UE in the News

As the spread of Covid-19 forced millions of workplaces to close in March 2020, Cesar Moreira continued to report to a bottling plant in Wharton, N.J., where he works as a batching technician. During 12-hour shifts, Moreira mixes vats of powdered concentrate and sugar to churn out brand-name beverages like Gatorade and Arizona Iced Tea.

On March 21, 2020, Moreira and his coworkers walked off the job to demand adequate protections and contact tracing, part of a wave of safety-related stoppages in the first months of the pandemic.

But workers at the Wharton plant didn’t stop there. Their spontaneous protest quickly blossomed into a full-fledged union drive. In June, 15 months after the walkout, Refresco workers voted 114 – 101 to join the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE). Their 250-person bargaining unit is one of the biggest victories of blue-collar organizing during the pandemic.

Graduate student workers at the University of New Mexico are now recognized as regular employees, under the Public Employee Bargaining Act, paving the way for them to form a union.

“We're asking UNM to respect and uphold the recommendation to see graduate workers as employees and sit at the bargaining table this semester,” said graduate worker, Natalia Toscano.

Hundreds of students marched directly to the UNM president's office Friday, delivering a petition with more than 1,600 signatures. It demands the university start negotiations on higher wages, adequate health insurance coverage, and better working conditions.

Union leadership at Local 506 of the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America in Erie has drafted legislation that would provide financial incentives to railroads that replace older, inefficient locomotives with newer, low-emissions models.

Scott Slawson, president of UE 506 at Wabtec, said Tier 4 emissions locomotives that the company makes now generate dramatically less pollution than previous generations. Yet only a fraction of the locomotives in use meet the most recent emissions standard. Of the roughly 30,000 freight locomotives in service today, more than 7,500 of what the Environmental Protection Agency would call Tier 0 are still in service.

If enacted, the bill also has the potential to create thousands of jobs, including many in Erie, Slawson said.
 

“As [a research assistant]* and a [teaching assistant], you do work as a student, but you’re also an employee,” Boland said. “You want to make sure that your interests as an employee are looked after and not just your interests as a student, and so I think it’s important to have an union, to have a body that can represent your interests.”

Kenyon College student workers are on an unfair labor practice strike today. The strike comes during a campaign to organize the first US union representing all undergraduate workers on a campus. Jacobin spoke to several strikers and two campus maintenance workers supporting them about why they’re organizing — and how other students can follow their example.