Tom Smykowski posted:

What's up with all the poo poo flying around about different campuses being treated differently?

In Training posted:

what's the mood after the ratification vote been like?

Shear Modulus posted:

i dunno, im at my parents' house.

i assume the people who liked the contract are super happy and the people who didnt are mega pissed off.

Animal-Mother posted:

Well, that's it for the UC strike.

Cyrano4747 posted:

What happened? By the smilie I'm guessing nothing good?

Shear Modulus posted:

The ratification vote for grad students ended last night.

https://twitter.com/uaw2865/status/1606467076486336512

The contracts are big improvements on the status quo but imperfect.

There are sharply opposing views on how much longer the strike could have held out. The differing vote margins for the TAs and researchers kind of reflect this. From where I am in a big STEM department, participation had fallen off a cliff and most people wanted to ratify. I heard a lot that in humanities departments where most grad students are teaching employees, participation was still strong and most people wanted to hold out.

e: WSWSis pushing a conspiracy theory that the bargaining team conspired with UAW international sold everybody out and cut a deal with the UC behind all the workers' backs to ram through a lovely contract. It's of course impossible to prove that Ray Curry wasn't secretly meeting with UC management and telling them to gently caress over the workers, but I think it's mostly something people are telling themselves to avoid acknowledging that the strike was weak to begin with and further weakening on its own.

Animal-Mother posted:

IMHO, the strike mostly appeared to be weakening because it's the holidays and people are busy with their families. If they held out past this, I think we would've seen a resurgence. But that's just my conjecture. Only thing I know for certain is that there's a pretty sharp class divide between the yes and no votes. The people who can afford to vote yes mostly did.

MegaZeroX posted:

From what I saw, the conditions for the divide was based on:

1) Did the bargaining team from your campus approve of the deal? If not, then you were much more likely to reject

2) Are you a TA instead of an RA? If so, then you were more likely to reject.

3) Is the cost of living low in your area? If so, you were more likely to reject.

1 is self-explanatory, 2 being a combination that striking as an RA may gently caress up your graduation time by not getting your lab-work done, and that your striking is having more obvious impacts as a TA. 3 may be the opposite of one would expect, but I'd rationalize it with saying that those there could more easily afford 1 or 2 more semesters of striking.

Jinnigan posted:

random question just crossed my mind for no reason: are the UPS retail clerks union?

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

my experience is that you should never omit important information, especially if it would upset people if they learned you chose to omit it, in any communication.

brevity is important, but not at the sacrifice of keeping people informed

structure your newsletter in such a way (with bold text, number, whatever) so that it can be easily skimmed to see what each section is about.

Shear Modulus posted:

lol the democrats selling off their entire voter database to private equity is the most democrat thing

Lib and let die posted:

quote:

EveryAction/NGP VAN Union Statement on Layoffs

Last Thursday, Bonterra – the parent company of NGP VAN, EveryAction, and Salsa Labs – laid off 10 percent of its workforce without warning. Employees received an email at 11:02 a.m. announcing the layoffs. Within minutes, 140 of our colleagues were locked out of their workstations-some were even locked out during client meetings. This so-called “strategic restructuring” terminated 38 union members in departments such as Client Services, Data Services, Engineering, and Sales. The way that Bonterra chose to conduct these layoffs reflects a total disregard for their employees and their clients.

In 2021, when Apax Partners, a private equity firm based overseas, combined four companies to create Bonterra, many were concerned about putting the primary software of the Democratic Party and many progressive organizations in the hands of private capital. Bonterra’s recent actions should reignite those fears. With these layoffs, our team has lost decades of institutional knowledge needed to continue serving our nonprofit, political, and union clients and adequately prepare for the 2024 election cycle. Despite executive management’s assurances, it is clear that the remaining employees will have no choice but to shoulder the work of those who were laid off. The level of disruption this creates, upending focus on projects in order to triage the current situation, cannot be overstated and will take months to overcome.

In a series of departmental meetings and Q&As, Bonterra executives were pressed on why our colleagues were laid off so abruptly. Their answers were vague and inconsistent, including “aligning the company to a shared vision” and “eliminating redundancy” across the four merged companies; however, the differences between Bonterra’s products as well as the unique experience and skills of those laid off proves that this is simply untrue. Some cited cost as one of the motivating factors. Prior to the acquisition, the entire executive team at NGP VAN/ EveryAction took pay cuts to ensure employees’ financial security during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a meeting this week, our new CEO adamantly denied that these layoffs were cost-driven and insisted they were merely “strategic restructuring.” Why does “strategic restructuring” have to result in 140 people losing their jobs?

While this news is distressing for our clients, particularly the Democratic Party, who rely on our tools, we must not forget those who were directly impacted. Being laid off with no notice is a disrespectful and dehumanizing experience that has left many of our colleagues in mental, emotional, and financial distress. Some employees received notice that their jobs no longer existed while they were on parental leave, and others learned about their job loss while on vacation outside of the country. Two people, including one of the first ever hires at one of Bonterra’s legacy companies, worked for the company for nearly 20 years before Bonterra unceremoniously locked them out of their accounts on Thursday morning.

We signed up to do this work for a reason – we want to make and support tech that strengthens the progressive movement and the many nonprofits that our communities rely on. With these layoffs, it is clearer than ever that those who were concerned about our acquisition by private capital, which aims to maximize profits at all costs, were right to be. We know this will not be the last time Apax Partners’ interests conflict with ours. We remain committed to keeping Bonterra accountable to its workers, clients, and the progressive movement. Thanks to our hard-won union contract, Bonterra is required to recall workers who were laid off if positions they are suited for open up in the future. We are also able to fight back against the inevitable push for us to perform the work of several employees at once. Worker solidarity is the only solution to corporate greed. You can’t trust your employer - unionize your workplace!

We are dedicated to helping our former colleagues find suitable work where they are valued and respected. Please reach out if you have any leads.

quote:

Strike training consists of a training period of around an hour, and after that begins a movie called Insanely poo poo Idea (duration c. 1:45)

Lib and let die posted:

We were just told by our locals that we aren't allowed to publish this.

In Training posted:

By what reasoning??

quote:

We heard back from the Locals and they aren’t on board with us publishing the statement.
They explained that they had concerns about the consequences that could come from releasing the statement. As it’s written now, this is something that would cause serious issues with a lot of existing clients, and while Mark and the ELT deserve to be made uncomfortable, current and prospective clients potentially boycotting our tools or switching to competitors would not help us.
It’s clear that people worked very hard on this statement, and it absolutely does catalog our issues with the company. Moving forward, if folks are going to step up and work on communications, let’s get clear on the objective (who is this for, what is our goal, what are our asks of people, and how will this accomplish that). Apologies to the people who stepped up and put a lot of effort here without us all agreeing on a clear objective—your energy and time are valuable and haven’t gone unnoticed.
What can we do next? A lot—and we should channel that effort internally. The locals acknowledged that the company has burned through a lot of our good will, and now one of the biggest ways we can push back is through strong contract enforcement. We know we need to all keep our eyes open for contract violations, but what does that look like? Could we use next Thursday’s Mobilization Committee meeting for a “Know Your Contract” training where we’ll review what articles we think they’re most likely to violate and where they’ll violate them?

Lib and let die posted:

We were told:

I may or may not have accused CWA leadership of being compromised after reading this.

quote:

In his classic 1958 essay, “The Capitalism of the Proletariat: A Theory of American Trade-Unionism,” Bell tried to understand a paradox: labor’s rhetoric included many angry speeches excoriating the boss, yet leaders of even militant unions frequently saw themselves as supporters of capitalism.

How to make sense of this? Bell argued we should “see American trade-unionism as existing in two contexts, as a social movement and as an economic force (market unionism).” The social movement is, in Bell’s telling, ideological. It is brought to workers by intellectuals who call upon them to fulfill their historical role. In short, the social movement is engaged in an ongoing struggle to overthrow capitalism. Market unionism, by contrast, is a narrow economic framework, “a delimiting of role and function, imposed by the realities of the specific industrial environment in which the union operates.”

Market unionism, simultaneous with the union social movement, will go along with capital’s desire to expand, regardless of whether that effort is broadly humane or not. Market unionism needs monopoly-dominated industries that are fully organized to eliminate wages from competition. As Bell said, a union “necessarily becomes an ally of ‘its’ industry.” So if the cigarette or the bomb or the prison factory promises another five thousand union jobs — or instead wishes to trade mechanization for higher wages for the remaining workers — the union delays the social movement and affirms market unionism.

In Training posted:

that sucks, especially the coddling of your employer. how could the blowback be worse anyway? people have already lost jobs, more will lose their jobs no matter what you do! and not criticizing employer now just means you probably alienate/lose more members who will view the union (correctly) as cowardly and now you're guaranteed a weaker bargaining position anyway.

In Training posted:

daniel bell is talking in a context of anti-imperalism mainly here, but this kind of applies to the staff that run voting databases bc of their relation to domestic voting rights. business unionism will protect their membership in the short-term regardless of the long-term social consequences of doing so

ekuNNN posted:

https://twitter.com/moreperfectus/status/1590892618556141571

MrYenko posted:

“this is the second castle to unionize” made me laugh hard enough that I had to explain it to my union treasurer who is sitting in this office with me.

3D Megadoodoo posted:

"Sorry, capitalist, the exploitable workforce is in another castle."

3D Megadoodoo posted:

"Sorry, capitalist, the exploitable workforce is in another castle."

3D Megadoodoo posted:

"Sorry, capitalist, the exploitable workforce is in another castle."