UE in the News

Graduate student workers at New Mexico State University and their supporters rallied in front of the university's administration complex Thursday to demand administrators meet with union leaders to discuss immediate relief from tuition costs.

The university employs about 900 graduate students as teaching and research assistants, paying them a minimum stipend of $18,435. The employees, who also attend classes in working toward their graduate degrees, pay the university about $6,189 in tuition and fees, according to report compiled by NMSU Graduate Workers United.

"It's a problem we have to pay so much of our salaries to cover tuition costs," said Bryson Stemock, an NMSU graduate research assistant.

The world's largest beverage bottler has been fined $49,724 by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for "serious violations" that could endanger employees at their plant in Wharton.

Employees of the Refresco bottling factory and community groups rallied outside the facility on Nov. 15 to demand better working conditions and recognition of their union. A week later, OSHA began a series of inspections at the plant that continued through last week.

An OSHA citation and notification dated May 19 lists four "serious violations" including wet walking surfaces on four occasions, employee exposure to continuous noise levels at 217% of the permissible action level exposure limit, failing to document the basis for determining that all hazards in a permit space had been eliminated, and failure to certify that propane-powered forklift and electric pallet jack operators had been trained and evaluated.

The City Council approved in a 10-1 vote a $3.3 billion gross operating budget Tuesday night that will raise the minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour. It goes into effect July 1.

The budget includes $32.8 million for a new step pay raise program for city workers. It will be based on years of service with a 3% wage increase for each step. Roughly 80% of the workforce will qualify for the plan. Virginia Beach employs 7,400 full- and part-time workers.

“It’s a major step in the right direction,” said Charles Brown, organizer of the Virginia Beach City Workers Union, UE Local 111.

Despite an insistence that they care deeply about the undergraduates and their education, the administration’s refusal to improve the conditions of graduate workers shows that the university system is primarily concerned with enriching itself, rather than being a place for exploration, discovery, and sharing of ideas, where workers are treated with dignity. Through collective actions and organizing, thousands of faculty, grad students, and staff can finally push back against the exploitation of graduate student workers. United we bargain, divided we beg

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.”