UE in the News

Housekeepers across campus have been organizing with The Workers Union [a chapter of UE Local 150] since October to fight for their two demands. Their petition had received over 2,000 signatures as of November, and they were invited into a Board of Trustees meeting where Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz expressed support for their cause and thanked them for speaking.

In December, housekeepers received a 90-cent raise, bringing their hourly wage up to $16.81 — and falling $3.19 short of their request for a $20 hourly wage. Their demand for free parking was also left unaddressed. 

Many housekeepers, organizers and students alike have said these actions by the University have felt superficial and inadequate to their requests.

Meanwhile, the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) recently also issued a strident call for public ownership of railroads to protect the economy, workers, frontline communities and the environment.

“We demand that Congress immediately begin a process of bringing our nation’s railroads under public ownership,” reads the statement from the UE general executive board. The union, which represents electrical workers and other sectors, argues that the major railroad companies — like electric utilities — are ​“natural monopolies,” and have an ​“endless thirst for profit.”

The union argues that nationalization is necessary both to protect workers and to fight climate change and railroad-related pollution that disproportionately impacts communities of color and low-income communities.

The two unions also hope to set a new floor for graduate working conditions in the city. At both universities, the base stipend paid to graduate workers — $33,000 a year at UChicago and $35,196 at Northwestern — is far below Chicago’s living wage of $40,123. ​“I know graduate workers who are on food stamps,” says Brianna Suslovic, a social work Ph.D. student at UChicago. ​“It’s been years since most of us have gone to the dentist because our dental plans are so limited.” Suslovic says inflation has made the cost of living in Hyde Park untenable for many of her colleagues, and in order to survive, most graduate workers are working side-jobs on top of their teaching requirements and regular coursework. ​“Graduate students should not have to work full-time, in addition to being full-time employees of the university,” she adds. 

The longest-running pre-majority union that we know of in the private sector is the United Electrical Workers’ (UE) Carolina Auto, Aerospace and Machine Workers Union in North Carolina, in existence for over 30 years at a factory now called Cummins Rocky Mount Engine Plant. Workers there decided to pursue pre-majority unionism after witnessing repeated narrow losses in NLRB elections at local factories in the 1980s and 1990s.

Since they won their first campaign for a paid holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1990, they’ve won reinstatement of workers fired unfairly, shorter shifts, and better benefits and pay. They’ve also won several unfair labor practice charges protecting their right to distribute union materials.

In August 2022, an emboldened GSU voted to affiliate with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), pointing to the UE’s emphasis on rank-and-file democracy and local autonomy, as well as its experience in supporting graduate student organizing. With the university administration continuing its refusal to voluntarily recognize the union, and with a friendlier NLRB in place, GSU officially filed for a union election, submitting more than 2,000 signed union cards to the labor board on November 30, 2022. The NLRB set the election for January 31 and February 1, 2023.

All this comes over five years after the first union election was stymied and over 15 years after GSU first formed. Graduate students hope the upcoming election can finally deliver the union recognition they’ve long sought, and with it, the right to bargain directly with their employer as workers whose labor — from teaching to grading to lab work — is at the core of the university’s daily functioning.

Workers at Planned Parenthood of Western Pennsylvania are celebrating the completion of their first union contract. The agreement comes after 20 months of negotiations with the reproductive health care provider.

The contract increases the hourly base wage for health care assistants, which make up the majority of the clinics’ staff, from $16 to $18. Crystal Grabowski, a health care assistant in abortion services and member of the union’s bargaining committee, said this disrupts a long history of undervaluing medical staff.

“Frontline health care workers are just notoriously underpaid and even more so for abortion access and reproductive access work,” Grabowski said. “Our roles are underpaid in terms of market rates. So to be able to significantly improve our wages was a huge win for us.”