Following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood workers are under tremendous stress and expecting a “tidal wave of need.” Now they’re organizing to protect and improve abortion care by ending chronic understaffing and low wages at clinics.
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.
Retired UE International Director Robin Alexander and Benedicto Martinez, longtime leader of Mexico’s Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), were the featured guests on radio station KKFI’s “Heartland Labor Forum” program on May 5. They were there to discuss Alexander’s new book, International Solidarity in Action, published in English as an e-book earlier this year by UE and forthcoming later this year in Spanish, in both print and electronic versions.
International Solidarity in Action tells the story of UE’s relationship with the FAT, an independent union federation that has challenged Mexico’s corrupt system of labor relations since its founding in the 1960s.
Listen to Alexander and Martinez on Heartland Labor Forum here. The e-book International Solidarity in Action can be downloaded at InternationalSolidarityInAction.org.
“We hope more people will see us unified, standing in solidarity,” said Keshia Barnette, a member of Durham City Workers Union. “We are all essential. We are all important. We all matter to the democracy of this country.”
Barnette has been a Durham city worker for 23 years. She currently works on community development and affordable housing.
“We want to make sure we can afford to live in the city for which we work,” Barnette said. “Currently the wages aren’t to the levels where you can find affordable housing in Durham. That’s a problem.”
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
Graduate workers at Indiana University went on strike this morning in response to the administration’s continued refusal to recognize their union, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition–United Electrical Workers (IGWC-UE). Recognition strikes are uncommon in recent years and, taking place as this one does in a state where public sector workers have few rights (though the same could be said of all Indiana workers, living as they do in a right-to-work state), it’s a show of strength intended to demonstrate that the union has not only majority support among the school’s estimated 2,500 graduate workers but majority participation in a high-stakes collective action.
Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Cole Nelson, an IGWC-UE member and first-year PhD student in IU’s media studies school, about what led to today’s strike, the demands driving the organizing, and where the action fits into a broader wave of labor organizing in higher education.
The second union contract took effect Wednesday at the Willy Street Co-op, bringing minimum starting pay to $15 an hour and raising average wages by 20% over the two-year term.
“We're actually able to be competitive in the job market now,” said David Droster, chief steward of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1186, which represents roughly 300 nonmanagerial Co-op workers at the three Madison stores and central kitchen. The workers overwhelmingly voted in a union in September 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic would earn grocery workers across the country the moniker of “essential workers.”
Paramveer Singh, a graduate assistant in the Environmental Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces ... said his fellow grad workers can no longer afford [the lack of tuition coverage]. They were already crunched financially, Singh said, but now they’re facing rising rents, inflation and fuel prices that are “adding to the pain we endure.”
“Now is the time for real action,” Singh said.
Singh was addressing the NMSU Board of Regents on Monday afternoon. Earlier, outside the meeting chamber, the grad workers union rallied along with faculty, undergraduate students, alumni and community supporters.
Graduate students delivered a petition signed by over 1,100 supporters to the regents, along with a series of public comments at the meeting.