#Amazon#UK#Unions#AntiLabor#AntiUnions#LaborUnions: "Amazon has once again discovered its incredible facility for ease-of-use. The company has blanketed its shop floor with radioactively illegal "one click to quit the union" QR codes. When a worker aims their phones at the code and clicks the link, the system auto-generates a letter resigning the worker from their union.
As noted, this is totally illegal. English law bans employers from "making an offer to an employee for the sole or main purpose of inducing workers not to be members of an independent trade union, take part in its activities, or make use of its services."
Now, legal or not, this may strike you as a benign intervention on Amazon's part. Why shouldn't it be easy for workers to choose how they are represented in their workplaces? But the one-click system is only half of Amazon's illegal union-busting: the other half is delivered by its managers, who have cornered workers on the shop floor and ordered them to quit their union, threatening them with workplace retaliation if they don't.
This is in addition to more forced "captive audience" meetings where workers are bombarded with lies about what life in an union shop is like.
#Tesla#Sweden#Unions#LaborRights#LaborStrikes#EVs: "Globally, Tesla has fought off any attempts by unions to organize its workplaces and establish collective bargaining. Signing up its employees is a priority for the United Auto Workers, the industry’s largest American union, and for its counterpart in Germany, where Tesla operates a big factory outside Berlin. UAW President Shawn Fain, who won extensive wage concessions from Detroit’s three major automakers with a strike last year, has cheered on the Swedes and called their effort “a blueprint for future leveraging campaigns.” Encouraged by this support—and armed with enough funds to pay the idle Tesla workers for around 500 years—IF Metall has stuck to its guns. The strike has now lasted four times as long as the UAW’s in 2023.
If Tesla had reached a collective agreement when it arrived in Sweden a decade ago, it’s likely nobody would have cared. For IF Metall, which signs hundreds of such accords each year, it hardly would have warranted a public declaration of victory. And Tesla could have rationalized it as an obligatory acceptance of local customs—comparable to removing one’s shoes when entering a Swedish home.
Now the company’s approach risks tarnishing its image in a region at the vanguard of the green transition. Scandinavians are among the world’s fastest adopters of electric vehicles: EVs and hybrids accounted for 60% of new cars sold in Sweden last year. Norwegians, Danes and Finns also buy electric cars at rates far above those in the US. Global automakers are fighting for the business of these affluent customers, who also happen to be broadly supportive of organized labor." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-29/tesla-strike-in-sweden-previews-elon-musk-playbook-for-us-unions
from #NewYorkTimes [gift article below]
University of California Workers May Strike After UCLA Raid
A union representing academic workers said it would file unfair labor charges against #UCLA, and potentially walk out over the handling of protests this week.
“#Amazon CEO Andy Jassy violated labor laws when making ‘coercive statements’ about #unions during interviews conducted in 2022, a judge for the National Labor Relations Board ruled on Wednesday.”
"In the past 2.5 years, more than 60 groups of student workers have filed petitions for representation elections...Notably, student workers have won every single election that has been held, and student workers have voted by overwhelming margins to unionize. On average, a whopping 91.3% of student workers have voted in favor of forming a union during their elections."
-Lynn Rhinehart and Margaret Poydock, Economic Policy Institute
"When a full-time worker is living in poverty, it indicates a failed system and the need for major change; not more cuts, austerity and a further erosion of our rights at work."