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Meeting went alright with my coworker in production. I'm gonna contact UFCW and see about getting actual paperwork rolling while he puts out more feelers, but he seems to think we could at least reach the 30% needed to send in the election request or whatever to the DoL.
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Jul 27, 2022 17:59
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Organic Lube User posted:Meeting went alright with my coworker in production. I'm gonna contact UFCW and see about getting actual paperwork rolling while he puts out more feelers, but he seems to think we could at least reach the 30% needed to send in the election request or whatever to the DoL. this is gonna depend on the strategy you want to take, but usually the thinking is to secure a supermajority (70%+) before going public. this lets you inoculate your coworkers against the anti-union propaganda the company is certain to bombard them with. basically, you need to win a majority at some point, so you might as well do it early, before you file the petition, rather than trying to do it after the company has hired a union-busting law firm.
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Jul 27, 2022 18:37
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the UK "Labour" party having a normal one: https://twitter.com/guardiannews/status/1552336498367791109
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Jul 27, 2022 19:05
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kingcobweb posted:this is gonna depend on the strategy you want to take, but usually the thinking is to secure a supermajority (70%+) before going public. this lets you inoculate your coworkers against the anti-union propaganda the company is certain to bombard them with. basically, you need to win a majority at some point, so you might as well do it early, before you file the petition, rather than trying to do it after the company has hired a union-busting law firm.
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Jul 27, 2022 22:28
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Looks like my drive to union the hospital's boiler operator's will be foiled by the dumbass painters and carpenters. Divide and Conquer!
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Jul 27, 2022 22:58
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In Training posted:it definitely reeks of that US business union mentality that the union bureaucracy exists to soothe the employer/worker relationship rather than be the radical vehicle for class warfare that they originally were created for. It manifests across so many different sectors and orgs too, I see quite often on materials/websites etc.a pitch like "we support strikes but only as a last ditch effort, 95%+ of our contracts are settled without a strike, it's a nuclear option that should only be finely considered" etc. It gets me all boiled up when strikes are pitched as a tough sacrifice for members to undergo. It's the most uplifting and powerful action possible! It's a way to live out the theory that the employer needs us as much as we need them. People should be striking left and right and getting used to going on strike not just for their own contract, but for workplaces in the neighbor not even in your local or even affiliated with a nlrb union. Gee, I wonder why that is.
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Jul 27, 2022 23:14
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i took particular delight in calling out this anti-union rear end in a top hat by name. he's not shy about the fact that his entire job is to be a dick to the union, so i see no reason to play nice with him. https://twitter.com/VzwUnion/status/1554930790827298816
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Aug 5, 2022 01:02
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??? https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1556466211399110657 ??????? ??????????????????????
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Aug 8, 2022 07:10
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lmao
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Aug 8, 2022 13:20
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this might seem like boring inside baseball stuff but it’s really important to understand the choices organized labor as a group of organizations is making, and how those lead to successes or failures https://twitter.com/hamiltonnolan/status/1556681854987665413
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Aug 8, 2022 17:52
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kingcobweb posted:this might seem like boring inside baseball stuff but it’s really important to understand the choices organized labor as a group of organizations is making, and how those lead to successes or failures i think it's very interesting. i only read the ITT article for now, but i'll be reading the research report later. please post more inside baseball.
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Aug 8, 2022 18:07
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kingcobweb posted:this might seem like boring inside baseball stuff but it’s really important to understand the choices organized labor as a group of organizations is making, and how those lead to successes or failures No this is very cool and important.
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Aug 8, 2022 19:55
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kingcobweb posted:??? The workers kidnapped their labor and gave a list of ransom demands for returning it!
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Aug 8, 2022 20:07
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here's me https://twitter.com/MorePerfectUS/status/1557376826070245376 edit: full version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9P5c0Y2xKI kingcobweb has issued a correction as of 19:42 on Aug 10, 2022 |
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Aug 10, 2022 17:54
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I love labor solidarity
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Aug 12, 2022 21:15
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https://twitter.com/jamieson/status/1558188599539032072?cxt=HHwWkICzidKR5p8rAAAA This is great.
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Aug 13, 2022 02:30
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AnimeIsTrash posted:https://twitter.com/jamieson/status/1558188599539032072?cxt=HHwWkICzidKR5p8rAAAA hell yeah
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Aug 13, 2022 11:30
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what the hell is this lmao https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/1558207580807122944
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Aug 13, 2022 16:55
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More evidence that venture capitalists are dumb as gently caress lol
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Aug 13, 2022 19:23
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Tom Smykowski posted:More evidence that venture capitalists are dumb as gently caress lol not necessarily. for decades a lot of major unions in the US have been opposed class struggle politics and basically act and even sell themselves to workers and management as mediators between the 2 sides whos job is to help avoid or prevent strikes or disruptions in work. a lot of peoples support for unions is also idealistic, meaning they like the idea but dont have any practical experience with unions or concrete demands they see being won through organizing with a union. its part of what helps to explain why support for unions in the US has grown so high in the last few years but actual unionization rates are unchanged. so in practice plenty of existing unions already operate more or less this way but just with dues going to inflated salaries for union staffers and leadership. dunno that it will come to anything but makes sense that some capitalists are looking to turn unions into a way to generate profit. its also why existing labor leadership needs to adopt a more militant approach to organizing, like instead of just filing suits with the NLRB when employees are fired for organizing, organizing strikes to get them reinstated.
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Aug 14, 2022 05:01
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hi people who frequent this thread, I am thinking about how we occasionally get complaints that cspam has too many stickied threads and how it might be nice to have room at the top of the forum to stick fun new threads temporarily. Do you think being stickied is good for this thread? Should it stay at the top of the list or should it surf the waves of poster interest like the rest of the forum?
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Aug 15, 2022 16:09
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this thread, its visibility, and the accessibility to questions and information that visibility affords, seems to be one of the main goods that can come from cspam
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Aug 15, 2022 16:24
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vyelkin posted:hi people who frequent this thread, I am thinking about how we occasionally get complaints that cspam has too many stickied threads and how it might be nice to have room at the top of the forum to stick fun new threads temporarily. Do you think being stickied is good for this thread? Should it stay at the top of the list or should it surf the waves of poster interest like the rest of the forum? it was literally dead before being sticky’d by a kind mod I mean you could try to un-stick it but i do think it’s one of the few threads that has genuinely important real-life info so if it dies re-stick it
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Aug 15, 2022 16:52
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Do not unsticky plz.
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Aug 15, 2022 16:52
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vyelkin posted:hi people who frequent this thread, I am thinking about how we occasionally get complaints that cspam has too many stickied threads and how it might be nice to have room at the top of the forum to stick fun new threads temporarily. Do you think being stickied is good for this thread? Should it stay at the top of the list or should it surf the waves of poster interest like the rest of the forum? this thread should remain stickied and whatever “fun new threads” the mods had on the powerpoint during the committee meeting this post was composed in should surf the waves of poster interest
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Aug 15, 2022 17:00
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I love this thread and want this thread stickied This thread has news you can use
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Aug 15, 2022 17:04
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sbux is trying to pause all union elections lmao. https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/starbucks-alleges-labor-board-misconduct-union-elections-us-cafes-2022-08-15/
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Aug 15, 2022 17:24
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this is more or less what I expected on this thread's sticky status, but I wanted to ask instead of just assuming. I like this thread and I like it being stickied so it will stay where it is. Thanks!Zodium posted:this thread should remain stickied and whatever “fun new threads” the mods had on the powerpoint during the committee meeting this post was composed in should surf the waves of poster interest to be very clear, I don't mean mod threads and this wasn't some committee decision, I mean the way in some other SA subforums if somebody posts a good thread mods or IKs sometimes stick it for a week or two to give it some extra exposure
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Aug 15, 2022 17:33
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kingcobweb posted:sbux is trying to pause all union elections lmao. Barf.
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Aug 15, 2022 17:46
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kingcobweb posted:sbux is trying to pause all union elections lmao. starbucks big mad
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Aug 15, 2022 17:55
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kingcobweb posted:sbux is trying to pause all union elections lmao. they're running scared
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Aug 15, 2022 17:56
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This will definitely put the chill on some drives, and I wonder if we will see more locations respond with recognition strikes. Would be really healthy for the movement in general to return to that tactic, although I assume most unions would balk at the suggestion and just encourage membership to let their lawyers handle things
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Aug 15, 2022 17:58
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In Training posted:This will definitely put the chill on some drives, and I wonder if we will see more locations respond with recognition strikes. Would be really healthy for the movement in general to return to that tactic, although I assume most unions would balk at the suggestion and just encourage membership to let their lawyers handle things this is something i've thought a lot about, as someone that got fired from a big company (Verizon) where we've unionized five of about 1600 stores. the threat of a strike is that it causes meaningful cost to a company. i'm not sure the economics of what a meaningful cost would be to Starbucks. right now there's just under 9000 corporate Starbucks stores in the USA, and 220 have voted to unionize. there's about 33,000 stores worldwide. there is a number of stores that could strike simultaneously- and it's an important part of analysis to try to figure roughly what this number is- that would impose a meaningful loss of business to Starbucks. judging by how much money Starbucks will spend on union-busting lawyers, clearly they have a lot of resources to spend; judging by how they will close a dozen non-union stores for fake "safety" reasons just to give an excuse to close a few union stores, they are delighted to eat the loss of a dozen profitable stores just to stop a few union ones. i think the number of stores that would need to strike is way higher than the ~2.5% of US stores that are unionized right now. probably more along the lines of... 10% or so. and coordinating a national strike is a huge logistical challenge, especially when you consider the (extremely cool and good!) decentralized, worker-led, peer-to-peer nature of Starbucks stores unionizing. the economics are even more dire at Verizon than at Starbucks; Starbucks needs the income of stores for money, whereas Verizon's retail stores are a minor concern compared to the passive income they make. during the early pandemic, Verizon paid retail workers at nearly all stores to sit on their asses at home (it kept a small number of key stores open, including one of the now-unionized ones in Washington). my friend who was the lead organizer there asked a boss way higher up the chain how long Verizon could pay people to stay at home; he just laughed and said, "indefinitely." and i think he was telling the truth. i've read a shitload of labor history, most recently about the Flint sit-down strikes. one of the factors that made those strikes (which were, in part, over union recognition) so effective is that they targeted specific key plants to cripple the company. during the strike, GM could not make cars; they lost something like 99% of their production. Starbucks workers going with this store-by-store strategy makes it far, far easier to win union elections than trying to put every SBux worker in one enormous bargaining unit, but it means that their power is drastically reduced until they hit a huge number of organized stores. basically, even if all 220 stores went on indefinite strike right now, as huge of a news story as it would be, Starbucks would lose probably less than 1% of their total income and be under essentially no economic pressure to acknowledge the workers demands. i'd even argue that Starbucks would prefer these workers go on indefinite strike! as evidence, see their pattern of closing unionized stores and mass-firing pro-union workers. the underlying conditions of this stage of capitalism are so different than the last time we had a period of mass labor action that we need a fresh analysis that gives us strategies that will work in today's conditions. please don't mistake me for saying "strikes are bad" or other conservative/liberal/business union poo poo, just that we need to analyze what strikes win, and why, and make new plans based on that.
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Aug 15, 2022 18:48
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in local union news that's unfortunately flown under the radar, teachers at a childcare center called Mightykidz organized to send a letter of demands to their bosses. the company responded by outright firing eleven of them for being "unprofessional." two more walked off in solidarity. on tuesday, i went to their first press conference/picket, when they were still an indie union; yesterday, i went to a much bigger rally where they had affiliated with SEIU 925. https://twitter.com/SEIU925/status/1558943135140524032
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Aug 15, 2022 18:57
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kingcobweb posted:this is something i've thought a lot about, as someone that got fired from a big company (Verizon) where we've unionized five of about 1600 stores. all very true, the difficulty of trying to impose workers' demands on international monopolies with limitless resources....the tactics would have to be pretty different, and different from region to region based on how many stores are already unionized + community sentiment and other ongoing labor activity. i don't envy workers engaging in that struggle, but there's also wider sentiment growing in multiple ways. A thought: who delivers the raw materials to Starbucks locations? Teamster truck drivers? Solidarity strikes that disrupt the actual supply in a region could more clearly show the power of witholding labor, and cut across different industries in a pretty visceral way....
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Aug 15, 2022 19:01
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Aren't those franchises independently owned though? Can't you still threaten the profits of the owner of your local starbucks even if corporate won't really feel much from it?
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Aug 15, 2022 19:15
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kingcobweb posted:the underlying conditions of this stage of capitalism are so different than the last time we had a period of mass labor action that we need a fresh analysis that gives us strategies that will work in today's conditions. please don't mistake me for saying "strikes are bad" or other conservative/liberal/business union poo poo, just that we need to analyze what strikes win, and why, and make new plans based on that. really good post there's a lot of naivety around strikes, where strikes are treated not as an action and tactic that uses resources and organizing, but instead a symbolic win that requires nothing more than an act of will. While going on strike is performative, the authority that enables that performativity rests on a series of material conditions: strike funds, logistics on both sides, the organization and discipline of the union, counter-tactics, and so on. And of course they're a tactic not a goal in and of themselves, which means that the ability of striking to secure victories for workers is something that can be evaluated - and its not always going to come up on top. In the case of starbucks, its probably not a trivial mitigating factor that, at least where I live, most starbucks are within walking distance of at least one other starbucks. This has been criticized (from a capitalist perspective) as a form of cannibalization, but in the case of strikes it means that unless you can get at least like, regional blocks of starbucks to strike, starbucks as a company may not see any loss of revenue. It's almost certainly going to have to be case-by-case. In the case of stuff like chemicals or certain forms of logistics, shutting down the appropriate node with a few dozen people could cause dramatic impacts, but that's not going to be every work place and especially food service and retail don't really work like that.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:17
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I think most kinds of sympathy strikes like that are illegal
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Aug 15, 2022 19:17
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Aren't those franchises independently owned though? Can't you still threaten the profits of the owner of your local starbucks even if corporate won't really feel much from it? ~9k Starbucks stores are corporate-owned. those are the ones organizing with SBWU. a lot of the others have actually been union for a long time- Safeway, airports, hotels, etc.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:26
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In Training posted:all very true, the difficulty of trying to impose workers' demands on international monopolies with limitless resources....the tactics would have to be pretty different, and different from region to region based on how many stores are already unionized + community sentiment and other ongoing labor activity. Yeah, I wonder about this too. If there's a lot of vertical integration within a company, a union that organized at multiple levels within the company's supply chain might have more leverage - if you can get the people who roast the Starbucks beans to strike, or the truck drivers who deliver supplies to the stores, that likely puts more pressure on the bottom line than the frontline workers striking. (I would imagine a similar thing with, for instance, the techs who maintain and repair Verizon infrastructure compared to the store workers) But I think part of the changes to firm structure in late capitalism protects firms against this kind of thing, because so many of those additional upstream and downstream functions are done by separate contractors to atomize the workforce and dilute bargaining power. If Starbucks doesn't roast its own beans or drive its own trucks, then organizing those workers in the same union as the frontline workers becomes more of a challenge, and as far as I know current labour law (at least in the US) makes sympathy strikes illegal so a coffee roasters or truck drivers union would be less inclined to support a frontline worker strike as a result.
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Aug 15, 2022 19:27
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