Workers at G&D Integrated in Morton last month won their union election and are now represented by the Ironworkers, which praised the “G&D workers who fought tirelessly for a union, and now have a voice on the job, the right to negotiate a contract [and] the opportunity to make their workplace better.”

Racism harms caregivers: SEIU official. Structural racism in the U.S., particularly against women, especially hurts Black and brown caregivers, said April Verrett, whose Los Angeles-based Service Employees Local 2015 led a drive to organize 40,000 state-paid caregivers.

That means, she adds, that overcoming such racism is key to improving wages, hours and working conditions for caregivers and other low-paid workers.

“I want to build a labor movement that’s about ending systemic racism,” Verrett said. “We have to talk about poverty and income inequality and challenge corporate power. And we need women and people of color at the table, drafting policy” such as dealing with policing and environmental justice.

Teachers union reaches student-debt settlement. Thousands of student loan borrowers can expect relief from their debt after the American Federation of Teachers and union-member plaintiffs reached a landmark settlement with the U.S. Department of Education.

The suit, filed in 2019, addresses the federal Education Department’s failure to deliver on its own Public Service Loan Forgiveness program (PSLF).

“The AFT has fought hard for years to make PSLF work for the borrowers it was intended to help, and with this settlement we have ensured that a promise made is a promise kept,” said AFT President Randi Weingarten.

Under the settlement, all PSLF applicants denied relief will have an opportunity for their cases to be re-viewed by the department, setting public employees including teachers, nurses and firefighters on a path to a life-changing reduction or elimination of their student-debt burden.

PSLF was supposed to guarantee that those who work in public service and make their student-loan payments will have the balance of their loans forgiven after 10 years. But since 2007, fewer than 2% of applicants have received that relief. The settlement and a summary of “what it means for borrowers and the public” is at: https://www.aft.org/pslf

74% of U.S. voters supported ‘Strike-tober’ work stoppages. Polling in October found that a huge majority of American voters have been supportive of recent labor actions as a strike wave swept the U.S. and the labor movement shows signs of a resurgence.

Conducted by Data for Progress on behalf of the AFL-CIO, the survey asked nearly 1,300 representative respondents if they approve or disapprove of workers striking for better wages. The survey referenced the John Deere, Nabisco and Kellogg strikes.

Among all respondents, 74% of likely voters say that they either strongly or somewhat approve the strikes, with only 20% disapproving –– a 54-point margin. Support was strongest among Democrats, where 87% of respondents said they approved of the strikes. However, most Republicans also approved (60%), and only 30% disapproving.

Economists showed claims about labor are wrong. Researchers who showed that claims are wrong that increasing the minimum wage hurt business and that workers receiving government aid are reluctant to take jobs won the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics.

David Card of the University of California-Berkeley, was awarded half of the prize for research on how the minimum wage and other influences affect the market. The other half was shared by Joshua Angrist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Guido Imbens from Stanford University for their framework for studying issues that can’t rely on traditional methods.

In a landmark study, Card examined the labor market at fast-food restaurants when New Jersey raised its minimum wage and proved that conventional wisdom that employment would suffer was wrong.

Angrist and Imbens used nontraditional methods to show that workers don’t resist working even when their incomes are supplemented. For example, a survey of lottery winners evaluated the possible impact of a government-provided basic income and found that an additional $15,000 a year had little effect on a person’s likelihood to work.

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper