Kaiser Permanente workers start to walk off the job. Its set to become the largest healthcare strike
Source: CNN Business
Updated 7:56 AM EDT, Wed October 4, 2023
CNN — On Wednesday morning, unionized employees of Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health providers, have begun to walk off the job. By 9 am ET, more than 75,000 Kaiser workers plan to join picket lines, marking the largest health care strike in US history.
The striking employees are represented by a coalition of eight unions that comprise 40% of Kaiser Permanente’s total staff. The unions ordered members off the job at 6 am local time, and Kaiser workers in Virginia and Washington, DC, started to walk out early Wednesday.
The vast majority of the striking workers are in the western part of the United States, including California, Colorado, Washington and Oregon.
The unprecedented strike comes at a time of heightened labor activity across the United States, with tens of thousands of workers across multiple industries taking to the picket lines for better pay and benefits. In the wake of pandemic, however, health care workers in particular have been fighting for safer and more secure work environments.
Efforts to form a new union have surged 58% since Biden became president, federal officials say
Source: Business Insider
Oct 14, 2023, 6:08 AM EDT
The election of President Joe Biden and a new liberal majority at the federal agency that rules on employer-worker disputes has coincided with a boon in collective organizing. The National Labor Relations Board announced Friday that petitions to form unions continue to rise following a "dramatic surge" the year before.
In fiscal year 2023, which ended September 30, the NLRB said there were 2,594 union representation petitions filed with its regional field offices, an uptick of 3% from the year before. Compared to fiscal year 2021, when Biden entered office, requests for union recognition are up 58%. That has to do, at least in part, with who is in the White House.
Since being elected, Biden has often touted his support for organized labor, becoming the first president to join a union picket line when he stood with autoworkers last month. He has also shifted the balance of power at the NLRB, which holds union elections and rules on when employers have broken the law, appointing two of its current Democrats and ensuring its pro-labor contingent is in the majority.
Under Biden, the NLRB has increasingly sided with workers over employers, declaring most severance requirements illegal and ruling that unions displaying a giant inflatable rat known as "Scabby" in front of employers they're protesting is a protected form of free speech.
One Down, Two to Go: Autoworkers Get a Tentative Deal with Ford by Emilt Stewart
October 26, 2023
Introduction:
(Vox) Forty days after the United Auto Workers went on strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers, the union has reached a tentative agreement with one of the companies in question: Ford. It means deals with General Motors and Stellantis may soon be on the horizon, too.
On Wednesday, the UAW announced that its negotiators had made a tentative deal with Ford on a new four-year contract for members. In a video, UAW president Shawn Fain and international vice president Chuck Browning laid out some of the details of the agreement and what comes next. “For months we’ve said that record profits mean record contracts. And UAW family, our stand-up strike has delivered,” Fain said in the video.
The “stand-up strike” is the union’s strategy of having different plants and workers go on strike at different times. The idea is to increase leverage and keep the companies guessing about what would be next. The union began striking, starting with three plants across Ford, GM, and Stellantis, on September 15.
The exact details of the tentative agreement aren’t yet clear. The union said the deal includes a 25 percent increase over the course of the new contract. It raises the top wage for workers by over 30 percent to more than $40 an hour, the starting wage by 68 percent, and the wage for temp workers by over 150 percent. The agreement entails improvements for current retirees, members with pensions, and members with 401(k)s.
Notably, the agreement includes the right to strike over plant closures for the first time. That may give the union leverage as the auto industry shifts to electric vehicles over time, because in general, electric vehicle plants require fewer workers. Autoworkers have been adamant the EV transition be a “just” one. If EV production grows over time, there will likely be some plant closures, so this gives the union a right to react. “That means they can’t keep devastating our communities and closing plants with no consequences,” Browning said in the video.
UAW Settles Another Major Contract in Labor Fight by Russ Choma
October 20, 2023
Introduction:
(Mother Jones) Two days after Ford Motor said it had reached a deal offering major concessions to its employees, Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler, Jeep and Ram, announced on Saturday that it also had reached a tentative deal with members of the United Auto Workers. The union has been organizing a slowly expanding strike at American auto plants since Sept. 15, when the last contract expired, hoping to ramp up pressure on Detroit’s big three automakers. The union declared victory on Saturday after the deal was announced, calling it “a record contract.”
The deal, which is tentative and still needs to be ratified by a union council elected by Stellantis employees, calls for a 25 percent pay increase, and includes the possibility of cost-of-living increases to fight inflation.
“We truly believe that we got every penny possible out of this company,” UAW president Shawn Fain said in a video the union released. “We left nothing on the table.”
The contract also reportedly includes a requirement that Stellantis, which was created out of a merger of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, reopen a truck plant in Belvidere, Ill. and keep open another plant in Michigan. The terms of the agreement are similar to a tentative deal signed between the UAW and Ford last week, which also included a 25 percent pay increase, and large increases to the starting wages for factory workers.
The tentative agreements send workers who were striking at the two companies back to work; meanwhile, the heat is rising for General Motors, with the UAW calling for an expansion of the strike against that company. Last Monday, the UAW expanded its strike against Stellantis, shutting down production of the popular Jeep line of autos and trucks. At its peak, the UAW strike has taken 46,000 workers off the production line—about one-third of its total membership.
Toyota hikes wage of US factory workers after UAW labor deals
Source: Reuters
November 1, 2023 12:55 PM EDT
Nov 1 (Reuters) - Toyota Motor (7203.T) said on Wednesday it is raising the wages of nonunion U.S. factory workers just days after the United Auto Workers union won major pay and benefit hikes from the Detroit Three automakers.
Hourly manufacturing workers at top pay will receive a wage hike of about 9% effective on Jan. 1, the company confirmed. Other nonunion logistics and service parts employees are getting wage hikes.
The largest Japanese automaker also said it is cutting the amount of time needed for U.S. production workers to reach top pay to four years from eight years and increasing paid time off. The media and organizing project Labor Notes earlier reported the wage hikes and other details, citing a company document.
"We value our employees and their contributions, and we show it by offering robust compensation packages that we continually review to ensure that we remain competitive within the automotive industry,” Chris Reynolds, Toyota Motor North America's executive vice president, said in a statement. The pay of production Toyota workers in Kentucky at top scale will rise by $2.94 to $34.80 an hour.
San Francisco Bay Area Hospice Workers Vote to Unionize by Gabriel Thompson
November 3, 2023
Introduction:
(Capital & Main) Workers at a San Francisco Bay Area hospice facility voted on Nov. 3 to unionize, advancing a labor movement that is growing in the end-of-life care industry. Hospice East Bay employees voted 56-15 to join the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), becoming the sixth hospice workplace in California to unionize in the last year. Workers at the nonprofit agency, based in Pleasant Hill, California, had launched the organizing drive in response to what they characterized as an increased emphasis on productivity that threatened patient care and made their caseloads unmanageable. (Disclosure: NUHW is a financial supporters of Capital & Main.)
The newly organized group includes social workers, nurses, bereavement and spiritual care counselors, and music therapists.
“Management has made so many changes without staff input that have been really detrimental to patient care,” said Claire Eustace, a spiritual care counselor at Hospice East Bay since 2019, and who helped lead the union drive. “We think that with bargaining power we can help set the work environment and make it better for clinicians to do our jobs.”
Hospice East Bay management had opposed the union. In response to a request for comment, Bill Musick, Hospice East Bay’s Interim President, forwarded a message he sent to staff, which stated that once the vote was formally certified, negotiations for a first contract would begin, and also thanked staff for “continuing to focus on excellent patient care during this challenging time.”
As Capital & Main previously reported, hospice has undergone a dramatic transformation in recent years, with for-profit companies now making up more than 72% of the industry. A 2019 study found that for-profit hospices provided only one-third the number of physician or nurse practitioner visits as their nonprofit counterparts and just half the number of therapy visits. Notably, all of the recently unionized California hospice workplaces are nonprofits where workers say they are fighting back against the industry-wide trends of increasing caseloads, shrinking time with patients and short-staffing.
