An Amazing Collaboration: The Working People Weekly List

Every week, we bring you a roundup of the top news and commentary about issues and events important to working families. Here’s the latest edition of the Working People Weekly List.

‘An Amazing Collaboration’: United Way Highlights Holiday Volunteer Opportunities: “The United Way of Greater St. Joseph is making it easy for residents to find opportunities to give back and volunteer for the holidays with an online guide. The Holiday Volunteer and Giving Guide is a collection of the United Way’s many partner agencies’ volunteer opportunities. Jodi Flurry, director of community investment for United Way, said the organization’s volunteer center works hard to compile the list of volunteering options.”

The Power of Apprenticeships: How an Air Force Vet Found a Rewarding Career in Sheet Metal: “The demand is there, especially with new construction across Southwestern Ohio. More than five million square feet of industrial space have been built around Dayton International Airport alone since 2014. Honda and Intel this year announced big Ohio construction projects of their own. ‘The amount of work that is stacked up in the Miami Valley is out of control,’ said Tony Stephens, apprenticeship coordinator at Local 24. ‘It seems like every week there is another $750 million…project that gets announced. We are recruiting like mad.’”

AFL-CIO Urges Congress to Add Paid Sick Leave to Rail Contract: “The AFL-CIO on Wednesday called on Congress to add paid sick leave to a contract between rail workers and railroads. ‘While the tentative agreement unions negotiated this year included many critical gains—significant wage increases, caps on health care premiums and prevention of crew reduction—it also fell short by not including provisions on paid sick leave or fair scheduling,’ AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler said in a statement. “It’s now up to Congress to do the right thing by passing paid sick days for rail workers.’”

More Than 150 Agents Back Striking HarperCollins Workers: “More than 150 literary agents, whose clients include Danielle Jackson, V.E. Schwab and L.A. Chandlar, have signed an open letter to HarperCollins vowing to ‘omit’ the publisher from upcoming book submissions until it reaches an agreement with striking employees. Around 250 entry- and mid-level staff members, from publicists to editorial assistants, have been on strike since Nov. 10, with the two sides differing over wages, workforce diversity and other issues that have become increasingly prominent across the industry. No new talks are scheduled.”

Working People Key in Driving Midterm Wins—and We’re Just Getting Started: “In state after state, union households provided critical votes that put pro-worker candidates over the top. Our approach to politics is simple: Organize. Face to face. Cut through the noise with real conversations about the issues that matter. It’s a feedback loop. Organizers talk with workers. Workers share their concerns, which informs future conversations.”

Is America’s Labor Movement on the Upswing?: “The American labor movement seems resurgent, at a time when pandemic-weary employees are battling their bosses over work-from-home policies and thinking of ‘quiet quitting.’ We asked David H. Webber, a School of Law professor of law and Paul M. Siskind Scholar, to sort it out. Webber is the author of The Rise of the Working-Class Shareholder: Labor’s Last Best Weapon.”

Protecting the Right to Organize Act Will Help Unions Win Their First Contracts: “We are witnessing more worker organizing than many of us have seen in our lifetimes. Workers at colleges and universities, retail stores, newsrooms, nonprofits, museums, and more are forming unions with their co-workers. It has been nearly a year since the first group of Starbucks workers voted to unionize, and since then workers at more than 250 other Starbucks stores have joined them in unionizing. Workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island have also voted to unionize, as have workers in diverse industries across the country. Petitions for union elections are up 58% at the National Labor Relations Board compared to last year.”

AFL-CIO’s Feingold: Unions Demand ‘Just Transition,’ but Are G20 Leaders Listening?: “World leaders meeting at the G20 summit in Indonesia, and the COP27 clean energy conference in Egypt have apparently heard world trade unionists’ calls for ‘a just transition’ for workers as the globe makes the difficult move away from depending on fossil fuels, said AFL-CIO International Affairs Department Director Cathy Feingold. But did they heed it? ‘We’re moving in the direction of a new social contract’ around the world, Feingold replied. In a telephone interview from the Melbourne, Australia, airport, Feingold, re-elected as a deputy general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), stated unionists are pushing for ‘a new social contract’ around the globe.”