UE NEWS Updates

UE Local 893, Sublocal 15, which represents the Cedar County Road Crew in Tipton, Iowa, ratified a new three-year agreement on March 3. The agreement includes a wage adjustment of one dollar plus two percent in the first year, one dollar plus three percent in the second year, and seventy-five cents plus three percent in the third year. “The membership was pleased with the contract, which brings road crew wages up with those in surrounding urban counties,” said Sublocal Secretary-Treasurer Hap Deerberg.

This year, we celebrate International Workers Day as the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic has made clear the central importance of workers to our society. It is the labor of frontline workers — healthcare workers, grocery and food workers, sanitation workers and others — that is keeping people alive right now, not the wealth accumulated by capitalists.

“Life-and-death circumstances are being imposed on U.S. workplaces and workers are increasingly responding by standing up, fighting back and walking out, but frequently without the support of organized labor,” UE’s three national officers wrote in an open letter in In These Times. “Unions have a choice right now: Hunker down and try to ride out the COVID-19 storm or put our shoulders to the task of assisting workers in their fight to either improve conditions on the job or shut their workplaces down.”

As our nation and our world takes measures to mitigate the impact of the novel coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic, workers need effective rank-and-file unions more than ever, to make sure workers’ voices are heard as decisions are being made which impact our health, our jobs, and our ability to provide for our families. Visit UE's COVID-19 information page for suggestions for maintaining local union functioning, demands locals should consider making on employers, and highlights of the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (H.R. 6201), which includes measures to cover COVID-19 testing, provide paid sick leave, strengthen unemployment insurance benefits, and keep working people from going without food.