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Workers and Unions
Captive Audience Meetings and the 2024 NLRB Decision Against Them What captive audience meetings are, how employers like Amazon in Bessemer used them, why the labor board banned mandatory ones in November 2024, and where that ruling stands now. Crystal Lee Sutton and the Union Sign at a North Carolina Textile Mill The real story behind the cardboard sign in a J.P. Stevens mill in 1973: the firing, the 1974 union vote in Roanoke Rapids, and the six years it took to win a first contract. How Workers at Amazon's Staten Island Warehouse Won Their Union Vote How an independent union with no national backing won the 2022 vote at Amazon's JFK8 warehouse, why a first contract never followed, and what later drives took from it. Janus v. AFSCME and Public-Sector Unions After Mandatory Fees The 2018 Supreme Court ruling that ended mandatory fees for government workers was expected to gut public unions. Here is what it held, what happened next and what it means for bargaining. John L. Lewis, a Punch at the 1935 AFL Convention and the Birth of the CIO How a mine workers' chief threw one punch in Atlantic City in 1935, walked out of the old craft federation and built the industrial unions that organized steel and autos. Michigan Repealed Right-to-Work, and What That Means What right-to-work laws do, why Michigan passed one in 2012 and repealed it in 2023, and the strongest arguments on each side, so you can follow the next state fight. Starbucks Workers in Buffalo and the Long Road to a First Contract How a 19-8 vote at one Buffalo cafe in December 2021 started a union campaign across hundreds of Starbucks stores, and why a first contract has proved so slow to arrive. Taft-Hartley Passed Over Truman's Veto and Still Shapes Every Drive In June 1947 Congress overrode Harry Truman to rewrite labor law. The bans and permissions it added, from secondary boycotts to right-to-work, still decide organizing fights. The Flint Sit-Down Strike and the Forty-Four Days That Built the UAW From December 1936 to February 1937, autoworkers occupied General Motors plants in Flint. Why staying inside won what years of walkouts had not, and what it cost. The Great Railroad Strike of 1877, From Martinsburg to St. Louis How a wage cut on the Baltimore and Ohio in a small West Virginia town became the first national strike, why governors called for federal troops, and what it left behind. The Postal Wildcat Strike of 1970 and the Bargaining Rights It Won How New York letter carriers broke federal law in March 1970, why the walkout spread to cities across the country, and how it produced the Postal Reorganization Act and real bargaining. The Pullman Strike and the Courts' War on Labor in 1894 In 1894 a railroad boycott led by Eugene Debs was crushed by a federal injunction and Army troops. How the courts became labor's chief opponent, and what it took to change that.