The United Auto Workers’ current agreement with Caterpillar is scheduled to expire March 1. Likely issues include not only compensation, but attendance policies — all as the UAW international leadership could be changing and related situations such as the union’s eight-month strike at CNH in Burlington, Iowa, and Racine, Wis. At press time, the UAW’s first popular-vote election for top leadership posts is headed for a presidential runoff between incumbent Ray Curry and top challenger Shawn Fain. Curry received 38.2% of ballots cast; Fain got 37.6%, and three other challengers split the rest.
Southwest pilots predicted airline’s meltdown. A month before Southwest’s holiday chaos, industry union leaders warned putting profits over people and workers leads to trouble, and Southwest Airlines Pilots Association President Casey Murray cited the company on his podcast in November.
“[Southwest CEO Gary] Kelly made a conscious decision to make the less than necessary investments in tech upgrades in favor of maximizing shareholder return because, well, ‘Our tech’s been working OK for 20 years,’ ” Murray said.
From 2014 through 2019, United, Southwest, American, and Delta rewarded Wall Street with more than $39 billion in combined stock buybacks, said a joint letter from Sara Nelson of the Flight Attendants, Sean O’Brien of the Teamsters, and Joe DePete of the Air Line Pilots Association, and just before Southwest’s Christmas meltdown, the corporation announced a $426 million dividend payment to shareholders.
The National Labor Relations Board is calling out lawbreakers. The NLRB found merit to an Unfair Labor Practice charge filed by the Communications Workers of America against Apple for using illegal tactics to interfere with workers’ organizing efforts at its retail store in Atlanta, where the union has several unresolved ULP charges, including the interrogation of workers and a threat to withhold benefits from workers in Oklahoma City. Elsewhere, the NLRB has accused Tesla of violating labor law by prohibiting employees in Orlando, Fla., from talking about workplace matters, according to Bloomberg, which added that Tesla management also told employees “not to complain to higher level managers” about working conditions.
In 2021, the agency found that Tesla had violated labor laws by firing a union activist and threatening workers’ benefits.
Authors, agents support HarperCollins strikers. Some 200 workers have been on strike at HarperCollins since November, and more than 500 authors, including Barbara Kingsolver, have signed a letter calling on the company to settle the strike.
“We stand with the people who mold and champion our work and ask that they be compensated justly and fairly,” the letter reads. “Our hope is that HarperCollins will not be satisfied with meeting an industry standard that is far too low to retain top talent.”
Meanwhile, about 150 literary agents from various firms also signed a letter pledging they will not bring new books until HarperCollins reaches an agreement with the strikers.
“While many consider publishing to be a labor of love, we agents know how quickly that labor can lead to burnout, tension, missed opportunities for advancement, and mistakes,” they wrote.
CWA to C-SPAN: Oust Pittsburgh publisher. The Communications Workers of America last month sent a letter to C-SPAN calling for the removal of Allan Block, CEO of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s parent company, Block Communications, from C-SPAN’s Board of Directors.
In the letter, the union pointed to Block’s biased actions as contradictory to C-SPAN’s commitment to neutrality.
In addition to denying health care and raises to striking Post-Gazette workers, Block made headlines for swearing at and slapping a union representative with a bag of food after being asked why he refuses to come to a fair agreement with his newspaper workers. Block also supported the Jan. 6 insurrection and tried to sway reporting to be pro-Trump, the CWA said.
— News briefs courtesy of The Labor Paper:
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