collective bargaining

In Kentucky, the inevitable fight for ideological control has begun with newly elected Republican Governor Matt Bevin at the helm. On Tuesday, the state legislature began its session with a bevy of political infighting as Democrats and Republicans battled for committee membership and leadership positions.

A recent Gallup poll shows that America’s support for labor unions has jumped 5 percent in the past year, bringing it to 58 percent. This is the highest such figure since 2008 when 59 percent approved. The poll was conducted between August 5th and 9th and is part of Gallup’s annual Work and Education survey. The numbers show an improving image of unions which had reached an all-time low in 2009 after the government bailout of the big three auto companies.

Fort Wayne councilman John Shoaff has introduced a bill to restore some of the powers stripped from city workers when the city council ended collective bargaining last year. While Shoaff’s ordinance will not restore collective bargaining per se, it will restore workers’ rights to join a union (without making it mandatory).

Following Wisconsin’s passage of Act 10, union-friendly Dane County prolonged public sector union contracts as long as it could to avoid the legislation’s anti-worker effects. The city of Madison did the same.

In Pennsylvania, the State Senate voted against an amendment to an unrelated bill that would have disallowed unions from automatically deducting dues from paychecks. The amendment failed on a 20-28 vote.

Freight drivers in Texas voted to unionize. The workers at Con-Way in Laredo drive for the busiest inland port in the US, with over 7,000 trucks crossing the border each day.

We've always had labor in this country: free laborers, indentured servants and slave labor. But it wasn't until 1894, that Congress made the first Monday in September the official Labor Day holiday. Although now, in most communities, it's mainly just another day off — or excuse to shop the sales — people used to take Labor Day pretty seriously and with good reason.

Organized labor and pro-business groups are waging an intense lobbying campaign directed at school teachers who are deciding this month whether to remain in their union, in the first real test of the state's new right-to-work law. Many of the 112,000 active educators and school workers in the Michigan Education Association can now leave the union and stop paying fees under the law that took effect last year.

Just weeks after the Fort Wayne City Council passed legislation ending collective bargaining for city employees, it has taken the assault on workers rights further by passing a new law which would make union membership for all public safety employees optional. This local “Right-to-Work” law goes further than the state’s bill which exempted policemen and firefighters.

Legislation has passed the Delaware House of Representatives which would set prevailing wages based on negotiated collective bargaining agreements, thus eliminating the need for wage surveys. The bill, which passed the house on a 26-13 vote, will now be taken up by the Senate. Up to this point, support for and opposition to the bill have fallen along party lines: