of measures by Prime Minister Bart De Wever’s government that the unions say slash pensions, reduce wages, and attack collective bargaining.
The marchers called on the government to roll back plans to raise Belgium’s retirement age to 67 and have called for an end to what the unions have dubbed a “pension penalty” that would cut benefits for those who retire early.
Amid rising costs caused by the US-Israeli war against Iran, the unions are also outraged by a proposed temporary cap on wage indexation, which requires wages to rise in tandem with inflation.
In Bus Factories, A Triple-Decker Win By Keith Brower Brown
May 29, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) What does it take to unionize factories today, especially in the South? In the last two years, bus manufacturing workers secured first union contracts and a national master agreement across New Flyer facilities in three states.
Their strategy shows how, with pressure from transit agencies that buy the buses, union members from organized sites leading outreach to non-union workers, and fighting stewards on the line, workers can unionize plants across a whole company.
New Flyer, North America’s largest bus-making company, expanded heavily in the South during the last decade, a common employer strategy to move to areas with few unions, sharp poverty, and racial splits to exploit. About a quarter of its production is electric or hydrogen buses.
But in the last three years, 600 New Flyer assemblers in Alabama, 700 parts makers and warehouse workers in Kentucky, and 100 workers in upstate New York won union recognition and first contracts with the industrial wing of the Communications Workers (CWA).
Alongside 1,000 already-unionized members at the company’s two Minnesota plants, they just settled a national master agreement that locked in new holidays, more humane attendance policies, health care cost caps, and a slew of other benefits. During the campaign to win that national deal, a supermajority of workers at each plant signed on as dues-paying members, even in Southern states where they could get full benefits without paying dues.
Labor Unions Celebrate World Court Ruling Enshrining Right to Strike By Marjorie Cohn
May 31, 2026
Introduction:
(Common Dreams) The right to strike is under attack throughout the world, including in the United States. Labor strikes are currently forbidden or restricted in the majority of countries.
Now, in a landmark 43-page advisory opinion issued May 21, the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) has determined that the right to strike is protected under the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) Convention No. 87 on Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise.
“At a moment when workers’ organizations face sustained attacks around the world, this opinion reaffirms that the freedom to withhold one’s labor is not a privilege granted by the powerful, but a fundamental human right grounded in international law,” AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement.
The ILO is the United Nations agency that sets global labor standards. It has 187 member states and has adopted 191 conventions since its founding in 1919. The ILO considers Convention No. 87 to be one of its 11 fundamental conventions.
Honda Mexico Worker Wins Reinstatement After 15-Year Fight By Natascha Elena Uhlmann
June 5, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) The leader of Mexico's Honda workers’ union won reinstatement last week, in an important win for workers seeking to build real unions in the country's massive auto sector. But it took 15 years for José Luis Solorio Alcalá, of the Union of United Honda Workers of Mexico (Sindicato de Trabajadores Unidos de Honda de México, STUHM), to get one step closer to justice.
Solorio Acalá was fired in 2010, months after a campaign to organize the plant went public—and just three days before Christmas. Within a year the entire organizing committee had been fired, he said. Some, like him, have held out for the slow wheels of justice to turn in their favor.
In June, Mexico’s Federal Board of Conciliation and Arbitration, which mediates labor disputes, finally ordered Solorio Acalá reinstated. But the victory was bittersweet, he said, because he suspected his long wait was far from over: Honda quickly filed an appeal.
A FAKE UNION
On paper, the Honda workers already had a union when Solorio Acalá and his co-workers began organizing. In practice, it was nothing of the sort.
“The only union rep we knew was the manager of human resources,” Solorio Acalá said.
Big Tech Built a Gig Economy that Works Against Us By Michale Huggins
June 10, 2026
Introduction:
(Other Words) Recent reporting has confirmed what many working people already feel every day: companies are using personal data to decide the lowest wage someone will accept. What working people call exploitation, Silicon Valley calls innovation.
The seven largest gig platforms in the United States — Amazon Flex, DoorDash, Favor, Instacart, Lyft, Shipt, and Uber — are using data that tracks how long its users stay on an app, what jobs they accept, and how urgently they need income. This algorithm calculates what the employers can pay to get the job done at the lowest rate individuals will accept.
Not what their labor is worth. Not what is fair.
Gig work was sold as a way to make extra money on a flexible schedule. But that’s not what it looks like today. Nearly one in four people in the U.S. now participate in some form of gig or freelance work. What was supposed to be a side hustle has become a main source of income for one third of gig workers.
As layoffs rise and wages fall further behind the cost of living, more people are being pushed into this kind of work to keep up. Black people and other workers of color, who tend to be more dependent on this type of work than white people, have been especially hard hit. But these unfair practices can impact all workers.
The NYU Strike Showed How to Reverse the Downward Spiral in Higher Education By Peter Cole
June 9, 2026
Introduction:
(In These Times) While teaching and conducting research can be wonderful experiences, working conditions in higher education have become increasingly horrible. In the United States, massive state disinvestment coinciding with 50 years of neoliberalism has resulted in both soaring tuition costs for students and large-scale budget cuts to universities. As a result, faculty teaching loads have increased while wages have stagnated. Meanwhile, university administrators across the country have replaced full-time and permanent faculty with insecure, part-time positions, and rarely replaced faculty who retired or moved. Whereas in the 1970s, more than half of U.S. faculty were tenured or on the tenure-track, today that figure stands at just over one quarter.
Students suffer because their professors have far less availability and are far more stressed. Faculty are forced to hustle, often taking on additional jobs, and are left with less time for teaching and research, thereby undermining the mission of universities. Unsurprisingly, universities have, on the whole, become far worse institutions for both students and teachers.
In the face of this downward spiral for higher education, university workers are fighting back on behalf of themselves, their students and their institutions. New unions of faculty and student workers are being formed at a rapid pace. Union faculty often make the argument that teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions, meaning if those whose job it is to teach are worse off, so is the educational experiences of students. And when they take action and withhold their labor, higher education workers can make real gains.
That was put on display this March when nearly 1,000 non-tenured faculty at New York University (NYU) went out on a two-day strike — and came out victorious with a strong first contract. Following more than a year of negotiations, the union — Contract Faculty United, affiliated with the United Auto Workers — won a minimum $14,000 raise for all members starting next semester, higher minimum salaries for new hires and 3.5% annual raises for the duration of the contract.
They Didn’t Wait: California Teachers Strike and Win By Danielle Smith
June 9, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) Tens of thousands of California educators joined forces statewide, wagering that they could win more by working together. The result was a wave of strikes this school year that defied narratives of austerity and won better funding.
“Our districts are different, but our stories are the same,” said Gina Gray, a Los Angeles high school English teacher who served on her union’s extended bargaining committee. “It’s exciting to see how up and down the state, locals are really standing up. Educators everywhere are saying: Enough is enough. Invest in public education the way it deserves to be.”
The We Can’t Wait Campaign started with 11 California Teachers Association locals, and expanded to 32. They ratified a shared platform of fighting for smaller class sizes, more school resources, and competitive compensation. They also committed to organize and escalate on a common timeline, build up member power at their schools, and work with families, students, the community, and other unions.
In the course of the campaign, six locals struck—San Francisco, Richmond, Natomas, Twin Rivers, Dublin, and Little Lake. Others, including Oakland and Los Angeles, took strike votes but settled before walking out.
RECORD-SETTING STRIKES
The campaign started with the locals doing coordinated actions, but it became clear as bargaining reached full swing that their negotiations were moving at different paces, said Denisha Jordan, a Los Angeles teacher who is organizing for the campaign statewide.
Liberian Rubber Workers Triumphed Against Union Busting By Andrew Tillet-Saks
July 7, 2026
Introduction:
(Jacobin) Stepping onto the Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia, the largest contiguous rubber plantation in the world at 185 square miles, is a step into the past — though which past or which historical moment is debatable. The “plantation,” as it’s officially referred to by Firestone, is at once reminiscent of American chattel slavery, nineteenth-century company towns, and the old Western colonies of Africa.
Most of the eight thousand workers and their families live on the plantation in Firestone-provided housing evocative of dilapidated public housing in poor inner-city US neighborhoods. Their children are born in Firestone hospitals and attend Firestone schools on the plantation. The workers are all Liberian while upper management is primarily white Americans. No Firestone tires are produced in the country; Firestone uses the Liberian workers to extract the latex, package it up, and send it off to other countries for production. Traversing the nearly undrivable dirt roads of the plantation, one sees scores of workers cutting tall grass with rusty machetes, workers forced to relieve themselves in open fields due to the lack of public toilets, and rusty facilities so dilapidated they look as though they might have been abandoned and untouched for decades.
Yet this plantation was recently the scene of a momentous union victory. Facing rampant subcontracting — an increasingly favored weapon of employers worldwide seeking to avoid unions — the Firestone Agricultural Workers Union of Liberia (FAWUL) confronted the practice head-on and won a union election among the plantation’s four thousand subcontracted workers; this past December, they secured their first collective bargaining agreement. As workers and unions around the world increasingly struggle with how to deal with subcontracting and short-term contracts, Firestone workers in Liberia overcame huge political, legal, and economic obstacles to provide an example of how unions might tackle the problem.
Strike Six: New Orleans Nurses Fight for First Contract By Lee Abbott
July 6, 2026
Introduction:
(Labor Notes) Two years and six strikes into bargaining—after switching law firms, cancelling negotiation sessions, firing union leaders, and allegedly backing a decertification effort—perhaps it’s dawning on University Medical Center in New Orleans that nurses don’t tire out easily.
On May 1 the nurses held their sixth strike—at five days, the longest yet—and their picket lines keep growing. There was dance music blasting, spontaneous line-dancing, boiled crawfish and jambalaya.
“We have first-time strikers out here who are brand new nurses!” said endoscopy nurse Hailey Dupré, a member of the bargaining team. “You understand that you can take your job into your hands and shape the future of it.”
As Heidi Tujague, a registered nurse and member of the bargaining committee, explained, this strike was intentionally longer than any of the previous five strikes. It was planned for five days, much longer than many conducted by their union, National Nurses United, which tends to favor one- or two-day strikes.
“The maximum we’ve done before was a three-day strike" in November 2025, she said. "We wanted to show an escalation from then. But some in our rank and file wanted to go longer!”
