{"id":4019,"date":"2021-09-05T21:50:24","date_gmt":"2021-09-06T01:50:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4019"},"modified":"2021-09-09T12:06:50","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T16:06:50","slug":"labor-day-on-the-picket-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/09\/labor-day-on-the-picket-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Labor Day on the picket line"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>t\u2019s hard not to notice that there\u2019s been an uptick in strikes across the country. Lauded as \u201cessential workers \u201c<\/a> in the early days of the pandemic, many of these same workers have found themselves on the picket line this year.\u00a0 Instead of granting reasonable pay increases and safe working conditions, ungrateful bosses are demanding major concessions despite huge profits.<\/p>\n

Real heroes, like the nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, have been on strike since March 8<\/a>, making it the longest strike<\/a> in that state\u2019s history. The nurses, represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association, are resisting management\u2019s effort to implement unsafe nurse to patient ratios<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At the same time, one thousand food processing workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM)<\/a> are striking across five states against the international snack food behemoth Mondelez<\/a>, best known to U.S. consumers by the brand name Nabisco. The last time there was a national strike at Nabisco was in 1969.<\/p>\n

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Photo by Joe Allen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Workers at Nabisco are striking against working conditions that are more reminiscent of the early days of the industrial revolution<\/a> than anything experienced by unionized workers in the late twentieth century. One striker<\/a> told Jacobin:<\/p>\n

If you call somebody in, you might get lucky enough to go home in twelve hours, but often you aren\u2019t lucky. On Saturdays, they force us to come in, and then they force us into another shift right after that because people don\u2019t come to work. We\u2019re scared to come to work on Saturdays because we\u2019re going to be forced into another shift.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The issues that drive the on-going Nabisco strike are identical<\/a> to the ones behind the Frito-Lay strike in Topeka, Kansas earlier this summer. The Frito-Lay strikers, also represented by the BCTGU, settled the strike on terms that disappointed<\/a> many rank and file members. A sizable number of strikers on Facebook had announced that they were going to vote no.<\/p>\n

Given the labor shortage across the economy, where unionized employers like United Parcel Service (UPS), and non-union employers like Amazon, are raising wages<\/a> and offering bonuses<\/a> to attract workers that they desperately need, unions should be pressing hard to make significant gains on all fronts in contract negotiations. We should not be accepting of mediocre contract settlements when economic conditions are so favorable to our side. Yet, we\u2019ve seen this far too often. The United Auto Workers (UAW) leadership employed an old bureaucratic tactic of having their members at Volvo<\/a> vote three times<\/a>, until they voted yes on a contract proposal that nearly half still rejected.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, veteran trade union leaders Peter Olney and Rand Wilson put forward a perspective<\/a> for upcoming contract negotiations and the political opportunities it represent for the left. They wrote,<\/p>\n

This year, 450 collective bargaining agreements covering more than 200 union members apiece will expire, according to Bloomberg, which maintains the most comprehensive database of expiring agreements outside of the AFL-CIO. Of these, 160 agreements cover more than 1,000 workers. These 450 contracts, involving more than a million and a half workers, are an ideal opportunity for the labor movement to showcase our power and the advantages of collective bargaining.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cIn our experience,\u201d Olney and Wilson further wrote, \u201cunorganized workers are generally attracted to unions that engage in contract campaigns and strikes. For example, after the 1997 Teamsters\u2019 UPS strike, workers at FedEx, Overnite, and many other freight and delivery companies were inspired to try to form unions with the Teamsters.\u201d<\/p>\n