Labor Rights News Thread

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caltrek
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US Department of Agriculture Study Shows Working Conditions in Meatpacking Plants Likely Drove Coronavirus Outbreaks
by Amanda Perez Pintado and Madison McVan
October 6, 2021

https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/10/ ... outbreaks/

Introduction:
(Investigate Midwest) The analysis supports what many meatpacking workers and advocates suspected during the early months of the pandemic — working shoulder-to-shoulder coupled with high line speeds contributed to the virus’ spread.

Working conditions in meatpacking plants likely led to the spread of COVID-19 in rural areas of the U.S. in the early months of the pandemic, new U.S. Department of Agriculture research shows.

The space between workers, who stand close together on production lines as they make the same cut over and over, was probably the main factor that caused the outbreaks, according to the USDA’s report published last month. Overall, meatpacking plant workers were much more likely to be exposed to the virus than workers in other manufacturing jobs.

“It is a strong possibility that specifically the physical proximity of the workers in meatpacking plants is directly linked to the outbreaks that we saw in the spring and summer of 2020,” said Thomas Krumel, one of the paper’s authors and now an assistant professor at North Dakota State University.

The paper, according to the researchers, could be the first effort to empirically identify conditions that caused coronavirus outbreaks in meatpacking plants at an industry-wide level.
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'Some Things Are Worth Fighting For': 10,000 Unionized John Deere Workers Now on Strike
by Jon Queally
October 14, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... now-strike

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) An estimated 10,000 unionized John Deere workers are officially on strike Thursday after a midnight deadline failed to yield an agreement to satisfy the organized workforce of the well-known tractor and farm machine company.

"Our members at John Deere strike for the ability to earn a decent living, retire with dignity and establish fair work rules," said Chuck Browning, vice prresident and director of the UAW’s Agricultural Implement Department, in a statement released just after midnight. "We stay committed to bargaining until our members' goals are achieved."

According to CNN:

The UAW had reached a tentative agreement on a new six-year contact with the company two weeks ago, only to see 90% of the rank-and-file members of the union reject it in a ratification vote that concluded this past Sunday. Union and management negotiators talked into the night Wednesday trying to reach a new deal but were unable to do so.

This is the nation's largest private-sector strike since the UAW waged a costly six-week strike against General Motors (GM) two years ago. And it continues a recent trend of workers flexing more muscle as the dynamics of the labor market tip more toward them and away from employers. Businesses have been struggling to find the workers they need to fill a recent record number of job openings. There has also been a record high number of workers quitting jobs.

UAW president Ray Curry said the union's almost one million retired and active members "stand in solidarity" with the striking John Deere workers and their families.
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caltrek
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Waitering and waitressing can be good jobs, but recent developments may be causing your waiter or waitress to be getting a little grumpy in their attitude.

Wage Theft at Restaurants Is Getting Worse
by Andrea Guzman
October 23, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/food/2021/1 ... -pandemic/

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) As if restaurant workers weren’t already suffering enough during the pandemic from lost hours and angry customers, many of them have also had to contend with not being paid for all of the hours they’ve worked.

Tipped workers, most of them restaurant workers, have experienced increased wage theft this year compared to last, according to a recent report by nonprofit restaurant advocacy group One Fair Wage. In a Facebook Live event last month, the group’s President Saru Jayaraman said: “We are seeing a real uptick in violations of workers’ rights in this industry.”

Wage theft—when employers fail to pay workers what they’ve earned—has a disproportionate impact on the tens of millions of minimum wage and subminimum wage workers. That’s in part because the Department of Labor, the agency responsible for investigating those violations, is under-resourced. The report notes that in 2015, even though the workforce had undergone massive growth, the number of investigators in the DOL’s Wage and Hour Division has remained nearly the same as it was 70 years ago. As a result, people of color, women and immigrants, who make up a large share of low-wage workers, have missed out on earnings.

This is especially problematic for tipped workers. By law, restaurants in 43 states can pay workers a lower hourly minimum wage, down to $2.13 an hour, as long as the worker’s tips get their earnings up to the state’s minimum wage. If tips are inadequate, employers are supposed to make up the difference. But in a September survey of 238 tipped workers, more than a third of workers reported that their tips and additional wages fail to bring them up to the state’s minimum wage. And while almost half of tipped workers reported not being fairly compensated for overtime, women were 10 percent more likely to report not being paid time and a half.

Even when employers that underpaid workers pay back stolen wages, they’re often only required to pay back a portion of them.
Last edited by caltrek on Wed Nov 03, 2021 3:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Why America’s Health Care Workers are Escalating Their Fight for Fair Treatment and Patient Safety
by Tom Conway
October 22, 2021

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/health-care-workers/

Introduction:
(Alternet) So many people with COVID-19 sought treatment at Providence St. Mary Medical Center in recent months that the hospital triaged patients in a tent outside the facility and set up a makeshift ward in the main lobby.

Many workers put in 14- and 16-hour shifts to keep the Southern California facility operating during the crisis, with some comforting the dying and others volunteering to use their Spanish skills to help communicate with bereft family members over the phone.

But instead of recognizing workers who risked their lives and pushed themselves to exhaustion, the hospital compounded the strain by demanding concessions and dragging out contract negotiations for more than a year.

Around the country, hospitals continue to stretch workers to the breaking point and put the entire health care system at risk.

"The fact is that without us, the hospitals have no one," observed Alma Garzon, president of United Steelworkers (USW) Local 183, which represents hundreds of workers at Providence St. Mary.
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Fired #AppleToo Organizer Files Labor Charge Against the Company
by Zoe Schiffer
November 2, 2021

https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/2/2275 ... harge-nlrb

Introduction:
(The Verge) Janneke Parrish, a leader of the #AppleToo movement, has filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company, alleging the tech giant fired her in retaliation for organizing.

Parrish created the #AppleToo platform to help colleagues air their concerns with Apple’s culture of “pervasive sexism” and pay equity, according to the complaint. Then, in October, she was fired, allegedly for failing to comply with a workplace investigation into leaks.

Parrish says the company terminated her based on “false and pretextual reasons” — namely because she “spoke up regarding her personal experiences regarding workplace concerns and helped give voice to her co-workers’ concerns in a workplace where such issues have been systematically siloed, suppressed, and unaddressed.”

“It seems like all the tech companies are using the same playbook,” says labor attorney Laurie Burgess. “They get rid of outspoken organizers by asserting they are responsible for a leak without any proof or documentation that that person was indeed responsible. My client denies having leaked this information.” Burgess is also representing the fired and suspended Netflix organizers, as well as prominent Google organizers.

This is the seventh unfair labor practice charge that has been filed against Apple since August. Last month, former senior engineering program manager Ashley Gjøvik accused Tim Cook of violating the National Labor Relations Act when he warned employees that “people who leak confidential information do not belong here.”
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New York Cabbies’ Hunger Strike Ends With a Huge Victory
by Noah Lanard
November 3, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/mojo-wire/2 ... de-blasio/

Introduction:
(Mother Jones) Two weeks ago, New York City taxi drivers and their supporters launched a hunger strike. Their goal was to pressure Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city to guarantee the loans they took out to purchase medallions required to operate Yellow cabs.

On Wednesday, they achieved a near total victory.

In a course reversal, de Blasio has agreed to have the city serve as a backstop for the debt past administrations loaded onto drivers. That will allow the cabbies, many of whom still owe more than $500,000, to reduce their debts to $170,000 at most. Their loan payments will also be capped at about $1,100 per month. So far, the agreement covers drivers who owe money to Marblegate, which became the largest holder of medallion loans after the bubble burst.

As I wrote last month at the start of the strike:
  • A Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times investigation established in 2019 [that] lenders, medallion brokers, and city officials spent years taking advantage of a scheme to inflate the prices of the taxi medallions that let New York City drivers operate cabs. The victims were the mostly immigrant cab drivers now left with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. There have been three suicides by owner-drivers in recent years.
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Fast-Food Companies Have One Easy Trick for Avoiding Liability for Sexual Harassment. Now, Workers Are Walking Out
by Madison Pauly
November 9, 2021

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... lking-out/

Introduction and Extract:
(Mother Jones) L.H. worked for McDonald’s—or so she thought. The 14-year-old put on her McDonald’s uniform before her shifts, handed McDonald’s bags through the drive-through window, and, at the end of the day, trudged out through doors beside the golden arches.

But earlier this year, after her new manager started touching her inappropriately, told her he wanted her to be his “happy meal,” and then raped her in a restaurant bathroom, L.H. learned that technically, she didn’t work for McDonald’s at all, according to a legal complaint. Instead, she worked for Rice Enterprises—a franchisee that owns eight McDonald’s locations in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, suburbs.

That seemingly technical distinction will matter immensely as the 14-year-old’s parents pursue a lawsuit accusing both Rice Enterprises and McDonald’s, the corporate entity, of negligence: for hiring the shift manager, Walter Garner, to oversee teen workers despite his past criminal conviction of sexual assault, for not adequately supervising him, and for failing to address complaints about harassment. According to the complaint, filed in September, even after L.H. (whose name has been concealed in court records because she is a minor) and her co-workers spoke to a hiring manager about Garner’s behavior, nothing was done to stop it; when other managers viewed surveillance video showing Garner groping L.H., they neither disciplined nor fired him. Only after he showed an intimate photo of her to another young worker, who reported it to her school, did anyone call the police, says Alan Perer, L.H.’s lawyer. Garner was arrested in mid-April and pleaded guilty this last week to statutory sexual assault of a girl age 11 or older, along with other charges.

In October, McDonald’s workers outraged over L.H.’s story went on strike for a day. And on Tuesday, according to the Los Angeles Times, McDonald’s workers in five California cities will stage more walkouts and a series of rallies to shore up support for a bill that would make it clear that McDonald’s is on the hook for employment law violations in franchise restaurants, including sexual harassment. “The franchisee being a separate business from the franchisor—I think of it as a legal fiction,” says Lorena Gonzalez, the bill’s author. “We allow that to absolve the franchisor of their responsibility.”
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Starbucks Anti-Union Blitz in High Gear as Buffalo Employees Begin Historic Vote
by Julia Conley
November 11, 2021

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2021/ ... toric-vote

Introduction:
(Common Dreams) Starbucks employees in the Buffalo, New York area are casting ballots in a union election which, if successful, would result in the first U.S. bargaining unit at the international coffee chain.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Wednesday began sending out ballots to workers at three store locations which filed for an election in August, setting off an effort by the Seattle-based corporation to "intimidate" the employees out of organizing, according to critics.

The company has attempted to delay the election and has sent high-level corporate employees to the area in recent weeks, as well as former CEO and powerful shareholder Howard Schultz, who held a meeting for workers at a Buffalo-area hotel last weekend ahead of the vote.

AFL-CIO president Liz Shuler tweeted on Tuesday that the corporation has used a number of tactics in the anti-union playbook, including "holding anti-union meetings framed as listening sessions" and telling workers, "Our benefits are already good."

"Starbucks will do everything it can to stop Workers United's organizing drive in Buffalo," Shuler tweeted, referring to the affiliate of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) which more than 100 Starbucks workers in the Buffalo area are voting on whether to join.
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Hating Work and the Great Resignation
by Ranni Molla
November 12, 2021

https://www.vox.com/recode/22776112/qui ... kers-union

Extract:
(Vox) Workers are fed up and fighting back against low pay, poor conditions, and the general idea that work is the center of their lives.

That fighting back is taking on many forms, from the performative to the transformative. Posts about standing up to abusive bosses have become their own genre on TikTok, Reddit, and other platforms. Some workers are participating in collective actions, and approval of unions is at its highest rate since 1965. Others are finding alternative sources of income or committing to getting by on less. Perhaps, most directly, people are quitting their jobs at record rates in what’s become known as the Great Resignation.

There are still more than 4 million fewer people in the workforce than there would be if labor force participation were at pre-pandemic levels. There are 10.4 million open jobs and just 7.4 million unemployed, according to the latest data. Of course, many of these open jobs are bad: They have bad pay, dangerous working conditions, or just aren’t remote (remote positions on LinkedIn get 2.5 times more applications than non-remote, according to the company).

The result is a situation where many employers — especially those in industries with notoriously bad pay and conditions — are having difficulty finding and retaining workers. To counter it, they’re raising wages, offering better benefits, and even altering the nature of their work. Depending on their strength and duration, these various actions could have long-lasting impacts on the future of work for all Americans.
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