As with the moment last year dubbed “Striketober,” promises of massive labor action by national unions didn’t live up to the hoopla, with the few real wins coming out of bold moves taken by rank-and-file workers.
In the first installment of our new The Nation Explains video series, Jane McAlevey explains the core principles that can help workers win better contracts, faster.
In The Nation, longtime organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey wrote a postmortem on the campaign. She noted that organizers did not have an accurate count of how many people worked at the site and were more concerned with giving employees a digital platform for expressing their discontent with Amazon than with building grassroots support for a union.
But now the real fight begins. Under byzantine US labor law, winning the union election is only step one. At present, the ALU is not even legally certified by the National Labor Relations Board. Without a legally certified union, the employer does not have to commence negotiations. On April 8, Amazon filed objections. This is the standard union buster’s playbook: to delay and outlast the workers, to prevent certification and the ability to get to contract negotiations.
Today’s vote marks an important victory over corporate power and arrogance—and a crucial step in the fight to unionize the company.
In April of last year, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research released a report estimating that 3.2 million Californians would remain without health coverage in 2022.
What should national unions have been doing? Mobilizing members to take the only action—strikes—that could have given them real power in the legislative fights that have ended badly for workers
A new report from Berkeley is a rare piece of good news for American labor—and a bracing reminder of what real organizing looks like.
Jane McAlevey argues that the biggest factor in the vote was the laws that give tremendous advantages to the corporate side—but the union itself made a series of tactical and strategic errors.
It’s bad news, but it doesn’t mean workers in future Amazon campaigns won’t or can’t win. They can. The results were not surprising, however, for reasons that have more to do with the approach used in the campaign itself than any other factor.
If national union leaders acquiesce to the creation of a third category of worker in exchange for sectoral bargaining, collective begging will replace collective bargaining.
Demobilizing our base is never a good idea, especially when the right wing and the Trump forces continue to mobilize.
But winning the election is like gaining recognition for a union. Now the real work starts.
Prop 22 exempts the gig companies from AB5, and instead creates a “third category” of independent contractors with a few perks. Drivers will now receive limited health benefits, but only for those who log enough hours, and an hourly pay “guarantee” that a UC Berkeley Labor Center study found to be worth $5.64.
California’s Prop 22 would make the misclassification of Uber and Lyft drivers permanent.
For Labor Day, let’s imagine it’s time to actually try winning key swing states, where, like the entire country and world, finding a good-paying job is the most urgent issue—unless you are Black, in which case not being shot by the police trumps employment.
This group of capable organizers, rooted in structure-based organizations in the workplace and in the community, composed of many groups whose leaders and members are overwhelmingly women and people of color, is now attempting the unthinkable: challenging Proposition 13, passed by California voters more than four decades ago.
“The right wing, the corporate elite understand how strategic nurses are to the labor movement,” said Jane McAlevey, a union organizer, The Nation’s strikes correspondent, and author of A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy. “Hospital administrators try to come off as doing something good, but really they’re just taking public money and hiring union-busting thugs.”
Despite the many obstacles and tarnished national UAW leadership, everyone needs the workers in this strike to win.
A bevy of new policy proposals have been floated on how to rebuild worker power. But that rebuilding is happening precisely because workers themselves are doing it, not because national union leaders, labor think tanks, or presidential candidates have newfangled ideas about solving the crisis of inequality.
Here in the United States, workers need a lot more than another holiday.
Rank-and-file workers are finally taking back their unions, and strikes are spreading across the country as a result.
During Climate Week, why not show we can have economic and environmental justice?
