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Collective bargaining

UDR Story

  • Resisting attack from the right; fighting the mob
    Facing the most outright attack since President Reagan broke the air traffic controllers association, unions are responding with an unusual display of labor power. Reagan destroyed the union, but he stopped short of challenging the fundamental right of unions to represent workers. The new assault goes further as the anti-union right seeks to end or drastically curb the very principle of collective bargaining itself.
     
  • Vindicating Clyde Summers, Unions and scholars petition NLRB: Make employers recognize non-majority unions

    Back in 2007 seven major AFL-CIO unions, including the Steel Workers and Auto Workers, petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to adopt a regulation that would require employers to recognize and bargain with unions, only on behalf of their members, in cases where a majority of the workers had not voted for union recognition. The petition was endorsed by Change to Win in 2008 when it still represented six influential unions. In June this year, 46 law professors around the country submitted a 60-page amicus brief in support of the union petition.

  • SEIU holds on at NLRB. Autocracy tops Democracy.

    In an NLRB election in October, 43,500 Kaiser healthcare workers in California got what had been denied to them in the Service Employees International Union, the right to choose which set of officers should run their local union.

  • New stage in super bureaucratization of labor

    Four locals in California, with a combined membership of 40,000 janitorial service workers, were ordered by SEIU President Andy Stern to join together in a new district council called United Service Workers-West. Here is something drastically new in the SEIU. Unlike the various mega locals created earlier by Stern by dissolving several locals into one, these four locals each retain a separate existence, but only as desiccated shells deprived of substance.

  • Union officers uncomfortable with online free speech

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    Two cases in which union members were banned from official union online forums reflect the growing importance of the internet as a new space for member participation and the contrary efforts of union leaders to limit discussion to what they consider acceptable.

    Marine Engineers: good beginning but then...

  • Nurses ask court to back rights in NYS Association

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  • Healthcare leader raps Stern; quits SEIU board

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    The president of the 140,000 United Healthcare Workers in California resigned from the executive committee of the Service Employees International Union in February. Sal Rosselli, in announcing his move in a stinging letter to Andy Stern, SEIU international president, denounced "the undemocratic practices we in the UHW have experienced firsthand." Rosselli charged, too, that "An overly zealous focus on growth, growth at any cost, apparently has eclipsed SEIU's commitment to its members."

  • IBEW delegates demand due process in construction hiring.

    Keep AUD on the job: SUBSCRIBE to Union Democracy Review! Call 718-564-1114.

  • For union democracy in action, watch NYC public employees

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$100 Plus Story

  • UNION DEMOCRACY = UNION POWER

    (Part One of a $100 Plus Club News Special Report on a University of Illinois Forum on Union Democracy & Effective Union Leadership)

    Incumbent union officers tend to think of union democracy as a threat to incumbent power. This is a basic misconception. Union democracy is about union member power, and union member power is union power. Because union democracy activism usually focuses on deposing corrupt, ineffectual, or uncaring union officers, it is not widely understood that an effective union is one that cultivates its members' power.

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