cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/8287289

Thousands of unionized Starbucks workers will walk off their jobs on Thursday, with the one-day work stoppages coming to protest the company's stance with shops that voted to organize, according to Starbucks Workers United.

The labor action is timed to for Starbucks' Red Cup Day, an annual event in which the coffee giant hands out holiday-themed reusable cups. Starbucks has refused to negotiate in good faith over staffing and other issues that are particularly acute during promotions, according to the union.

"Starbucks is creating unnecessarily stressful working conditions by scheduling promotion after promotion without increasing staffing," Neha Cremin, a Starbucks worker in Oklahoma City, said in a statement to CBS MoneyWatch. "Starbucks has made it clear that they won't listen to workers, so we're advocating for ourselves by going on strike."

Excerpt from the article (it's a long one so maybe take your time to read it, but it is rather interesting):

Teddy Ostrow: Another element of the tentative agreements that may be representative of a greater shift in the union is that the contracts, if they’re ratified, will now expire on May 1st or the day before, which is the international holiday of May Day.

And one could say this is perhaps symbolic, but it also is quite strategic, I think. UAW President Shawn Fain has called on other unions to basically line their own contracts up to expire on that day as well. Can you give us a very brief crash course on the importance of May Day, basically so you can help us understand why the union did this, and what it says about the kind of unionism the UAW is trying to influence across the labor movement?

Barry Eidlin: Yeah, I mean, there are practical considerations, just that having the contract expire at the end of April means that workers are on the picket lines in the spring and summer instead of in the wintertime, which is non trivial when you’re talking about a protracted strike situation.

But it’s really the symbolism that’s important here. And I don’t mean symbolic in the sense of meaningless. I mean symbolic in the sense that it means something really important. So May Day obviously is the international workers’ holiday. Some people sort of say that it’s the real Labor Day and that the one in September is the fake Labor Day, but I think we should just have two Labor Days and we should fight for more Labor Days, as far as I’m concerned.

But May 1st is considered this worker’s holiday. It is to honor the martyrs of the Haymarket massacre on May 4th, 1886. I’m not quite sure what the history is of why it shifted from May 4th to May 1st, maybe it has to do with the Pagan holidays of May Day in Europe, I’m not quite sure.

But in any case. In 1887, some members of the Socialist International decided that they were going to designate May 1st as a workers’ holiday, and it sort of held that position ever since. And there’s been efforts in the U.S. to sort of recapture May Day, even though it originated in the U.S. has never really been as big of a holiday that it is in other parts of the world. So there have been efforts recently to recapture that.

But what’s important here with the UAW aligning their contracts to expire on April 30th, with the strike beyond May 1st and inviting other unions to do the same, to align their contracts, it really speaks to Shawn Fain and the new UAW administration’s commitment to a more class struggle vision of unionism, right? That’s really the story of the UAW contract campaign and the Stand-Up-Strike that ensued, is one of developing a much more explicit framework of class warfare, and that we are fighting not just for auto workers, but for the entire working class, that we are engaged in a class struggle with our billionaire class enemies, drawing these clear dividing lines and mobilizing workers around this broader vision.

And so aligning the contracts to expire the day before May Day and then inviting others to do so is a concrete embodiment of that broader vision, right? It sort of is a way to turn that vision into reality because it creates the structural preconditions for having a mass strike on May 1st of 2028 in a way that is, I mean, you will often hear small groups on the left talk about calling for a general strike and it’s sort of in the realm of fantasy, this actually brings that into the realm of a very real possibility, especially if we see other other unions follow suit.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/9253908

The rule — announced late last month by the National Labor Relations Board –- sets new standards for determining when two companies should be considered “joint employers” under the National Labor Relations Act.

It sounds wonky. But essentially, the rule could widen the number of companies that must participate in labor negotiations alongside their franchisees or independent contractors. For example, it might require Burger King to bargain with workers even though most of its U.S. restaurants are owned by franchisees. Or it could require Amazon to negotiate with delivery drivers who are employed by independent contractors.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/07/world/europe/sweden-tesla-strike.html

Unions across Sweden said on Tuesday that they would support an effort to pressure Tesla to sign a collective bargaining agreement with its 120 mechanics, joining a campaign to defend a model of organized labor that many Swedes say is essential to the country’s economic success and stability.

Dockworkers said they would expand their blockade of the automaker’s shipment to all ports in Sweden next week, after launching the action at four key locations. The electricians’ union said its members would stop servicing Tesla charging stations when they needed a repair, and maintenance workers said they wouldn’t clean Tesla facilities.

The transport union said last week that it would refuse to unload any Teslas arriving by ship to four large Swedish ports beginning Tuesday. After it learned that Tesla was rerouting shipments to other ports, the union said, it expanded its job action to block such shipments to all Swedish ports starting Nov. 17 unless an agreement is reached.

I've been considering joining a leftist organization outside of the DSA but have heard some pretty terrible things about both CPUSA and PSL. I've read some pretty glowing reviews that the APL is the only purely ML party that sticks to its revolutionary/anti-revisionist roots. However, I can't find any actual unions that support APL (besides a teacher's union in the Dominican Republic?) and their platform is very explicitly Hoxhaist, which I'm not very familiar with.

Has anyone worked with them before?

EUGENE VICTOR DEBS (1855-1926) was one of the greatest and most articulate advocates of workers’ power to have ever lived. During the early years of the labor movement in the United States, Debs was far ahead of his times, leading the formation of the American Railway Union (ARU) and the American Socialist Party.

Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on November 5, 1855. He left home at 14 to work on the railroad and soon became interested in union activity. As president of the American Railway Union, he led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Two months later he was jailed for his role in a strike against the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company. While in jail, Socialist and future Congressman Victor Berger talked with Debs and introduced him to the ideas of Marx and socialism. When he was released from prison, he announced that he was a Socialist.

He soon formed the Social Democratic Party, which eventually became the Socialist Party in 1901. He became their perennial presidential candidate. He ran on the Socialist ticket in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 when he received his highest popular vote—about 915,000 (3.4%)—from within a prison cell. He had been arrested once again, this time for “sedition”; because he opposed World War I. Many Socialists were imprisoned during this time because they felt that the war was being fought for the profits of the rich, but with the blood of the poor. Debs was fortunately released in 1921.

Debs died in Elmhurst, Illinois, on October 20, 1926, but he is remembered to this day by countless labor activists from all over the political spectrum. The Eugene V. Debs Foundation works to continue his legacy into the 21st century...

To learn more about Debs and his life, read Stephen Marion Reynolds’ Biography of Eugene V. Debs for a full accounting of his life and times.

Biographies, Critiques, Criticisms, Sketches, Autobiographies, Obituaries and Memoirs of Eugene V. Debs

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Insider victim of layoffs on

The workers get 8,300 takas, or $75, as monthly minimum wage and they often need to work overtime to make ends meet, labor unions and workers say.

Protests erupted over the weekend after BGMEA offered to increase the monthly minimum wage by 25% to reach $90, instead of the $208 demanded by the workers.

Bangladesh earns annually about $55 billion from exports of garment products, mainly to the United States and Europe.

The protests came amid rising tensions over the coming general elections between the ruling Awami League party — led by Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina — and the main opposition group — Bangladesh Nationalist Party — led by her rival and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia.

On this day in 1919, the United Mine Workers (UMW) initiated a nationwide strike of more than 400,000 coal miners, demanding better wages and a 30-hour week. The U.S. declared the strike illegal while the media smeared workers as communists.

U.S. Attorney General, A. Mitchell Palmer, the same individual behind the infamous Palmer Raids, declared the strike illegal by invoking the Lever Act, a wartime measure that made it a crime to interfere with the production or transportation of necessities.

The law had never been used against a union before, and in fact American Federation of Labor (AFL) founder Samuel Gompers had been promised by President Woodrow Wilson that the Lever Act would not be used to suppress labor actions.

The strike was subject to Red Scare propaganda: coal operators made false charges that Lenin and Trotsky had ordered the strike and were financing it, and some of the press repeated those claims. Others used words like "insurrection" and "Bolshevik revolution". Because of this propaganda and the Attorney General's injunction against the strike, the UMW called the strike off on November 8th.

Many workers ignored this order, however, and the strike continued for over a month, with a final agreement being reached on December 10th. Workers won a 14% wage increase and the creation of an investigatory commission to mediate wage issues.

The US miners' strikes, 1919-1922 - Jeremy Brecher :worker

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On this day in 1891, armed Tennessee Coal Miners freed hundreds of prisoners who were being used as strikebreaking convict labor. The raid took place in the context of the "Coal Creek War", a militant labor uprising in the early 1890s.

The Coal Creek War took place primarily, but not exclusively, in Anderson County, Tennessee. This labor conflict ignited in 1891 when coal mine owners in the Coal Creek watershed began to remove and replace their company-employed, private coal miners then on the payroll with convict laborers leased out by the Tennessee state prison system, used in this case as strikebreakers.

Coal workers at the Tennessee Coal Mining Company (TCMC) went on strike on April 1st, 1891, demanding to be paid in cash, not scrip (currency only usable at company stores) and to be allowed to check the weight of their haul (they were paid by weight, but not allowed to check the company's measurement).

Workers initiated a series of raids against the TCMC - on July 14th, armed miners surrounded the stockades where leased convicts were held and sent them by train out of the city. On October 31st, 1891, the miners burned company stockades to the ground and freed hundreds of convicts being held there. On Nov. 2nd, another band attacked stockades in a different location and freed those prisoners as well. From those two events alone, at least 453 convicts were set free.

The strike was forcibly put down by state militia, ending with the arrest of hundreds of miners. All but one were either acquitted or merely fined. Tennessee ended its policy of leasing convict labor, using convicts to work in state-owned mines instead.

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BWAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA

Unionize, folks.

An injury to one is an injury to all.