UAW wants relationship with Big 3, with respect. Going into negotiations this summer with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler), new United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain says the union wants a good relationship with automakers, but workers haven’t received a fair share of the money car companies made since the government bailed out the industry in 2009.
Rank and file has demands: “I want to work with the companies,” he said. “But if they’re not going to treat our members with respect and not give them their due, then we’re going to have issues,” he told Automotive Press.
Illinois union local taken over by Teamsters International. Chicago-area Teamsters local 731 has been placed into trusteeship while the international union investigates spending by the local’s leaders, according to Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. Since 2018, Local 731 President Terrence Hancock and others rang up $1.3 million in questionable and unauthorized expenses, the International alleges, for food and liquor, year-end bonuses, and donations and contributions.
“Immediate action must be taken to ensure that a decade-long culture of misuse of local union assets and blatant disregard and violation of policies are finally stopped at Local 731,” O’Brien said.
With strong labor support, Sanders unveils $17 minimum wage bill. With strong backing from unions and low-wage workers, Senate Labor Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (Ind-Vt.) on May 4 introduced legislation raising the federal minimum wage to $17 an hour over five years.
If enacted, Sanders’s legislation would be the first minimum wage hike law in 16 years. In 2007 the minimum wage rose eventually to the current $7.25.
“I travel this country, talking to working people,” said AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler. “They tell me, ‘I can’t afford food.’ ‘I can’t go to the doctor.’ ‘I might be evicted because I can’t pay the rent.’ ”
Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 hourly “is not radical,” she added.
House Right-wingers want to kill OSHA. The House Freedom Caucus wants to kill the Occupational Safety and Health Administration as of Oct. 1. Introduced by Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), HR1942 reads, in part, “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, amounts authorized or otherwise made available to the Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for fiscal year 2024, shall not exceed $0.”
The caucus also seeks to zero-out “student financial aid,” eliminate the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, and cut the National Labor Relations Board back to its 2014 funding level.
Repression of workers, voter suppression and gun violence have common ground. Attempts to repress workers, enable gun violence, and remove voting rights are part of a long-term attack of “moral and political murder” by the radical Right, according to the Rev. William Barber II, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign.
Barber made that statement at the Tennessee state capitol in Nashville, where hundreds of demonstrators carried empty coffins honoring three adults and three children shot dead at a Christian school this spring.
Barber described a “death by public policy,” saying, “The same people that suppress the vote block the gun bans. The same people that block gun bans block health care. The same people that block health care block (raising) the minimum wage. And the same people that block the minimum wage block environmental justice.”
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