Upcoming Events 📅
Join us for EWOC’s second general meeting on July 15, 8 pm EST. We’ll be talking about our 2021 organizing goals, various components of EWOC, and ways to get involved. Register here.
Why should I join a union? What does union membership entail? Join us on Tuesday, July 13, at 8 pm EST for EWOC’s event What is a Union? We’ll hear from a panel of union organizers about the nuts and bolts of unions today, including how militant workers and union staff navigate their unions, and define some common language like dues, arbitration, collective bargaining, authorization cards, concerted activity, boycotts, lockouts, strikes, etc. Don’t miss it! Register here.
World of Work 🌍
IL: Non-union workers at Portillo’s Food Service in Addison went on strike this Monday, after management failed to negotiate a settlement. Workers have had to deal with grueling hours, low wages, and unsafe working conditions at the facility. For their part, management has reacted with hostility, even threatening to fire the striking workers. The strike remains ongoing.
CA: Workers at Bicycle Transit Systems (BTS) in Los Angeles held a solidarity ride this past Saturday, to support their ongoing unionization efforts. The workers filed to unionize earlier this month, after more than a year of inadequate pay and PPE. As one veteran BTS worker put it, “They say ‘We’re a very progressive company run with these values.’ Sometimes they align, and sometimes they don’t. You have people used as tools to prop up diversity projects at the top while at the bottom the class aspect is totally ignored. That’s become obvious during the pandemic, the disconnect from the labor being done, people’s bodies being put at risk.”
NC: Employees of Elizabeth City went on strike Tuesday morning, bringing city services to a halt. The strike follows a city council vote in which a potential raise for the workers was voted down. In the words of one Elizabeth City worker: “We want to be treated fairly. We’ve been going through this for a long time.”
USA/CANADA: Workers at Change.org in Canada and the United States are unionizing with Communications Workers of America (CWA) in a cross-border campaign. The workers are organizing to ensure that their working conditions remain the same for the long term, and that they have a say in the future of the company. The employer is cooperating with the drive and voluntarily recognizing the union. “We work to give everyone around the globe a voice on our open platform through the democratization of activism,” the workers said in a mission statement, “And to achieve this, every worker at Change must have a voice, too.”
MN: The Labor Notes and Teamsters for a Democratic Union office in Detroit was hard-hit with a massive flood over the weekend. The flooding turned LN inventory into a pulpy mush of sewage — destroying thousands of books. Help our friends out by donating to their clean-up fund.
From Our Blog 🗣
Decades before the modern LGBTQ+ movement, a small but militant union of maritime workers on the west coast fought discrimination on its ships and showed what gay-straight solidarity looks like. Jonathan Kissam tells the story for our friends at Labor Notes.
EWOC’s Samuel Fleischman and Wen Zhuang spoke with graduate workers at Colorado State University, who, with help from the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee, got organized during the pandemic and are demanding better pay and decent treatment.
Celeste and Ksenia, from the successful Santa Cruz Bookshop Workers Union organizing campaign, spoke with Laborlines podcast about their efforts and working with EWOC. Revisit their interview with EWOC’s Eric Dirnbach and Coworker’s Tim Newman on our blog.
