Tuesday, November 13, 2012
Employees of the retail giant hope to take advantage of one of the year's busiest shopping days.
Employees of DC-area Walmart and Sam's Club locations are joining a national strike effort this Black Friday to protest what they view as low wages, poor scheduling practices, and worker intimidation on the part of the retail giant. The campaign, organized by Making Change at Walmart and linked with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, is planning demonstrations outside dozens of stores nationwide on one of the busiest shopping days of the year. In the DC area, Nov. 23 protests are scheduled for Walmart and Sam's Club locations in Laurel, Hyattsville, Bowie, Gaithersburg, Woodlawn, Severn, Clinton, Abingdon, Alexandria, and Fairfax. (Both chains are owned by parent company Walmart Stores, Inc.) The strike action …
Friday, October 12, 2012
Workers' strike at 28 stores in more than a dozen cities is first ever for giant retailer.
Workers are striking to protest Walmart’s attempts to “silence and retaliate against workers for speaking out for improvements on the job,” according to a news statement cited in a recent Huffington Post story. The strike was organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers union. The story traced the strike from 60 Walmart employees walking off the job in Los Angeles on Friday, Oct. 5, to Tuesday’s protest by employees in stores in cities including Washington, DC, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Orlando, Chicago and Sacramento, as well as Walmart locations in Kentucky, Missouri and Minnesota. Protests are planned at Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, AR, during today’s annual investor meeting. Workers at the Laurel, MD, …
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Council President Berliner removed the vote from Tuesday’s agenda.
A proposed bill sponsored by five members of the Montgomery County Council would require property owners to continue paying laborers for three months even if their employing general contractor is fired. Councilmembers Valerie Ervin, Marc Elrich, Craig Rice and Council Vice President Nancy Navarro support County Bill 19-12—the “Displaced Worker Protection Act”—which would mandate that if a property owner dismisses a contractor, they must retain the employees for 90 days. If a replacement contractor is brought in, that new one must hire the employees. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has been a strong proponent of the bill and participated in a news conference on Monday with the five councilmembers, according to Montgomery …
Friday, March 25, 2011
Union members at a Thursday rally said the county executive's budget is 'scapegoating' them.
About 250 members of the county employees' union rallied at the Executive Office Building in Rockville Town Center on Thursday, including about 50 union members who—chanting and waving cow bells and protest signs—marched to Isiah Leggett's office in an unsuccessful attempt to meet with the county executive. The rally, held on the plaza outside the building, was in response to Leggett's proposal last week of a $4.35 billion fiscal 2012 operating budget that omits negotiated pay raises for county employees and calls on employees to bear more of the cost of their benefits. The rally included music, speeches by union leaders and by rank and file members and the appearance of two goats, which union leaders used to highlight their claim that …
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Only a week ago, union chief passionately opposed the measure
Montgomery County Council members voted to make it easier Tuesday for the county to win contract disputes with organized labor without a peep from the union leaders who just a week earlier accused the council of turning its back on working people. The measure, unanimously approved, would require an impartial arbitrator to first consider the county's ability to pay for any contract improvements before reviewing other factors, such as wages in neighboring areas when there's an impasse during collective bargaining. Council President Valerie Ervin, a former union organizer, said the legislation "levels the playing field" for contract negotiations that go to arbitration. Arbitrators have sided with labor union proposals in 12 out of the 17 …
ciaf
11:31 pm on Thursday, November 15, 2012
US management approach + US union approach sucks the life from business. Toyota and Hyundai -very successful, massively profitable companies- are both very heavily unionized. They aren't having the life sucked out of them by unions. They ate the US OEM's lunch for almost 30 years... with much better process control, and union workers. The too-early move into robotics was (yet another) knee-jerk … more ›