UE in the News

Members of the Charlotte City Workers Union, a chapter of UE Local 150, gathered at a city council meeting last week to demand family-supporting wages and benefits.

Community organizer Kass Ottley told the council that 75% of city workers earn less than $62,000, which is the amount considered necessary for a single adult with a child in Charlotte.

City leaders talk a lot about making Charlotte a place where people want to live. They seek out new ways to bring new residents and businesses to the area in hopes that it will help everyone prosper. But what about the people who already live here and can barely afford to anymore? Charlotte needs to take care of its own, and city workers should be at the top of the list.

“When we turn on the tap and water comes out, when there’s something wrong with the road, when we have trash out and we want someone to pick that up, that doesn’t happen magically,” Ottley said. “There are people that do that. And those people work very hard to keep the city running, and they deserve the right to be able to live and thrive in the city that they work so hard to keep and maintain.”

A US trade union and a non-profit organisation called the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) have written to the Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) requesting the delisting of private equity firm PAI Partners in connection with one of its portfolio companies.

In a letter to PRI chief executive officer David Atkin, representatives of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), a trade union, and the PESP alleged that PAI Partners’ portfolio company Refresco, a beverage bottler, was engaged in practices that endanger the environment and the health and safety of its workforce.

It’s official: graduate student workers at the University of New Mexico have the right to demand school officials come to the bargaining table.

New Mexico’s statewide labor board counted 887 cards signed by UNM graduate students expressing their wishes to join United Graduate Workers (UGW-UE). That represents 57.3% of the 1,547 graduate workers in the bargaining unit.

A majority of graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have signed cards in favor of unionizing, and the group asked the administration to voluntarily recognize the union.

If the university does not voluntarily recognize the union by Dec. 26, the student group will enter a formal election process with the National Labor Relations Board. Its national affiliate is the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.

“It’s a reflection of the democratic power that we as graduate students have built. People have joined this movement for a variety of reasons but they all relate to deeply felt systemic issues that MIT has failed to make any movement on,” said Lucy Hu, a graduate student in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology. “A union is the way we make a meaningful and material change.”

Representatives of the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition-United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America submitted 1,584 union cards to the university last week, representing almost two-thirds of the roughly 2,500 graduate students the group estimated are working at IU Bloomington.

IGWC member and media school Ph.D. student Sam Smucker ... said it was relatively easy to convince graduate workers to get on board with unionizing. "We signed up an enormous amount of people," he said. "But it's actually not that hard to sign people up because there's a deep sense that things have gone off the tracks at IU in terms of graduate education. People want to see a really big change and we hope that this is the process that will bring that about."