Labor News

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka was among the thousands rallying in New York Monday in support of nearly two thousand electrical workers on strike against telecommunications giant Charter Communications since March of this year.  Dozens of other unions and community groups joined International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3 Monday afternoon for a massive march and rally.  Negotiations stalled in March over the company’s refusal to make any offers unless the workers give up their union pension and health care plans.  

Home health care workers have filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Illinois, demanding the administration of Republican Governor Bruce Rauner pay them a 48 cent per hour raise that state legislators included in the state budget.  These homecare providers, primarily women of color, care for people with disabilities for an average hourly wage of 13 dollars an hour, mostly for jobs far less than forty hours a week.

SEIU Healthcare Illinois Communications Director James Muhammad:

In one of the largest back-pay cases in the state’s history, 150 car rental workers at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in Washington won nearly two million dollars last week in back-pay and interest from Hertz and Thrifty rental agencies after the companies failed pay workers the minimum wage.  The small city of SeaTac, where the airport is located, became the first in the nation to raise the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour in 2013 after voters approved the measure by a razor thin margin.

At their national convention Saturday in Toledo, Ohio, the AFL-CIO Farm Labor Organizing Committee celebrated its fiftieth year by launching a boycott of Reynold’s Vuse E-Cigarettes.  FLOC Organizer Catherine Crowe says their membership has been targeting Reynolds American and other tobacco companies for over a decade:

Collective worker action has led to a victory for nonunionized workers at a Target store in Christianburg, Virginia.  After years of trying to have General Manager Daniel Butler removed through official channels for sexual harassment and racist remarks, a small group of workers mounted a five day strike at the end of August, presenting testimony to the corporation and the public to hold him accountable.  On Friday, they received word that Butler has been fired.

One Wisconsin Now says the $3 billion state tax subsidy Republicans want to give to Foxconn is the largest ever state subsidy to a foreign corporation. Wisconsin’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau says even if the rosiest of projections come true it will take Wisconsin 25 years just to break even on the deal subsidizing Foxconn’s start-up in Wisconsin.