https://labornotes.org/2021/01/swarming-solidarity-how-contract-negotiations-2021-could-be-flashpoints-us-class-struggle

The labor movement’s pundits and prognosticators ring in the New Year like commentators anywhere. They make pronouncements about what “will” happen and what “should” happen to revitalize the shrinking U.S. trade union movement.

At 6.2 percent density in the private sector, U.S. unions aren’t even treading water; we are drowning. That makes it more imperative than ever to engage members to strengthen connections between our union struggles and build broader public support.

The best opportunity to involve union members in 2021 will be through the large-scale collective bargaining agreements that are due to expire this year. Economic struggles remain the center of gravity for the U.S. working class and its organized members in particular. An analysis of the collective bargaining calendar points us in the direction of where those struggles are most likely to occur.

This year, 450 collective bargaining agreements covering more than 200 union members apiece will expire, according to Bloomberg, which maintains the most comprehensive database of expiring agreements outside of the AFL-CIO. Of these, 160 agreements cover more than 1,000 workers.

These 450 contracts, involving more than a million and a half workers, are an ideal opportunity for the labor movement to showcase our power and the advantages of collective bargaining.

https://labornotes.org/2021/01/interview-despite-escalating-assassinations-colombian-farmworker-union-fights-right-land

The situation has recently gotten even worse in Colombia—already the world’s most dangerous place to be a union member.

Right now social movement leaders, union members, and participants in the peace process are being killed at a rate of more than one victim per day. With the restrictions and curfews related to the coronavirus, death squads can more easily find their targets at their homes, and have even massacred entire families.

One of the labor organizations that has suffered the highest levels of violence and forced displacement in Colombia is FENSUAGRO, the National Federation of Agricultural Unions, which was created to unite the labor movement and the farmworkers movement.

FENSUAGRO advocates for the rights of farmworkers, laborers, and rural indigenous and Afro-Colombian people. It fights for comprehensive redistribution of farmland and for the basic right to live and work on rural land, which has been kept from these communities for far too long.

The Colombian government has never fulfilled its commitment to honor the land rights of peasant farmers, the indigenous, and Afro-Colombians. Today it prioritizes the privatization of land for the benefit of agribusinesses, large-scale landowners, transnational extraction (such as mining and oil), and narco-traffickers. Using land for small-scale farming is not of any interest to the state.

The union’s efforts have been fruitful, but have been met with unrelenting violence. Since its inception in the early ’80s, FENSUAGRO has been brutally targeted by military and paramilitary forces. Rural families have been forcibly displaced by threats and violence with little protection from the government.

Traditionally, rural, Afro-Colombian, and indigenous families have worked plots for generations, more often than not without land titles. Big agribusinesses, cattle ranchers, transnational corporations, and wealthy landowners have been able to claim land that is not theirs by acquiring titles through a legal system farming families have no access to. FENSUAGRO has long fought for reforms that would correct this situation.

The union also represents workers in agricultural industries. Roughly half its members are family farmers, and the other half are farm workers. Between 2016 and 2020, 38 FENSUAGRO members were murdered.

Maya Hernández of the Alliance for Global Justice spoke last month with Elsa Nury Martínez Silva, a longtime farmworker activist and the current president of FENSUAGRO, about the union’s efforts to gain autonomy and help people live on the land that is rightfully theirs.

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2021/01/communications-workers-fight-telecom-giant-mlk-day

One multinational company is using Martin Luther King Day to issue a slap in the face to its union, undermining the very legacy of the civil rights leader.

Louisiana-based telecommunications giant Lumen Technologies (formerly CenturyLink) announced to its staff October 23 that it would be newly establishing a company holiday on MLK Day—but for non-union workers only.

The hypocrisy of leaving out 10,000 union workers on MLK Day was not well received by Anna Robbs, an African-American employee and union steward.

“How dare they?” she recalled thinking. “I just couldn’t wrap my head around how they could feel that there was diversity and inclusion and belonging when they were excluding the very people that Martin Luther King stood up for in terms of labor rights and worker rights.”

Robbs is also an executive board member of Communications Workers (CWA) Local 7777. With the help of her union, she decided to commemorate King’s legacy the right way—by fighting back against an unscrupulous corporation.

“Let’s go and get into some more good trouble,” she said.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/animal-legal-defense-fund-busting-union-labor

The Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) is a major nonprofit that boasts of its more than 40 years of ​“tireless pursuit of justice for animals.” When it comes to the pursuit of justice for working humans, however, its own employees say that it is badly failing the test.
In mid-December, ALDF’s employees told the organization’s management that they intended to unionize with the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, a division of the IFPTE. They presented signed union cards representing a ​“super majority” of the 54-person staff, and asked for the ALDF to voluntarily recognize their union. Such voluntary recognition has become standard in the nonprofit world — the NPEU says that of the 35 nonprofits it’s organized, only two have refused to recognize their unions.
One of those two is the ALDF. According to employees and the NPEU, the ALDF responded to the news of the union drive by hiring the anti-union law firm Ogletree Deakins and embarking on a union-busting campaign that is now in full swing. That campaign has centered on an ongoing series of ​“captive audience meetings” in which managers gather employees in small groups to try to persuade them not to unionize, a tactic common among corporations intent on intimidating and misleading workers who seek to organize.