#labor strikes

[metalheadsagainstfascism]

Adam Conover on TikTok

Would you pay $3500 for an Apple Vision Pro with nothing to watch? Apple, come back to the table and make a FAIR DEAL #WGAStrong

-fae

[emuanon34]

LET’S MOTHERFUCKING GOOOOOOOOO!

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Starbucks Worker Solidarity Day of Action

On September 14, Starbucks customers and allies are organizing visibility & petitioning events to demand Starbucks quit union busting. Join

Starbucks workers are going on strike on the chain's busiest day of the year. Find an event near you to support if you can.

[gean-grey-blog]

Colbert went back to work so quickly when the strike ended that the Late Show Band's bassist, Endea Owens, who was on a trip to central Australia, could not physically get to NYC in time. That means that first show back was written, produced, and filmed, in like 48 hours, from a dead stop in work. These artists deserve all the pay and protections they fought for, and more.

[hylianhimbo]

were you educated on labor strikes within the U.S. school system?

yes, in grades k-12

yes, in higher education

yes, in both

no 💀

not educated in U.S./show results

Voting ended onMay 10, 2023

I'm very curious, as I live in a state that had knowledge of historical labor strikes in the area as mandatory curriculum, but I don't know if other states do that!

[homerstroystory]

URGENT: University of Michigan Classics graduate student instructors are on strike and need your help

see below cut for information on UM's actions to sabotage its graduate students, the Department of Classics' complacency, and a signable letter of solidarity.

Dear [Colleagues],

I am reaching out on behalf of the graduate students in the Department of Classics at the University of Michigan to ask if you might consider signing and circulating within your departmental or Classics-adjacent listservs a letter calling for Michigan faculty to refrain from submitting Graduate Student Instructors' grades while we are on strike for a fair contract.

Our graduate student union (GEO) has been in contract negotiations with Academic HR for the majority of this past academic year, but AHR has not bargained in good faith. Notably, they have refused to grant graduate student instructors a living wage, despite a skyrocketing cost-of-living in Ann Arbor. Our current contract from 2020 stipulates a 10.1% wage increase over three years, whereas the inflation rate from 2020–2023 exceeded 15%, according to the US government’s standard index. AHR’s most recent pre-strike offer of an 11.5% wage increase over the next three years would not bring graduate students to even the inflation-adjusted baseline of our 2020 contract. The raise would include a 5% raise in the first year, an effective pay cut (as current inflation rates are an estimated 6-7%). The proposed contract's raise is even lower for our colleagues on Detroit and Dearborn campuses, despite a similar cost of living, with a 2% raise in the first year.

When GEO went on strike on March 29, the University immediately took legal action by filing an injunction against the union rather than attempting first to resolve matters at the bargaining table. GEO defeated the injunction on April 10, but the University has continued to refuse good-faith bargaining and instead has called upon faculty to submit final grades in the place of their striking Graduate Student Instructors. On April 20, GSIs noticed in their accounts that wages for the pay period of April 1–30 would be withheld on the basis of attestation forms, leaving us with a total of $100 for the month of April, even though 10 days of the pay period remained outstanding. On that same day, President Santa Ono called the police to detain two graduate students who were protesting outside of the restaurant in which he was having dinner (the two students were later released).

Unfortunately, the Classics department has adhered to the University’s line every step of the way. Our faculty have not only taught classes in our stead, undermining the power of graduate students to withhold our labor in pursuit of a fair contract, but they have taken on immense grading loads which would be entirely impossible to complete without a considerable cut to pedagogical quality. In certain cases, faculty who had no prior affiliation with a course have stepped in to submit incorrect grades for students while knowing that graduate student instructors were withholding components of those students’ grades. The graduate students in this department have attempted to communicate with and educate our faculty on the importance of respecting our strike throughout the last month, but we have received minimal engagement from the majority of professors. We have no choice but to turn to the wider academic community as a last resort, in the hopes that our faculty will listen to you when they won’t listen to us.

Please consider signing this letter and passing it onto your networks—not just for the wellbeing of graduate students here at the University of Michigan, but for the wellbeing of our undergraduate students as well.

 

Kindly,

[Graduate Student at UM Classics]

signable letter of solidarity

[hclib]

On Strike for Good Education

On February 24, 1948, Minneapolis school teachers abandoned their classrooms for the picket lines. The strike was the result of the school board deciding to cut four weeks from the school year in order to stay within budget and prevent a $2,000,000 deficit. Both union and non-union teachers rejected the shortened school year and union teachers filed new salary demands calling for an increase in the minimum pay base from $2,000 to $3,000 and an increase from $4,000 to $6,000 for salary maximums. During the strike, 92 public schools closed and 65,000 students were out of school. During the strike, many students joined in support of the teachers, carrying signs that said “Pay our teacher. Give them a fair hearing. They can’t live on hot air. We want school” and “U had yer lurnin lettuce hav hours”. The strike lasted 27 days. Students and teachers returned to the classrooms on March 22, 1948, after teachers approved a $300 pay increase for the remainder of the year and automatic increase of $200 annually.

This year, on February 23, 2022, after many months of negotiations, teachers unions in Minneapolis and St. Paul both filed intents to strike, bargaining for, among other things, more mental health professionals for students, smaller class sizes, higher wages for teachers and protections to help retain teachers of color. A strike could begin as soon as March 8. The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers last went on strike in 1970. You can read about the 1970 strike in Dr. Bill Green’s forthcoming book Strike! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law (University of Minnesota Press, June 2022).

Photos of the 1948 Teachers’ Strike from the Minneapolis Newspaper Photograph Collection in the Hennepin County Library Digital Collections. See more online.

[eelhound]

"The possibility of the other person standing before you, face-to-face, represents a moment of terror, a moment of truth, and a possible transformation of the relationship (even its end). Levinas insists on the face-to-face because it presents the other as a reality 'effectuated in the non-postponable urgency with which he requires a response.' When the other appears through a distant communiqué, through an old physical letter, an email, or some technological mediation, the other waits for a response but lacks the presence to demand it. The body is in this way a force, sometimes a necessary one, and not a dispensable or superficial feature of human relations.

This is why we often need to go places, with and in our physical bodies, not only in friendship but also in politics and protest. The presence of the body — or bodies — demands a response. Governments and their militaries, for example, may learn through screens how much they are hated by their people, but they need not respond until bodies confront them face-to-face, in the square, in the streets, as obstructions to commerce and normal business. In this political example, if we were to conclude that the face to-face is an old-fashioned ultimate situation, we would imply that the power of our bodies is also old-fashioned.

But don't our bodies remain fundamental to our being-in-the-world? Why not meet the lover only through a screen? Why not attend every conference only at home by video calls? The answer is that we want to bring our bodies to places and people because bodies are part of the indispensable apparatus of human relationality, even today where connections are more disembodied and cellular than ever. Even if we do not need to be at the conference physically or to go to the family's house in a distant city because we can talk by video calls, we still want to go there because we recognize that as the ultimate situation. Similarly, in politics, if we really want to stop them, we will eventually need to place our bodies on the line. Speaking of a strike is not the same thing as materializing one in picket lines."

- Richard Gilman-Opalsky, from The Communism of Love: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Exchange Value, 2020.