Page 29 - Labor Notes News Today

“They called us essential workers, so we believed them.” The labor shortage taught workers we could use the crisis to our advantage. A hundred thousand American workers either went on strike or authorized strikes in Striketober. And on November 20, 210 union members and allies showed up for a Troublemakers School in Detroit, eager to learn how to build power in their

    Workers in a lean world: unions in the international economy, by Kim Moody (Verso) Three snippets give an indication of the material Kim Moody covers in his latest book:   Workers on the General Motors assembly line used to work for 45 seconds out of every minute. Today they are in motion for 57 seconds a minute.  

A piece suggesting rank and file networks to fight workplace closings and to circumvent the official unions. Appeared in Labor Notes 48 (January 27, 1983)

The WSWS urges workers everywhere to come to the defense of strikers at Kellogg’s in the US, who are being threatened with being permanently replaced by management after they overwhelmingly rejected a sellout contract.

The 1,400 workers at four Kellogg’s plants across the US have been on strike for more than two months and have voted “overwhelmingly” against a tentative agreement containing major concessions to management over two-tiered wages.

A new spirit of defiance is spreading on the wind that whips through the North Pole workshop complex. Elves are chafing against long hours and discovering their increased leverage—both resulting from a labor shortage that has jammed up critical points in the supply chain. Polar warehouses are stacked to the rafters with gingerbread men no one has frosted and headless

The United States has experienced a wave of strikes on a scale rarely seen since 1968. All over the country, workers, exhausted by the Covid-19 pandemic, are demanding improvements in their working conditions. Driven by the rise in the cost of living, these thousands of workers are putting pressure on their bosses to grant them wage increases. This encompasses every sector of the economy.

A little over 140,000 voted out of close to 1 million eligible active workers and retirees, a mere 14 percent turnout, reflecting the deep alienation felt by workers toward the UAW.

In a major setback for top-down, corporate-model business unionism, Teamsters United candidate Sean O’Brien defeated Steve Vairma — the chosen successor to Teamsters President James Hoffa Jr. — by a two-to-one margin. The results were announced Nov. 18, with Fred Zuckerman, Teamsters United candidate for Secretary-Treasurer, and the entire “OZ”…

The Biden administration is intervening not to defend workers’ democratic rights, but to impose a labor police force over this decisive section of the working class