Watching the Biden admin is wild. At one minute he'll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine and Palestine, but the next he'll be funding the NLRB and addressing the housing crisis in a way that improves walk-ability.
It's like, he has two settings: "actually useful moderate" and "KILLKILLKILLKILL"
Unfortunately, this makes him the best US president since carter
Man, my drug use is outta control. I'm just blasting off daily. Every morning I'm like "I can't do this until I've ingested at least 60mg of caffeine" as I bust out my percolation set up.
Idk how big your workplace is, but at mine, everyone in the Organizing Committee picked a few leaders to talk to on an ongoing basis. and that way, the most influential people in the workplace were getting their opinions on union stuff from us. That way the 4 person OC was able to reach all 60 workers with pro union messaging.
I'm gonna be frank: organizing for a strike starts now or it doesn't happen. Do not count on the reps to do it. If you're going to make friends with deep pockets, it's on you and no-one else to reach out.
If you're going to have the "start saving" conversation, do it now.
Unfortunately, my experience is that the rep filed a grievance and it was out of my hands. What is important imo is immediately framing it as retaliation and making the boss the bad guy before the boss can blame the union. Make it an issue to organize around or management will.
Management can give you a raise whenever they want. Ant "my hands are tied" rhetoric is the bosses trying to blame the union for their own retaliation.
On the coordinated bargaining: you don't have to bargain at the same time this time around to line up expiration dates and bargain at the same time in 3 years.
See if you can negotiate your contract ending at the same time as the other departments. That way, next time you can negotiate together, with the power of three units threatening strike instead of just one.
To answer your question about selective raises, that's retaliation and a ULP. They did it to us at my last job and we had to fight it.
A lot of reps are fairly new, or are used to a particular wheelhouse, or know more about organizing than labor law, or more about labor law than organizing. That's why it's so important to have worker leadership.
Have you read Labor Law for the Rank and Filer and no contract, no peace?
Trots were big on "industrializing" which is going into buisness unions to improve them. Labor Notes is actually partially the result of this movement.
So a lot of our collective knowledge about relating to larger unions is from trot experiments.
Is anyone else really bad at drinking? Like, I spill coffee on myself like a solid quarter of the time. I keep an extra shirt in my car so I don't have to do field work with coffee on my shirt
Watching the Biden admin is wild. At one minute he'll be escalating the wars in the Ukraine and Palestine, but the next he'll be funding the NLRB and addressing the housing crisis in a way that improves walk-ability.
It's like, he has two settings: "actually useful moderate" and "KILLKILLKILLKILL"
Unfortunately, this makes him the best US president since carter