Tag: Organized Labor

VW Workers in Chattanooga Seek Vote to Join Union

Volkswagen employees in Tennessee who are hoping to join the United Automobile Workers asked a federal agency on Monday to hold an election, a key step toward the union’s longtime goal of organizing nonunion factories across the South. With the union’s backing, Volkswagen workers filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board asking for […]

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How Is a College Football Team Different From Its Marching Band?

Robert McRae III has seen a lot. His grandmother, a civil rights activist in Los Angeles, often brought him along to rallies she organized and picket lines she walked — even to a gay pride parade with giant anatomical balloons that, he recalls with a smile, might not have been age appropriate. As a Dartmouth […]

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Why Is Congress Probing a Union for Being Anti-Israel?

Like many progressive organizations, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, a union that represents public defenders in the New York City area, has been convulsed by battles over Israel’s war in Gaza. A recent article in the right-leaning Free Press revealed the strident and sometimes ugly language that union members used during a fight over […]

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Dartmouth Basketball’s Union Took Shape in the Campus Dining Hall

Members of the Dartmouth College men’s basketball team congregated at the stately Hanover Inn near campus on a dreary, drizzly Tuesday and walked over to a small office building where they smiled for a group photo. Then they went up to a second-floor conference room and took a vote that had been six months — […]

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Big Labor Gamble: Push to Unionize Every U.S. Auto Plant

When Shawn Fain, the United Automobile Workers president, unveiled the deal that ended six weeks of strikes at Ford Motor in the fall, he framed it as part of a longer campaign. Next, he declared, would be the task of organizing nonunion plants across the country. “One of our biggest goals coming out of this […]

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The Oscars Give Hollywood a Chance to Celebrate. After That? It’s Grim.

The Academy Awards ceremony, which this year will take place on March 10, traditionally provides a reliable moment of optimism for a perennially anxious industry. The Oscars are the climax of an awards season that’s a prolonged exercise in collective congratulation, and in early March the rest of the year still looks bright. The Sundance […]

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Can a Tech Giant Be Woke?

The December day in 2021 that set off a revolution across the videogame industry appeared to start innocuously enough. Managers at a Wisconsin studio called Raven began meeting one by one with quality assurance testers, who vet video games for bugs, to announce that the company was overhauling their department. Going forward, managers said, the […]

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Starbucks Baristas Fuel Workers in NYC, but Is Anyone Helping Them?

For more than a year, Felix Santiago has worked as a barista at a Starbucks near Times Square, and for about half that time he loved it. It was easy to swap shifts, easy to pick up new ones, easy to get along with supervisors who were largely accommodating. “The first six months were absolutely […]

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Biden Administration Is Said to Slow Early Stage of Shift to Electric Cars

In a concession to automakers and labor unions, the Biden administration intends to relax elements of one of its most ambitious strategies to combat climate change, limits on tailpipe emissions that are designed to get Americans to switch from gas-powered cars to electric vehicles, according to three people familiar with the plan. Instead of essentially […]

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Michigan Voters’ Anger Is a Problem for Joe Biden

Betrayal is a powerful emotion, especially at the ballot box. Voters who feel betrayed tend to act like spurned lovers, punishing the offending party even if it means electing somebody who will actually be worse. That’s how America got Donald Trump as president. Many blue-collar workers in factory towns in battleground states like Michigan, Ohio […]

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Is the Middle-Class Dream Over in Las Vegas?

To many Americans, Las Vegas is a burst of glittering hotels and seedy wedding chapels, a mirage-like city rising improbably from the Mojave Desert. The Americans who live in Las Vegas know the city as a destination for the middle class: Valets and cocktail waitresses become homeowners. Immigrants who arrive with empty pockets build thriving […]

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Dartmouth Players Are Employees Who Can Unionize, U.S. Official Says

A federal official said Monday that members of the Dartmouth men’s basketball team were university employees, clearing a path for the team to take a vote that could make it the first unionized college sports program in the country. In a statement, the National Labor Relations Board’s regional director in Boston, Laura Sacks, said that […]

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French Farmers Are Urged by Unions to End Roadblocks

France’s main farmer’s unions called on Thursday for an end to roadblocks across the country after expressing cautious satisfaction with a flurry of new government announcements to appease them, in the first sign of a possible reprieve after more than a week of protests disrupted traffic nationwide. It was not immediately clear whether the approximately […]

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French Farmer Was Spark Behind Widespread Protests

Jérôme Bayle had spent seven nights on a major French highway, leading a group of aggrieved farmers in protest, when the prime minister arrived, dressed in his Parisian blue suit and tie, to thank them for “making France proud” and announced he would meet their demands. Before camera flashes and outstretched microphones, Mr. Bayle told […]

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Los Angeles Times to Slash Newsroom by Over 20%

The Los Angeles Times said on Tuesday that it would lay off about 115 journalists, slashing its newsroom by more than 20 percent after a tumultuous few weeks that saw top editors depart and workers walk off the job. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, said in an interview with […]

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Cal State Professors Reach Tentative Deal to End Strike

The California State University system and the union representing thousands of professors and lecturers reached a tentative deal on Monday to raise wages, ending what was the largest strike by university faculty members in U.S. history. The deal, announced by both sides on Monday night, came just hours after the California Faculty Association, the union […]

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Cal State Faculty Begin Largest U.S. Strike of University Professors

In the largest university faculty strike in U.S. history, thousands of professors and lecturers throughout the California State University system walked off the job on Monday to demand higher compensation, a protest that was expected to cancel most classes early in the academic period. The California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 professors, lecturers, librarians, counselors […]

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How to Protect Millions of Workers Without a Union

As the Opinion video above explores, these are heady times for organized labor. Unions have recently scored big victories in the auto industry and Hollywood; an increasing number of health care workers are starting to organize; and the threat of a strike resulted in big gains for hospitality workers in Las Vegas. Elsewhere, baristas, nail […]

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San Francisco Rent Strike: Tenants Use Labor Tactics to Challenge Landlords

Auto workers in Detroit. Actors and screenwriters in Hollywood. Teachers in Portland, Ore. During a wave of labor unrest over the past year in which more than 500,000 American workers went on strike, a small group of San Franciscans has brought a similar vein of activism to a different arena: their homes. Tenants in 65 […]

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American Unions Long Backed Israel. Now, Some Are Protesting It.

“Why are we here?” said Brandon Mancilla, a leader with the United Automobile Workers. Mr. Mancilla faced a crowd of hundreds of union members gathered on the steps of the New York Public Library’s Fifth Avenue branch, huddling against the cold as they rallied for a cease-fire in Gaza. “Cease-fire now, solidarity forever!” Mr. Mancilla, […]

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Starbucks Faces New Pressure Over Union Campaign

More than two years into a campaign that has unionized more than 350 Starbucks stores, the company is facing mounting pressure from union officials and activists who say it has illegally retaliated against workers and resisted contract negotiations. Starbucks, which denies violating labor laws, has responded with mixed signals about its willingness to engage with […]

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Board Game Cafe Workers Went on a Quest for a Union and Won

A golden glow illuminated the employees huddled inside a Hex & Co. cafe on the Upper East Side, a haven created for board game enthusiasts to gather for fantastical quests. Meticulous campaigns were second nature to these workers — how many times had they infiltrated an obsidian castle or vanquished a warlock? They had been […]

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Tesla Strike in Sweden Highlights a Culture Clash

The Tesla technicians who walked off their jobs in Sweden say they still support the mission of the American company and its headline-grabbing chief executive. But they also want Tesla to accept the Swedish way of doing business. They call it the Swedish Model, a way of life that has defined the country’s economy for […]

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At What Point Should College Athletes Be Considered Employees?

Brandon Outlaw sat on a witness stand for two days this week and described what it was like to play football at the University of Southern California. His fingerprints were scanned when he arrived for meals at the athletes’ dining hall to make sure he was there. He received text messages from anonymous class checkers, […]

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The Newest Union Members Are Undergrads

Sam Betsko figured out fast that being a resident assistant in a college dorm would demand more than helping locked-out students and pleading with sophomores to, for the love of God, turn down the music. In her role at Boston University, there were days of compulsory, unpaid training, and the specter of arbitrary discipline from […]

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How the Israel-Hamas War Tore Apart Public Defenders in the Bronx

Four weeks before Hamas attacked Israel, a group of public defenders packed a bright, airy room in the Bronx for mandatory antisemitism training. The hourslong gathering was the consequence of a legal settlement stemming from an ugly dispute that had festered at the Bronx Defenders, one of the country’s most influential organizations providing legal services […]

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Starbucks Tells Union It Wants to Resume Contract Talks

Starbucks said Friday that it wanted to get back to the bargaining table after a deadlock of more than six months with the union that represents more than 9,000 of its workers. The company is proposing that bargaining continue with a set of organized stores in January, Sara Kelly, Starbucks’s vice president and chief partner […]

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Amazon Is Cracking Down on Union Organizing, Workers Say

More than a year and a half after Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to form the company’s first union in the United States, the company appears to be taking a harder line toward labor organizing, disciplining workers and even firing one who had been heavily involved in the union campaign. The disciplinary actions come […]

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DHL Workers at Kentucky Air Cargo Hub Go on Strike

More than 1,100 workers at DHL Express’s global air cargo hub at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport went on strike on Thursday after months of failed negotiations with the parcel carrier. A group of DHL workers at the hub who load and unload planes voted in April to unionize with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, […]

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