The Weekly Download

“This won’t come as a surprise to union activists, but the mainstream press doesn’t always fairly represent the labor movement. That was true in 1919, the year the Federated Press (FP) was founded, and it remains true today.”

“Josh Howard’s Hell’s Not Far Off: Bruce Crawford and the Appalachian Left arrives at a moment when Appalachia’s labor movement is wrestling with new forms of old struggles. As organizers, rank-and-file workers, union leaders, scholars, and labor journalists confront corporate consolidation, political division, and the collapse of local news infrastructure, Howard’s biography of Bruce Crawford, an early 20th-century labor journalist and organizer, serves as both recovery and reminder. It restores a forgotten figure to the narrative and reinforces a truth many of us already know: the most honest history of this region is written by the people willing to stand up to its power structures.”

“In this blogcast, Burnes Center for Social Change Senior Fellow Seth Harris is joined by Matthew Platkin and Randy Korgan to discuss the ongoing fight for Amazon’s employees that is raging in the courts and the workplace.”

“Said Mohamed has been working for Uber and Lyft for four years. He says that rideshare drivers who bring passengers to and from the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport have been asking for better facilities for restroom use and religious prayer for two and half years.”

“Hundreds of thousands of times each year in California, farmers and their contractors spray pesticides on fields and orchards in the state’s agricultural heartlands. Farmworkers young and old can be exposed to dangerous concentrations of toxic chemicals if they are not properly trained, left uninformed about when they can safely enter sprayed fields or exposed to pesticide applications — because of factors such as wind drift or operator error.”

“Call this a right-wing ‘wish list’ of changes. Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bill Cassidy (R-La.) unveiled a GOP package of Labor law “reforms” that’s a corporate lobbyist’s dream — and the opposite of Labor’s Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.”

“The Trump administration appealed a federal judge’s order protecting the collective bargaining agreements of some government labor unions from the president’s efforts to demolish them. The US Department of Justice gave notice of the appeal to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, seeking to overturn a district judge’s Sept. 30 preliminary injunction pausing the nullification of the collective bargaining agreements.”

“For more than two decades, Denise Lugo has worked as a home care worker in Fayetteville, North Carolina, caring for elderly clients in their homes. Workers like Lugo provide intimate care for seniors and people with disabilities who cannot care for themselves. For what’s often grueling work, Lugo makes $15 an hour caring for two clients, juggling everything from light housekeeping to household errands to bathing, dressing and exercising. But Lugo’s livelihood and that of 3 million home care workers across the country is now in peril under a proposal by the Trump administration to end their rights to federal minimum wage and overtime…Workers like Lugo have been mobilizing against the Trump administration proposal, which reopens a loophole allowing employers to broadly classify care workers as “companions” who can be paid less than minimum wage and are not eligible for overtime pay. The fight has also energized workers’ efforts to push state and federal lawmakers to strengthen their rights even as federal ones are taken away.”

“Throughout his campaign, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani repeatedly vowed to focus on the needs of working class New Yorkers. While workers’ rights did not make it into Mamdani’s oft-repeated campaign bullet points (freeze the rent, fast and free buses, universal childcare), Mamdani did often voice support for unions, and he appeared on several picket lines during the campaign. Mamdani will undoubtedly be a pro-worker, pro-union Mayor, but as he aims to boost worker organizing efforts, he has to walk the minefield that is federal labor law preemption.”

“We have three documents today, one a Fourth Circuit opinion upholding an NLRB decision and the other two ALJ decisions finding unfair labor practices. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the National Labor Relations Board’s determination that a firearms instructor who complained about dangerous workplace safety conditions was protected from retaliation…[An] ALJ decision examines whether Amazon’s employment confidentiality agreements violate Section 8(a)(1) of the Act by potentially restricting employees’ rights to engage in protected concerted activities.”

“Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump has made good on his promise to dismantle the Department of Education. His administration has laid off employees by the thousands, unraveled racial equity policies, and recently has shifted key educational responsibilities to the Department of Labor. Now, the state of New York, along with a coalition of school districts, advocacy organizations, and unions, is pushing back in federal court. In a lawsuit filed last week, they say the Trump administration’s changes are “unpredictable, chaotic, and unprofessional,” and point out that only Congress, not the White House, has the power to make wholesale Education Department changes. At the same time, the extraordinary moves the administration has made so far will harm millions of students — many of them Black.”

“The Trump administration fired eight immigration judges in New York City on Monday, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The firings followed an earlier round of job cuts in New York immigration courts and are part of a broader disruption across the country, which is taking place as the president seeks to accelerate deportations. They were confirmed by an official at the National Association of Immigration Judges, a union representing immigration judges, and a Justice Department official who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The immigration courts are under the control of the Justice Department.”

“Unions are popular across ages and demographic groups in America, but Gen Z men stand out for their high levels of support. According to Center for American Progress analysis of polling data from 2024, Gen Z men have the highest approval for unions among any generation or gender group—higher support for unions than older generations of men and women had at their age. The same was true in 2020, meaning high support for unions among young men has remained stable even as millions of young men have entered the labor force. The reason is likely very simple: Young men are concerned about being able to achieve financial independence from their families and earn enough money to start families of their own. Unions give workers—especially workers without college degrees—a substantial boost to wages, allowing them to build wealth and reach important life milestones.”

“After seeing their former union dissolved by the state earlier this year, city employees in Titusville who work in the utilities and public works departments are organizing to form a new union with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 606. Reorganizing their union would allow them to continue advocating for the workforce’s material needs — higher pay, better benefits and the like — collectively.”

“Four years after workers at a Starbucks store in upstate New York became the first to unionize, hundreds of outlets followed – defying intense resistance from the coffee chain. What happened next?”

“Union busters have often earned 20 times more than the workers they seek to ‘persuade’ not to unionize. Operating largely in the shadows with minimal regulatory oversight, these so-called ‘persuaders’ face little accountability for their tactics. The union-busting industry thrives on secrecy, with consultants exploiting loopholes in disclosure requirements and filing mandatory reports months late — if they file accurate information at all. But recently, the upper limits of what they charge have evidently exploded far beyond long-outrageous multiples. Disclosures show that two union busters, including one hired by Amazon, recently set new records for the highest hourly and daily rates. The disclosures also provide a stark illustration of common tactics used by union busters to neutralize the intended educational benefit of their reporting requirements to workers. A union buster for Amazon recently reported billing the highest daily rate ever observed by LaborLab, the workers’ rights watchdog organization that I lead. Anite Guillaume — working for one of Amazon’s favorite anti-union consultancies, Road Warrior Productions (RWP) — reported earning $9,000 a day for collecting information on drivers through one-on-one conversations. That’s roughly double the highest daily rate previously recorded by LaborLab.”

“While Florida isn’t exactly a hotbed for union organizing activity, the state (surprisingly or not) happens to be home to some of the most active union avoidance consultants in the country. Such consultants, described by critics as “union busters,” are routinely hired by employers to convince workers not to form or join a union. Some of these consultants are attorneys, others are not…A persuader contracted by Tate’s Bake Shop up in New York allegedly threatened undocumented workers with deportation if they voted in favor of unionization — an act that could most certainly be challenged as an illegal form of retaliation by the employer under federal labor law. A persuader called up to crush an organizing drive at a Barnes & Noble College Bookstore in New Jersey allegedly compared union membership to slavery in captive audience meetings with Black workers (the workers unanimously voted in favor of unionization, anyway).”

“College athletes have been fighting for years for fair treatment in an industry that generates billions in revenue off their talent and hard work. America’s unions have stood with them. In recent years, athletes have made important progress, but the SCORE Act would unravel that progress and entrench the power of conferences and schools at their expense. The bill is union-busting policy in action, stripping college athletes of basic—and wide-ranging—rights in the workplace, allowing schools to have ultimate control over athletes’ name, image and likeness, and empowering the NCAA—instead of democratically elected legislatures—to establish rules on athlete compensation. Now more than ever, college athletes need a voice in how they're treated. The SCORE Act takes us in the opposite direction, stifling athletes' voices and opening the door to more exploitation.”

“Last week, unionized journalists at Politico won a landmark arbitration regarding AI adoption in their newsroom. In the ruling issued on November 26, an arbitrator found that Politico management violated key AI adoption safeguards that had been negotiated into the union’s contract. Among other restrictions, the contract requires that management provide the union 60 days to bargain over any new AI technology that “materially and substantively” impacts members’ job duties. The contract also requires that if AI technology is used for ‘newsgathering’ that it meet Politico’s ‘standards of journalists ethics and involve human oversight.’ In a clear-cut ruling, the arbitrator found that Politico management violated both of these terms when it rolled out two recent AI-powered editorial products.”

“During the Cold War, many of the people with a radical vision of the world were driven out of our labor movement. Today, as unions search for answers about how to begin growing again, and regain the power workers need to defend themselves, the question of social vision has become very important. What is our vision in labor? What are the issues that we confront today that form a more radical vision for our era?”