For the first time in 13 years, the London Tube was shut down today, as workers went on strike after the London Underground (LU) and the unions failed to agree to a deal over pay and night-time service.
After a 36 hour total-network shutdown of approximately 20,000 workers, the strike technically ends at the end of today (Thursday). Service tomorrow morning will be significantly reduced.
Photo by David McKelvey via flickr (CC-BY-NC-SA).
We’re living in historic times. Over the past few months, we’ve seen marriage equality become the law across the United States. More locally, we’ve seen the NYC Fair Chance Act fundamentally alter the economic opportunity landscape for those with criminal records, requiring public and private sector employers to wait until after a conditional job offer to make any inquiries about criminal history.
Just how did we get here? On this week’s edition of Building Bridges Radio with Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash, the hosts talk with Miriam Frank, author of Out in the Union: A Labor History Of Queer America, along with Brandon Holmes, Community Civil Rights Organizer with VOCAL-NY, which has been instrumental in NYC’s Ban the Box efforts.
How have decades of union busting, “right-to-work” and the decline of organized labor affected workforce development? According to Corporate America beat back its best job trainers, and now it’s paying a price, a post on the Washington Post’s Wonkblog by Lydia DePillis, they’ve led to a decline in overall job preparedness — alongside an ever-growing need for an educated workforce. DePillis writes:
Although unions have historically constructed high-quality educational pipelines to well-paying jobs in cooperation with employers, labor has lost ground over the years. In the absence of union training programs, businesses in vast sectors of the economy are scrambling to meet their workforce needs through other means, like piecemeal job training programs and partnerships with community colleges, with few solutions that have really broad reach.
…
Over the years, [costs have] shifted to workers and the public education system. Companies in general have been spending less on training, as jobs have grown more transitory. Companies don’t see the point in investing in someone who’ll only stick around for a few years, if that, particularly when economic prospects are uncertain. So, at a time when manufacturing requires more sophisticated knowledge, the companies have found themselves without a base of trained workers, leading to complaints about a “skills gap.”
For the full article, visit the Washington Post.
What a couple of weeks. Civil rights tragedies and victories, both. Marriage equality, a supreme court upholding of the Affordable Care Act, direct action against the confederate flag. In the wake of the South Carolina tragedy, we want to celebrate and mourn, both. And yet, we can’t help sense the march of progress moving inexorably forward. In brief:
A new working paper from Trade Unions for Energy Democracy (TUED) titled Power to the People: Toward Democratic Control of Electricity Generation shows how “another energy is possible, and absolutely necessary.” The paper documents how and where energy democracy is expressing itself — and argues that public renewable power can drive the energy revolution the world needs. Union leaders from different sectors have welcomed the report.
Trade Unions for Energy Democracy is a multi-partner initiative coordinated by the International Program for Labor, Climate and Environment (IPLCE), based out of the Murphy Institute, in cooperation with the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – New York Office.
In a potentially striking blow to the Uber-ization of the state’s economy, the California Labor Commission declared this week that a San Francisco-based Uber driver is an employee, and not an independent contractor, of the company. The implications of this ruling could be far-reaching, requiring the company to start offering benefits and protections to its drivers — which it has, until now, managed to skirt.
In an article by Amy Langfield on CBSMoneyWatch, Murphy Institute Prof. Stephanie Luce explains:
“Employers have been increasingly shifting the risks of the employment relationship onto workers – whether in the form of classification as independent contractor, or moving to on-call scheduling, shifting from defined benefit to defined contribution pensions (or to no pension at all), and so on […] Workers and worker organizations have been resisting and fighting back – not just in the U.S., but in other parts of the world (similar issues are happening in Europe – and Uber is also engaged in similar legal battles in many other countries).”
“I think the ruling is significant both because of its impact on such a large and growing global company (Uber), but also for the possible spillover effects to so many other industries that have been moving in the same direction of attempting to evade the legal responsibility of the employer/employee relationship[…]”
For the full article, visit CBSMoneyWatch.
