UE in the News

Retired UE International Director Robin Alexander and Benedicto Martinez, longtime leader of Mexico’s Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT), were the featured guests on radio station KKFI’s “Heartland Labor Forum” program on May 5. They were there to discuss Alexander’s new book, International Solidarity in Action, published in English as an e-book earlier this year by UE and forthcoming later this year in Spanish, in both print and electronic versions.

International Solidarity in Action tells the story of UE’s relationship with the FAT, an independent union federation that has challenged Mexico’s corrupt system of labor relations since its founding in the 1960s.

Listen to Alexander and Martinez on Heartland Labor Forum here. The e-book International Solidarity in Action can be downloaded at InternationalSolidarityInAction.org.

“We hope more people will see us unified, standing in solidarity,” said Keshia Barnette, a member of Durham City Workers Union. “We are all essential. We are all important. We all matter to the democracy of this country.”

Barnette has been a Durham city worker for 23 years. She currently works on community development and affordable housing.

“We want to make sure we can afford to live in the city for which we work,” Barnette said. “Currently the wages aren’t to the levels where you can find affordable housing in Durham. That’s a problem.”

Graduate workers at Indiana University went on strike this morning in response to the administration’s continued refusal to recognize their union, the Indiana Graduate Workers Coalition–United Electrical Workers (IGWC-UE). Recognition strikes are uncommon in recent years and, taking place as this one does in a state where public sector workers have few rights (though the same could be said of all Indiana workers, living as they do in a right-to-work state), it’s a show of strength intended to demonstrate that the union has not only majority support among the school’s estimated 2,500 graduate workers but majority participation in a high-stakes collective action.

Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Cole Nelson, an IGWC-UE member and first-year PhD student in IU’s media studies school, about what led to today’s strike, the demands driving the organizing, and where the action fits into a broader wave of labor organizing in higher education.

The second union contract took effect Wednesday at the Willy Street Co-op, bringing minimum starting pay to $15 an hour and raising average wages by 20% over the two-year term.

“We're actually able to be competitive in the job market now,” said David Droster, chief steward of United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) Local 1186, which represents roughly 300 nonmanagerial Co-op workers at the three Madison stores and central kitchen. The workers overwhelmingly voted in a union in September 2019, just months before the COVID-19 pandemic would earn grocery workers across the country the moniker of “essential workers.”

Paramveer Singh, a graduate assistant in the Environmental Department at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces ... said his fellow grad workers can no longer afford [the lack of tuition coverage]. They were already crunched financially, Singh said, but now they’re facing rising rents, inflation and fuel prices that are “adding to the pain we endure.”

“Now is the time for real action,” Singh said.

Singh was addressing the NMSU Board of Regents on Monday afternoon. Earlier, outside the meeting chamber, the grad workers union rallied along with faculty, undergraduate students, alumni and community supporters.

Graduate students delivered a petition signed by over 1,100 supporters to the regents, along with a series of public comments at the meeting.

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury is supporting a union of University of New Mexico graduate student workers in its demand that the university initiate collective bargaining talks with the organization.

In a statement read by a spokesperson at the conference, the New Mexico Democrat wrote, “I’m proud to stand in solidarity with UNM graduate workers in their work to build a brighter future for the entire UNM community, and I look forward to a fair bargaining process that recognizes the vital contributions of graduate workers to teaching and research at New Mexico’s flagship university.”