UE NEWS Updates

Sister Oniboni wrote this poem for the members of UE Local 610 as they were fighting for a fair contract and against the threatened closure of their historic Wilmerding plant, and read it at a rally in Wilmerding on April 30, 2022.

This company was built with the blood and sweat and tears
of UE brothers and sisters throughout the years.

Earlier this week, New Mexico’s state labor board voted to certify UE Local 1498 as the union for over 900 graduate employees at New Mexico State University. The vote followed a March 17 “card count” conducted by the board that found that the majority of graduate employees at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces had signed union cards, paving the way for UE Local 1498 to be certified as the official bargaining agent for the 939 graduate workers at NMSU.

With chronic short staffing and Covid rolling through our ranks just before and after the holidays, affecting about two thirds of our center, many people were being subject to mandatory order-in shifts of four hours or more.

Per Connecticut labor law, overtime pay is not applicable unless the person has actually worked more than 40 hours in their pay period. This meant that if someone were to be out sick in the beginning of their week, and then ordered in later in the week, they would just get straight time.

Slow Bloom Coffee, the worker cooperative formed by workers fired during a UE organizing campaign in 2020, opened the doors of its new cafe in late March.

Slow Bloom workers, who are members of UE Local 1011, have been roasting and selling coffee for over a year as they prepared to open an in-person cafe.