Workers demanding more – and getting it. The halting-but-improving post-pandemic economy has a little good news for some people, according to the Labor Department, which reported wages increasing 4% this summer, and even major low-wage companies including Walmart, Chipotle and Amazon have announced improvements to tuition and training programs. Meanwhile, a 43-page study by professors David Brady from the University of California-Riverside and Tom VanHeuvelen from the University of Minnesota shows that states with higher unionization rates have lower poverty rates – 5.9% of families with at least one union member live in poverty, compared to 18.9% of families without union members. The average annual poverty rate with substantial unions, like Illinois, was 7 percentage points below the annual average poverty rate of less-unionized states. Finally, the AFL-CIO recently outlined key benefits to being in unions: 1.2% more in wages, 96% have employer-sponsored health care coverage, 93% have paid sick leave, and 79% have pensions.

Mass firing leads Audubon staffers to unionize. The National Audubon Society fired 100 workers (on Earth Day!), leading field staffers to organize into the Audubon For All Union to become members of the Communications Workers. “Much of our organizing was prompted by the two rounds of layoffs,” said Maddox Wolfe, a fundraising campaign manager, but there are other issues.

“I’ve seen several of my coworkers let go with zero warning and watched my health premiums go up – all during a pandemic,” said grant accounting department manager Safiya Cathey.

Tech workers strike New York Times for half day. New York Times technology workers this summer staged a half-day work stoppage to protest the news company’s unfair labor practices. The NewsGuild of New York (TNG-CWA), which represents 1,300 editorial and business employees at the Times, started organizing more than 600 tech workers in April.

“I feel continually let down by the company,” Times software engineer Vicki Crosson, a member of the organizing committee, told Bloomberg News. “They put themselves forward as sort of a liberal bastion in media. To see them be hypocritical about this is really frustrating.”

Mondelez workers in Illinois join nationwide strike. Illinois has joined Colorado, Oregon and Virginia as states where workers represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union are striking against Chicago-based Mondelez, maker of Nabisco cookies, Wheat Thin crackers and other baked goods. The company is demanding concessions in health-care benefits and proposed changes to schedules and overtime rules, such as a requirement to work 12-hour shifts and the elimination of guaranteed weekend overtime,

“We worked through COVID, we made them the profits and they don’t want to share them,” said Veronica Hopkins, business agent and organizer for the BCTGM Local 1, which represents 345 Chicagoland workers. The union’s contract with Mondelez expired in May.

Illinois labor prof restored to federal panel. President Biden last month named Chicago-Kent College of Law professor Martin Malin chair of the Federal Labor Relations Authority’s Federal Service Impasses Panel, which helps in disputes between unionized federal workers and the federal agencies employing them.

President Obama selected Malin for the panel in 2009 and reappointed him to a five-year term in 2014, but in May 2017, President Trump removed Malin and other Obama appointees from the panel.

Malin has arbitrated or mediated labor negotiations in Chicago for decades, including the 2015-2016 contract talks between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Board of Education.

Unions won most NLRB elections during pandemic – and during last decade.

Sometimes, union-election losses get so much attention, people may think labor is losing. In reality, however, Reuters News reports 72% of the 5,804 public and private union elections in the past five years were in favor of workers trying to organize, according to data from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Nine out of every 10 petitions to form bargaining units were won by unions last year, the highest rate of success in at least a decade, but even then, workers won more than half the NLRB-supervised elections.

Unionized retail workers earn higher wages. An analysis of 20 years of retail wages found that union workers get paid more on average – and the gap is widening. Examining U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Reuters documented that the weekly pay differential between union and nonunion workers in the U.S. retail sector widened significantly between 2013 and 2019 – from nearly $20 to more than $50. By the end of 2019, a unionized retail worker was taking home an average of about $730 a week, compared with about $670 weekly for a nonunionized worker, says Reuters (which didn’t count pandemic-hurt 2020).

One factor behind the widening wage gap is that unionized retail workers tend to work more hours per week, and more predictable hours, than nonunionized workers,

35th annual Mother Jones Dinner Oct. 9 in Springfield, honoring Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, who’s buried outside Mt. Olive, some 50 miles south of Springfield. For details on the Mother Jones Foundation, go to https://www.facebook.com/motherjonesfoundation.org/.

News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper