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In general, however, it’s pretty much been disaster after disaster for five decades: Reagan busting the air traffic controllers’ union, four failed congressional attempts to make the NLRA more functional, even more failed attempts to raise the federal minimum wage (stuck at $7.25 for the past 15 years), the passage of NAFTA, the enactment of permanent normal trade relations with China, and the relentless, sickening decline in the share of American workers who belong to unions, which now stands at 10 percent, and a bare 6 percent among private-sector workers. That decline correlates well with the shrinking of the American middle class.
However, the seven days between Friday, April 19, and Thursday, April 25, saw a succession of worker victories that was almost breathtaking in its scope.
Two of those victories were the direct result of worker mobilizations. On Friday, the UAW won a recognition election at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga factory by a 73 to 27 percent margin, in an election where fully 84 percent of the eligible workers voted. Workers evidently viewed the UAW’s landmark victory in its strike several months earlier against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis as proof positive that the union could raise their wages and benefits. They ignored the pleas of six Southern governors that the union would subvert “Southern values,” which most workers apparently understood to mean “low-wage work sustained by a lack of worker power.”
The new UAW leadership, headed by president Shawn Fain, had made sure to keep the strike against the Big Three and the unprecedented contract they won in the public eye, and that leadership then appropriated $40 million to unionize factories in the South—historically, the graveyard of unionization efforts.
https://prospect.org/labor/2024-04-29-great-week-for-american-workers/
I walk by that location all the time - they closed the dining room for Covid and never reopened, it's drive-up only now which is becoming more and more common around here.. too bad if you don't have a car
― Andy the Grasshopper, Monday, 6 May 2024 18:45 (five months ago) link
three months pass...
three weeks pass...