UE NEWS Updates

When an arrogant management demanded attendance-policy changes that would make it easy to fire half of their co-workers, the UE Local 155 negotiating committee at Generation Lighting held firm. Their new three-year contract, ratified in November, instead removes some of the most onerous aspects of the previous attendance policy, and resets all employees’ attendance-policy “points” to zero.

At a mid-December meeting of unions from around North America held in Los Angeles, representatives of independent Mexican unions shared their expectations for working people under the government of the newly elected Mexican President, Andres Manuel Lopes Obrador (known as AMLO). This public event drew many Mexican-American members of the LA community.

UE Local 506 was instrumental in the development of a new initiative, launched this week, to bring jobs to Erie, PA. The Choose Erie website features Local 506 prominently. In contrast to many "economic development" programs which seek to attract companies by promising low wages, union-free environments, or lax regulation, Choose Erie highlights the skilled workforce and the quality of life in this working-class city, with affordable housing, opportunities for outdoor recreation, and a proud manufacturing history.

In Can the Working Class Change the World? economist and labor educator Michael Yates makes the case that the working class — and only the working class — can indeed overcome economic inequality, eliminate racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination, and meet the challenge of environmental degradation and climate change. Historian Erik Loomis’s A History of America in Ten Strikes is an original and engaging way to re-learn U.S. history through the lens of working-class struggle.