Who benefits from union bashing?

Jane Carter, of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employee (AFSCME), addressed the 2013 UNISON conference in Liverpool about the relentless and well funded attacks on unions in the USA. Here she is interviewed by Thom Hartmann on The Big Picture and discusses the forces behind the anti union psychosis in many US states. Jane highlights the continued existence of a union wage premium despite decades of membership decline.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhJ1BrjnPNU&feature=youtu.be

Union strength lies within the membership

An anti-union ruling by the US Supreme Court on the status of home care workers has led to much reflection on the future of public service unions. Former SEIU organiser Jane McAlevey argues that US unions must ‘rebuild from the inside out’, drawing on the massively untapped resource of the union membership base and fostering a ‘high participation’ model in bargaining and organising work:
http://www.thenation.com/article/180478/after-harris-v-quinn-state-our-unions#mcalevey

US healthcare: fraud, over-priced and over here?

The Economist’s revelation that America lost up to $272 billion in 2011 to medical fraud and abuse comes on top of research showing just how inefficient the US system is, while it looks for opportunities to export its greed for profits to the NHS.
    $272 billion is “10% of medical spending and a whopping 1.7% of GDP—as if robbers had made off with the entire output of Tennessee or nearly twice the budget of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS)”, says the Economist.

US Union Organising Drive stalls at Volkswagen Plant

Much glee is in evidence on the Republican right over the ballot result on union recognition in the VW plant in Tennessee. There the United Auto Workers Union (UAW) had look set to win a ballot of the workforce in favour of a recognised trade union, alongside a European style works council. After a ferocious campaign by local Republican politicians the workers voted by a close majority not to have a union, the UAW losing the vote by 626 votes for and 712 against. This was to be a show piece battle for how the UAW was going to unionise car plants across the traditional redneck deep south, but the result has led to serious questions about the organising campaign US style.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/volkswagen-workers-reject-uaw-in-tenn-union-looks-for-plan-b-to-enter-south/2014/02/15/c35c018c-967c-11e3-9616-d367fa6ea99b_story.html

The future of unionised work is in our own hands

Union activists all over the world should read this account of the life of Shonda Roberts who works for KFC in San Jose, California. She lives in the richest economy in the world, the richest economy actually in the history of the world. This is an economy that sends armies and navies all over the world, that still maintains thousands of stock piled nuclear weapons, that generates trillions of dollars in investment and profit, that can boycott Cuba and subsidise Israel. This economy can maintain a differential between lowest paid workers wages and CEO of an average of 1 dollar to 475 dollars. The US economy can cause bust or boom across Europe. It can plunge the world in depression when its sub prime market collapses.

Is This What Europeans Want?

The New York Times asks whether the Europeans want the US deregulation economy, with tiny unions and no legal minimums of any note. It is a good question. If we can re phrase it - is it what the governments and corporate bosses want and what can the unions do about it? Certainly it is what our economic masters want.

US Government shutdown puts workers in fear of the breadline

This week’s US Congress budget blocking tactics by right wing Republicans to defund the Affordable Care Act has led to a partial government shutdown and over 800,000 public service workers being laid off without pay. Karina Vazquez, a SEIU member cleans government offices at the IRS building in Washington, D.C and says:
    "I'm worried because without work how am I going to look after my family? Every paycheck I get goes to paying bills, cards or food. The worst thing that I fear could happen to me is not being able to pay for food and rent. If the Republicans want to play games to stop the healthcare law, it's wrong for them to affect me and my family with them. I am asking them to stop"
http://www.seiu.org/2013/10/shutdown-story-how-am-i-going-to-look-after-my-fam.php#more

Ideology - an essential component of union growth strategies

This year we had the welcome news that unions are growing again in the UK. Despite having been subject to austerity, some of the most draconian anti trade union laws in the world, privatisation and decreasing wage levels, unions are stirring.
  Yet in the closed world of union organising the most advocated model of such campaigns is the US inspired version, promoted by a number of unions and even provoking a 2005 split in the AFL/CIO resulting in the `Change to Win` alliance led by the SEIU. The split is healing and the AFL/CIO remains the main union coalition in the US.

50 years on from the March on Washington for Jobs & Freedom

The SEIU has produced a video to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington - best known for the "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr - which highlights the ongoing fight for social justice in the USA:
http://www.seiu.org/2013/08/the-march-on-washington-for-jobs-freedom-realizing.php

Reviving the S word?

In recent decades the tide of opinion has been that strikes are bad for unions. That strikes bring them bad publicity, that it shows unions in a masculine aggressive light and that the majority of union members, never mind workers, are very much against strikes. It has also been the position of many a veteran trade union activist or official that we must avoid strikes, that militancy loses us power and members in the long run. In times of recession and austerity our members don`t want to strike because of the fear of losing jobs and then in good times members don`t want to strike because generally things are ok.

Fighting back at Walmart

The small rise in membership in 2012 gave some cheer to the British trade union movement although the 2.6m trade unionists in the private sector represent only 14.4% of the workforce. The situation is much worse in the USA where overall private sector density levels have fallen to below 7%. However workers are fighting back and Red Pepper reports on the impressive Organisation United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) campaign which is building collective worker organisation in an environment where the odds are stacked against unionisation:
http://www.redpepper.org.uk/winning-at-walmart/

Put Organising First!

Kate Bronfenbrenner of Cornell University reviews the prospects for US unions following the Presidential election and calls for labour movement unity in the struggle against the corporate right: 'Labor has very powerful enemies, but never before has it had so many allies who are equally angry at those same enemies.
  What the movement has to do is commit the financial and staff resources to recruit, train and coordinate organizers, and to run creative, multifaceted, strategic, comprehensive and (where necessary) global campaigns. This includes ongoing strategic corporate research.
  And it requires the involvement of labor and community allies, rank-and-file members on the organizing committees, and existing union members serving as volunteer organizers at every level of the campaign'
http://www.thenation.com/article/172919/unions-put-organizing-first

The State of the Unions in the United States

The Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, a progressive global network linked to Germany's Left Party, has published a report on how the US trade union movement has come to terms with neo-liberalism, union organising strategies as well as internal divisions including the split in the national trade union centre. Sean Sweeney, Director of the Global Labor Institute at Cornell University, analyses these recent historic development as well as the current state of US trade unions:
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/turmoil-and-transition-the-recent-history-and-future-prospects-for-the-u-s-trade-union-movement/
http://www.rosalux-nyc.org/wp-content/files_mf/sweeney_stateoftheunions.pdf

Walmart organising campaigns creating a buzz in the US

Small but highly publicized strikes by Walmart retail and warehouse workers last autumn 'set the labor movement abuzz and gained new respect for organizing methods once regarded sceptically' reports Labor Notes. US trade unions are deploying new, flexible tactics including the use of 'open source organising' to create economic leverage with hostile employers:
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/01/walmart-and-fast-food-unions-scaling-strike-first-strategy

Tax the Rich: An Animated Fairy Tale

An economics primer written and directed by Fred Glass for the California Federation of Teachers. An eight minute video about how we arrived at this moment of poorly funded public services and widening economic inequality. Things go downhill in a happy and prosperous land after the rich decide they don't want to pay taxes anymore. They tell the people that there is no alternative, but the people aren't so sure. This land bears a startling resemblance to our land. © 2012 California Federation of Teachers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ZsXrzF8Cc&feature=player_embedded

Unions & Union Rights under fierce attack in USA

Amongst the news reports on Jimmy Saville's serial sex crimes, the Royal rush to hospital with morning sickness and the continued denigration of the poor, you may have noticed that union members in Michigan USA were demonstrating over something called the `Right To Work` Bill (RTW). Far from being a progressive statute to increase employment rights and terms it is designed to finally break trade unions:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-20682190

SEIU hails Obama victory

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry has hailed the re-election of Barack Obama as a 'victory for working people, whose voices were heard despite some of the most coordinated and insidious obstacles to their participation in our democracy in history. When the right wing flooded our electoral process with obscene amounts of money, working people mobilized to energise voters around a better vision for America. When extremist state legislators tried to suppress the votes of broad swathes of Americans, working people responded by standing up for their constitutional right to cast their votes.' Over 100,000 SEIU members took part in canvassing for Obama - making a decisive intervention in swing states behind a union agenda of 'creating good jobs now, requiring the rich and corporations to pay their fair share, to invest in healthcare, education and other vital services and by creating a pathway to citizenship for immigrants'
http://www.seiu.org/2012/11/tonight-is-a-victory-for-working-people-everywhere.php

Obama & Romney – Differences that matter

Given that political elites and the main political parties in the US (and across the western world) accept the neoliberal paradigm of markets, deregulation, militarism and the supremacy of the private sector, it is easy to be cynical about the upcoming US Presidential election. Yet a CBS analysis of the different attitudes to organised labour and workers’ rights of candidates Obama and Romney confirms that no matter how small the differences between them in the general scheme of things, they matter a lot to unions struggling to survive in imperialism’s heartland:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505245_162-57528545/why-it-matters-labor/?tag=mncol;lst;1

How To Organise Non Union Workers, A Lesson From Historic Strike in Texas

The Texas Observer and SEIU report on a tremendous success for Janitors in Houston, Texas, a State where the legal and free market environment is amongst the toughest even in the USA.
http://www.texasobserver.org/authors/christomlinson/item/18633-why-the-houston-janitor-strike-was-historic

After Wisconsin - US public service unions under siege in Republican states

Americans for Tax Reform is the powerful right wing lobby upon which the UK’s Taxpayers’ Alliance is modelled. Its President Grover Norquist uses as a platform on the Guardian website to map out the coming republican offensive against public service unions and the Democratic Party, following the failure to unseat anti-union Republican Governor Scott Walker in Tuesday’s recall election: