Tag: Labor

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

On this day in 1911, 146 people—mostly young immigrant women and girls—lost their lives in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in NYC. Unable to escape due to deliberately locked exit doors, workers jumped to their death from windows or perished in the flames. The aftermath is documented below.
byu/dannydutch1 inUtterlyUniquePhotos

AbbyNem
Btw because a lot of people don’t know, a shirtwaist is just an old fashioned word for a shirt/ blouse.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire

To Draw Legs on a Snake – If it Aint Broke, Don’t Fix it

Boss said we MUST take lunch at 12:00. So we did

at my old job we used to have flexible lunch breaks at work. Could go anytime between 11:30-2:00, just made sure someone was covering. Worked fine.

New manager comes in, says “Everyone MUST take lunch at exactly 12:00. No exceptions.” Okay then.

12:00 hits. We all just… walk away. Phones ringing, customers mid-sentence—not our problem. Boss looked panicked, trying to handle it all.

By the time we got back, it was a complete mess. Next day? New rule: “Lunch between 11:30-2:00 is fine.”

Oh, so back to normal? Cool, boss.

Fubaryall
Some folks aren’t meant to manage.

lunaDolliey
Yep, dude tried to fix what wasn’t broken and broke it instead.

khaelic
Fun fact, there’s a Yiddish word, farpotshket, which means something broke because you tried to fix it.

DeletedByAuthor
It’s “Verschlimmbessern” in german

netelibata
Malay got a whole phrase: “tikus membaiki labu”. Translates to “rats fixing a pumpkin”

Neat_Tap_2274
In Taiwan, it’s this: 畫蛇添足 “To draw legs on a snake.”

reddit

King Soopers Strike

Some 10,000 grocery store workers across the greater Denver area went on strike Thursday, claiming unfair and illegal negotiating practices by King Soopers while their union has been negotiating a new contract with the store chain.

Striking workers at 77 King Soopers stores in Denver and its suburbs, plus those in nearby Boulder and Louisville, Colorado, urged customers not to cross picket lines that began taking shape before dawn.

“Stand together. Stay strong,” United Food and Commercial Workers International Union Local 7 President Kim Cordova wrote union members in a Monday letter announcing the strike.

UFCW Local 7 members voted by 96% last week to authorize the unfair labor practices strike.

Thousands of Denver-area King Soopers grocery store workers go on strike

Philadelphia Whole Foods – First Unionized Store

Workers at a Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia voted on Monday to become the first unionized store in Amazon’s grocery chain, opening a new front in the e-commerce giant’s efforts to fend off labor organizing in multiple segments of its business.

Employees at the sprawling Whole Foods store, in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood, voted 130-100 in favor of organizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the National Labor Relations Board said.

Whole Foods Workers in Philadelphia Vote to Form Chain’s First Union
The union win comes as Amazon, which owns the grocery chain, is also fighting labor organizing in its warehouse and delivery businesses.

Labor Day 2024 – Year in Review

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More Perfect Union
@MorePerfectUS

Today is Labor Day, and the working class has a lot to be excited about.
Unions are more popular than they’ve been in decades, and they’re winning victories too.
Let’s take a look at some of the most important developments over the last year.🧵

Last November, the United Auto Workers stood up in a historic strike against Stellantis, General Motors, and Ford and won contracts that will raise wages by at least 25% over the next four years.

The UAW made history again just 5 months later, unionizing the first automobile plant in the South since the 1940s and expanding the UAW’s reach beyond the Midwest. More than 70% of the workers at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga voted to unionize.

In May, 1,700 Disneyland character and parade workers won a new union — which they’re calling Magic United.

Then, 14,000 other Disneyland workers won a 31% raise after threatening to strike in July. It’s their biggest ever wage increase. Most workers will see a $6.10/hour bump, and minimum pay is rising to $24/hour this year.

Southwest Airlines flight attendants secured a contract that raises wages by 33% over the next 4 years.

Workers at Blue Bird—the country’s largest electric school bus maker—ratified their first union contract. They secured raises of up to 40%.

Starbucks Workers United announced in February that they secured a commitment from Starbucks to begin negotiations on a collective bargaining agreement for more than 9,000 workers at 380+ different locations.

The Writers Guild of America also secured their own victory in September last year, ratifying a contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after the second-longest strike in Hollywood history.

Not too long after that, the Screen Actors Guild secured their own contract as well, bringing an end to what was a rare multi-union struggle over workers’ rights in Hollywood in 2023.

Unions more broadly are very popular. A new poll from Gallup shows that 67% of Americans support labor unions and more than 75% say that unions get the goods for their members. A record high of 61% of Americans say that unions help the economy, as well.

Nationwide, more than 75% of all private sector organizing attempts from mid-2023 to mid-2024 resulted in union victories, according to the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Non-Compete Clauses and Overtime for Salaried Workers – Biden Administration Pro-Labor Moves

The Federal Trade Commission banned non-compete clauses in employment contracts, which have proliferated in recent years as a means to prevent (as Senator Bernie Sanders pointed out Tuesday) even low-wage workers like Starbucks baristas from seeking employment with a competitor. Non-competes have become a widely-deployed management trick to limit turnover by closing off the avenues to alternative employment opportunities.

It didn’t last. To the long list of items that went south during the 1970s—heavy industry, the dollar, Main Street, liberalism, literary culture—add the 40-hour work week. The Labor Department stopped increasing x—at first (ironically) because inflation was out of control, later because Ronald Reagan was president, and still later because the Clinton administration somehow never got around to righting this listing ship. Consequently, the proportion of salaried employees who qualified automatically for overtime pay fell to the point where the 40-hour week was no longer a middle-class benefit; it was a poverty benefit, and you had to be extremely poor to qualify. President George W. Bush finally updated overtime rules in 2003, raising x to an annual $23,660, but that was a poverty wage even two decades ago, and because of changes to the duties test, the net effect was that an estimated 6 million workers lost overtime coverage. By 2015, the proportion of salaried workers who qualified for overtime pay automatically was a mere eight percent.
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In the meantime, Biden has restored the 40-hour work week to the middle class for the first time since the 1970s. The median weekly wage in the United States is $1,139. On an annualized basis, that’s $59,228, or just slightly higher than Biden’s eligibility ceiling. That means workers paid very close to the median wage will qualify for time-and-a-half when they work more than 40 hours per week.

Biden Just Saved the 40-Hour Work Week

Tennessee Auto Workers Vote to Unionize

CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. (AP) — Employees at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, overwhelmingly voted to join the United Auto Workers union Friday in a historic first test of the UAW’s renewed effort to organize nonunion factories.

The union wound up getting 2,628 votes, or 73% of the ballots cast, compared with only 985 who voted no in an election run by the National Labor Relations Board.

Both sides have five business days to file objections to the election, the NLRB said. If there are none, the election will be certified and VW and the union must “begin bargaining in good faith.”

President Joe Biden, who backed the UAW and won its endorsement, said the union’s win follows major union gains across the country including actors, port workers, Teamsters members, writers and health care workers.

Tennessee Volkswagen employees overwhelmingly vote to join United Auto Workers union
AP

Part Time Labor in the U.S.

The shift to part-time workers means that focusing exclusively on hourly pay can be misleading. Walmart, for example, paid frontline hourly employees an average of $17.50 as of last month and recently announced plans to raise that to more than $18 an hour. Given that just a few years ago, progressives were animated by the Fight for $15 movement, these numbers can seem encouraging. The Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen wrote on social media last year that “Walmart’s probably a better employer at this point than most child care providers and a lot of the jobs in higher ed.”

The problem is that most Walmart employees don’t make $36,400, the annualized equivalent of $17.50 an hour at 40 hours a week. Last year, the median Walmart worker made 25 percent less than that, $27,326 — equivalent to an average of 30 hours a week. And that’s the median; many Walmart workers worked less than that.

Likewise, at Target, where pay starts at $15 an hour, the median employee makes not $31,200, the annualized full-time equivalent, but $25,993. The median employee of TJX (owner of such stores as TJ Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods) makes $13,884 a year; the median Kohl’s employee makes $12,819.

Those numbers, though low, are nevertheless higher than median pay at Starbucks, a company known for its generous benefits. To be eligible for those benefits, however, an employee must work at least 20 hours a week. At $15 an hour — the rate Starbucks said it was raising barista pay to in 2022 — 20 hours a week would amount to $15,600 a year. But in 2022 the median Starbucks worker made $12,254 a year, which is lower than the federal poverty level for a single person.

It’s Not Just Wages. Retailers Are Mistreating Workers in a More Insidious Way.
By Adelle Waldman

Theranos – Believe or Else

The resignations infuriated Elizabeth and Sunny. The following day, they summoned the staff for an all-hands meeting in the cafeteria. Copies of The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s famous novel about an Andalusian shepherd boy who finds his destiny by going on a journey to Egypt, had been placed on every chair. Still visibly angry, Elizabeth told the gathered employees that she was building a religion. If there were any among them who didn’t believe, they should leave. Sunny put it more bluntly: anyone not prepared to show complete devotion and unmitigated loyalty to the company should “get the fuck out.”

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup
John Carreyrou

Some Americans Talking About Their Jobs

SOFTWARE ENGINEER
It is hard to talk about this work. It is hard to do it, too. The best time to work is when it’s quiet, from ten at night till two in the morning. Because sometimes, well, [laughs] almost always, it’s a frustrating job. You know, it’s easy to use finished product, like computer games or Microsoft products, but the process to completing software is very frustrating. It is sometimes even pretty easy to write a program, but to make it so the users who will use the program cannot do anything stupid or cause some problems you have to imagine every single thing the user could do on keyboard. That part takes almost all of time. And it is a very boring time.

GAS STATION ATTENDANT
Out where this place is, it’s just all desert, and there’s a lot of weird people that live out around here. They’re kind of scary. They actually scare me more than the freeway people do because the main reason anybody’d live all the way out here is because of drug problems and problems with the government. Most of them are like that. Not all of them—there’s nice ones, but there’s a lot of weirdos that do weird things, they drive really awful-looking cars. White trucks with blue doors. No teeth. I try not to get involved with them. I’m polite. I smile, take their money, bag what they’re buying, but that’s it. I’m scared so I try not to get personal. That’s probably the worst part about the job. The drive is no fun, but the scary people, they’re the worst.

PERSONAL INJURY TRIAL LAWYER
And by the way, I have never, and I mean this, never met an honest man. I have had rabbis lie. I have had priests lie. I have had witnesses of every color and denomination and persuasion lie. Clients come to me and tell me that they were caused to have an accident and they were injured in a certain way. But the truth is that it usually didn’t happen exactly the way they say it happened. The client may be fundamentally and inherently a good and honest person, but when it comes to their case their theory is, well, it’s a goddamn insurance company, and they’ve got more money than God, and it isn’t right, and it isn’t fair. And so it’s okay if, on the margins, on the fringes, they improve or enhance their story a little bit.

So we have to begin with a premise that it’s not a question of whether someone’s honest, it’s a question of the degree. And lawyers are the most dishonest people of all. A lawyer will prepare his witness in such a way that he, the lawyer, thinks he’s being honest, but in truth and in all candor, he’s really not. Because he’s kind of steering or directing the witness in a certain direction—the direction that says the other party is at fault. And that’s part of our business. A good lawyer has to approach every accident, every case, with the mindset that his client is not at fault. The other party is at fault. And so a good lawyer is often dishonest and so is everyone else.

TEMP
I’m not an actor. I’m not into that. I’m a temp, a forty-year-old temp. Let’s leave it at that, okay? I mean, I know there’s stigma attached to being a forty-year-old temp. At forty, people assume you should have achieved something. And they don’t see this as an achievement. But I don’t care. I’m happy doing this. I’ve never fit in. The more I see what fitting in is, the less I want to. It’s plots that you already know the ending to. Why do you want to live out a story and know that you’re gonna do this or do that, you know? A steady job is a plot. I will stay here and I will do this, then I’ll retire, then I’ll move to Florida. Then I’ll die, you know? You spend your days at work dreaming of the future, you spend your days at work getting ready to get off of work. Me, I don’t know if I’ll make it to my job tomorrow. So it’s the moment, living in the moment.

Like last year, I took a vacation. I’d been at this place a couple of months and it was getting old. I called up and said, “I’m going on a vacation.” And they’re like, “Well, we don’t know if we’ll have a job for you when you get back.” I said, “I know you don’t know if you’ll have a job for me when I get back ’cause I’m not even sure when I’m coming back.” So I went on this bike trip; I took a bunch of time. I love to travel and see things. Two-week vacations just don’t do it for me.

Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
NOTE – Highly recommended book

Kaiser Permanente Strike

75,000 Kaiser Permanente workers walk off the job. It’s the largest health care worker strike in US history
CNN
On Wednesday, more than 75,000 unionized employees of Kaiser Permanente, one of the nation’s largest not-for-profit health providers, walked off the job, marking the largest health care worker strike in US history.

The striking employees, who work across California, Colorado, Washington, Virginia, Oregon and Washington, DC, are represented by a coalition of unions that comprise 40% of Kaiser Permanente’s total staff. The vast majority of the striking workers are in West Coast states. The strike began at 6 am local time, and will run through Saturday morning.

Striking Workers – Summer 2023

This year, workers across industries in the United States have increasingly walked off the job or threatened to do so. In July, tens of thousands of actors joined screenwriters on the picket line, bringing Hollywood to a halt. Meanwhile, a summertime strike of more than 300,000 United Parcel Service workers seemed imminent before a deal was reached last month.

Now, another large-scale strike looms. The United Auto Workers union has voted to authorize a walkout of about 150,000 members at General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis if negotiations fail before contracts expire on Sept. 14.

If the auto workers go on strike, the number of workers who have walked off the job at some point over the course of this year will top 450,000, the highest level since 2018, another notable year for work stoppages.

A Summer of Strikes
Work stoppages in the United States this year could reach heights rarely seen in recent decades.