Category
Manufacturing, wage inequality, ethical consumerism, and trade policy.
48 articles
A prevailing wage is the minimum hourly rate, including fringe benefits, that contractors and subcontractors must pay workers on government-funded projects, as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor or a state equivalent.
The Teamsters' national strike fund holds over $300 million, according to Civic Media. That figure gives the impression of invincibility.
Amazon's fulfillment centers track a metric called "time off task" down to individual seconds. The system logs every pause a warehouse worker takes, generates automated warnings, and can produce termination paperwork without a single manager making the call.
The Richard L. Trumka Protecting the Right to Organize Act has been introduced in four consecutive Congresses. It passed the House once, never reached a Senate floor vote, and changed zero lines of federal labor law.
Workers at The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica voted to join the NewsGuild of New York in 2018. Their first contract didn't arrive until June 2021.
Captive audience meetings are deployed in roughly 89% of union organizing campaigns in the United States, and the data shows they cut union election win rates from 73% to 47%.
Salting, the practice of trained union organizers taking jobs at non-union workplaces to build support from the inside, drove the first successful Starbucks organizing campaign in decades.
Forty-four percent of newly certified unions between 1999 and 2004 never reached a first contract, according to a study of more than 8,000 successful elections by sociologist John-Paul Ferguson. The election was the easy part.
Thirty-one percent. That's the win rate for private-sector union elections in the United States, according to the Economic Policy Institute, after workers endure the full weight of employer anti-union campaigns. The number is grim, but it hides something important.
The National Labor Relations Board requires signed authorization cards from at least 30% of workers in a proposed bargaining unit before it will schedule an election. That threshold appears in every organizing manual, on every union website, and in every introductory labor law course.
The AFL-CIO's Organizing Institute trains participants to have one-on-one organizing conversations, chart workplace leaders, and run mini-campaigns around live issues.
Eighty-nine percent of employers require workers to attend anti-union meetings during organizing campaigns, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That figure tells you everything about the opposition your complaints will face the moment they become visible.
