If you are in a labor Union (thinking US but any similar kind of union works too) whose membership is significantly larger than there are leadership roles, do you have some kind of shop steward role?
Specifically: stewards that are representatives of a small group of workers like a shift or a department or a wing. Do they have some kind of voting/additional power beyond basic legal rights like weingarten rights? Even if it is often unfilled, does the role exist?
Edit: also tell me about ur stewards/show me ur handbooks plz♥
Did you know that you have the legally protected right to swear at your boss "in a moment of animal exuberance" if you are doing "concerted activity" like bargaining, picketing, or representing a member as a steward in a meeting? https://apps.nlrb.gov/link/document.aspx/09031d4583a42c17
Tien is head of policy & legal affairs at the #Vietnam General Confederation of Labor and director of the Institute for #Workers & Trade #Unions, the group said.
In the latest cause for concern, police in #Hanoi have arrested a #reformist labor ministry official, Nguyen Van Binh, 51, and charged him with disclosure of state secrets. Mr. Binh had advocated #LaborReform as director general of the legal department at the ministry, especially ratification of International Labor Organization Convention 87, which would guarantee #Vietnamese#workers the right to form independent trade #unions.
An officer at #XuanPhuoc prison declined to comment on his behavior but said that prisoners who are disciplined are put in #SolitaryConfinement for 10 days.
Phuoc, 62, is a former music lecturer at #DakLak#PedagogicalCollege. He was #arrested on Sept. 8, 2022, on charges of “anti-state propaganda.”
Sentenced to 8 yrs in prison & 4 yrs of probation at his trial in June 2023. After losing an appeal, he was sent to Xuan Phuoc prison in #PhuYen province.
Very amusing 4-minute video by Robert Reich about how Musk and Bezos want to dismantle government protection for workers.
Quote by RR:
"14 mei 2024
Nothing tells you how important unions are like corporations controlled by the richest men on earth suing to dismantle the government agency that protects the right to organize."
"In the past 2.5 years, more than 60 groups of student workers have filed petitions for representation elections...Notably, student workers have won every single election that has been held, and student workers have voted by overwhelming margins to unionize. On average, a whopping 91.3% of student workers have voted in favor of forming a union during their elections."
-Lynn Rhinehart and Margaret Poydock, Economic Policy Institute
Neil Bierbaum (a performance coach) on why the key answer to workers' travails is to revive the idea (practice) of the workplace union.
Like others (here perhaps more implicitly) he recognises that unions have historically presented (in JK Galbraith's term) a 'countervailing power' in the workplace & this has been (wilfully/purposefully) lost in the right-wing attack on unionisation.
Time to take a different (older) road back to unions!
The GMB is right - Amazon is out of control in its ongoing & extensive campaign to fight unionisation here & elsewhere.
When a firm (here Amazon or elsewhere such as in the gig economy), so fears unionisation, you know that whatever their claims around technology, really their business model is built on exploring & under-paying labour.
@ChrisMayLA6
this and the ads on shows are why I've not bought anything or paid them in 3-4 months; and tbh I don't feel like I've missed out on a damn thing.
Sadly, most other companies are no nicer to delivery drivers; but I'd say I've befriended a local contractor, who as an independent; works for Evri.
"We've had our greatest pay increases under Joe Biden.
"We've negotiated some of the biggest contracts with the most generous settlements in decades. Our members are moving forward economically. Biden has created so many jobs."
Today, like many other West Australian teachers, I'm not going to work this morning.
It's interesting that our industrial action is represented in the media as about pay. We're not striking over salary - we're striking because the system is broken.
My son has had no Phys Ed teacher all year. He's had a procession of relief teachers which, for a special needs child, is extremely distressing. He attends an inner city public school, but staffing shortages are statewide.
Speaking of special needs students, I'd like to look after my own without having to skip lunch to ensure their needs are met.
I'd like the Education Department to give me a personal device so I can do my job
(more efficiently). If I want a laptop, I have to lease one.
I'd like an acknowledgement of how teaching has recently become more difficult and demanding, especially during #COVID19, when we kept schools open and tried to keep students safe.
I enforced the mask mandate far more often than a rank-and-file police officer. I've probably been threatened and assaulted more times than many police officers too. And the statewide mobile phone ban? Guess who enforces that every single day.
So many of my colleagues have left teaching: re-trained or resigned due to burnout and stress. Who suffers? The students.
It's not about the pay. We're tired, and we need support. We're underfunded and under-resourced. We need to improve conditions for students. We need to fix the system.
@neenish_tart@FerdiMagellan I think higher pay would attract more people, I don’t know that it would retain them. We have the central, fundamental problem of the emotional workload of dealing with awful behaviour. How can we fix that? Either let us remove badly behaved students, or reduce class sizes to the point where we can manage it.
@neenish_tart@FerdiMagellan the main issue is that private schooling has concentrated the demographics with the most behavioural problems, the trauma, the violence, the poverty into one set of schools, while the students from the families without those issues (statistically, not deterministically) go to private schools. It normalises bad behaviour for those in the public system.
“Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., passed a historic vote to join the United Auto Workers on Friday, becoming the first Southern auto factory to approve a union with an election since the 1940s.”
TIL that in the 1930s Communist organizers and local farmers #unions in rural #Alabama hid their weekly meetings from #police by calling them “Bible meetings” and recorded meeting minutes by underling relevant words and phrases in a Bible #history#labor
Day 8 of Western University teaching assistants striking.
Students and professors alike have arrived late to exams; exams started late due to unqualified proctors mishandling exam setups; many completed exams remain ungraded.
Western has finally reached out to PSAC 610 to return to the bargaining table.
Google's illegal retaliation continues with a mass firing of over two dozen workers involved in the #NoTechForApartheid movement, including those with no direct involvements in yesterday's action. This is why we need #unions in tech, people.
Maybe @ufwupdates could flesh out the details on their account profile, so we have more information about what it is and who they are and what the account is for.
(No this is not a request to respond with details in a reply, it's a request to have those details on the account profile)
@inquiline So sad. Your post made me look her up. What a Wikipedia page!
“McAlevey contends that only workers have the power, through organization, to force significant change in the workplace and in society at large. Her model, what she calls whole-worker organizing, sees workers and the community they live in as a whole. The underlying theory of change requires a systematic, grassroots mass organization of workers.”
Malaysian and Philippine #unions discuss #LivingWage and decoupling of #productivity and wages, "It is evident that the global economic system is a failure that only favours few owners of #capital"
#REI continues in their #UnionBusting efforts, working swiftly to continue alienating customers and firing low-level managers for essentially no reason. They are doing a great job demonstrating why being a #CoOp doesn't guarantee good #labor policy. I hope they will wake up to the fact that they need to treat their employees better and stop interfering with their attempts to #unionize, and penalizing managers put into a difficult position.
